Real-Life Communication

Media training is all about communication. While teaching others how to communicate, media trainers must also be experts in the field. They must be able to listen to their clients and clearly articulate how to improve a client's communication skills.

"We have to focus and engage in complex thought," says media trainer TJ Walker. "We really have to listen to what someone says when they're speaking, and at the same time figure out the best way to tell them how to improve."

Media trainers work one-on-one with clients. They also give seminars. That means being able to write reports, give presentations and speak well in public.

You're a media trainer giving a seminar, trying to help your audience understand how the media operates. You want to dispel any myths about reporters. In order to know how to speak to reporters, it's important to know how and why they do their jobs.

This is a list of five commonly held views about reporters that you share with your audience:

1. "Watch out for reporters. They're out to get you."

   FALSE. Reporters are out to get a story. Most journalists in most situations have no interest in making you look bad, especially if you don't make yourself look bad. Reporters who earn reputations as being too tough or unfair will find it increasingly difficult to get the "good" interviews, and therefore, the good stories.

2. "Reporters look for controversy."

   TRUE. Controversy makes for more interesting stories. Journalists who pursue one side of an issue without seeking an opposing view aren't doing their jobs. In any reputable newsroom, a story without this kind of balance won't make it past the first editor.

3. "TV reporters oversimplify things."

   TRUE. The average TV reporter's story runs 90 seconds (around 500 words), and it's getting shorter all the time. What's more, if a viewer doesn't understand the story the first time, there's no "re-reading" it. The reporter must make their story as simplistic as possible, and therefore unburdened by detail.

4. "Reporters use editing tricks to make you appear to say things you really didn't."

   FALSE. This is perhaps one of the best ways to scare a client into getting media training. It is also nearly always erroneous. While it is true that a news reporter (or an editor) will occasionally run a sound bite or print a quote out of its proper context, it is almost unheard of for a reporter to edit unrelated sound bites together, or to deliberately make it appear as if a subject is answering a different question than the one that was actually asked.

5. "Reporters will let you ramble, hoping you'll say something you didn't mean to say."

   TRUE. If there is any one bona fide justification for media training, it is this phenomenon. Seasoned reporters know that our social instincts prompt us to "fill in the dead air" during normal conversation. Of course, a news interview is anything but a normal conversation. Reporters who ask a provocative question and neglect to immediately follow it up with another question are craftily handing out the rope with which many uninitiated interviewees hang themselves.

   (Excerpted with permission from Confessions of a Former Reporter by Mark Bernheimer, MediaWorks Resource Group)

After you talk about these reporting issues with the audience, you ask questions to make sure that you have been understood. This is what you ask:

1. Why do most reporters not want to deliberately make their interviewees look bad?
2. Why do TV reporters oversimplify things?
3. Why do reporters remain silent when waiting for an answer, or let their interviewees ramble?

What answers do you hope that the audience will come up with?

• Want to learn more? Check out this URL:

  Media Awareness Training
  Internet: https://www.throughlinegroup.com/2011/02/17/the-21-most-essential-media-training-links/
  

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