Winning Media Interviews, Part IV: The Fine Art of “Bridging”

November 9, 2009

Reporters are more experienced than you are in an interview.  They should be.  They do it for a living.  They know the questions that are likely to make you squirm.

For example, a reporter will often lead you into areas that you would rather not talk about for any number of reasons.  Read more

Winning Media Interviews, Part III: Structuring Your Answers to a Question

October 29, 2009

Whether you are being interviewed by a print, broadcast or online reporter, you should structure your answer in what journalists call the “inverted pyramid” style. That is, you lead with your most important message. For many executives, this is in direct contrast to the way they approach a problem, that is, by gathering the facts and building a case for a proposal or recommendation. Read more

Winning Media Interviews, Part II: What Reporters Are Looking For in a Story

October 20, 2009

When you have the opportunity to be interviewed, you will no doubt have thought about the key messages you want to communicate.  This is important and the right thing to do.  It comes under “being prepared.”  But you also need to know what reporters are looking for in a story and it may not always be what you are interested in talking about.  Read more

Winning Media Interviews, Part I: Ten Most Common Mistakes in Dealing With the Media

October 17, 2009

More than ever before, executives are being called on to represent their organizations in backgrounders, briefings and interviews with reporters from the print, broadcast and online media. These discussions offer an excellent opportunity to tell a positive story about the organization and its products and services. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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