Guy Clapperton, Author at Clapperton Media

When PR teams prepare a client for a media opportunity, messaging quite rightly takes centre stage. But strong messaging alone doesn’t guarantee strong interviews. At Clapperton Media Associates, we regularly see spokespeople who know their content inside-out still fall short — not because they lack knowledge, but because they’ve missed three critical skills that shape how journalists receive and use their words.

These skills are often overlooked in pre-interview briefings, or dismissed by clients who believe they “sound fine already”. In practice, they make the difference between an effective interview and a frustrating one. Here are the three that matter most:

1. Tone: Expertise Isn’t Enough

A spokesperson can hold every relevant fact in their head and be a world-class expert — but if they sound dismissive, bored, defensive or aloof, the interview immediately suffers.

Tone determines whether a journalist warms to the speaker or braces for a difficult conversation. The goal is to sound engaged and engaging: confident without arrogance, warm without gushing, authoritative without condescension. It’s a balance many senior executives underestimate.

2. Structure: Think, Then Speak

A common issue is that a journalist asks a question and the spokesperson dives straight into an answer with no reflection. To the expert, it makes perfect sense — they can mentally stitch it all together. To the journalist, whose expertise lies in interviewing and shaping stories, the result can feel fragmented, unclear, or unmoored from the point.

Training clients to pause, structure, and signpost before they speak leads to clearer quotes, better coverage, and far fewer follow-up questions driven by confusion rather than curiosity.

3. Length: More Isn’t More

Well-meaning spokespeople often want to be as helpful as possible. If they have 20 years’ experience, they may feel obliged to offer every angle, nuance and historical footnote.

Unfortunately, this overwhelms rather than assists. Long, meandering answers encourage journalists to conflate issues, lose focus, or latch onto details the client didn’t intend to foreground.

Shorter, sharper answers maintain control of the narrative and make it easier for journalists to extract accurate, useful quotes.

Helping PR Teams Reduce Risk and Improve Results

These issues are rarely about lack of skill — they’re about lack of practice. The right training helps spokespeople communicate in ways journalists can immediately use, reducing the risk of poor coverage and increasing the likelihood of meaningful, positive stories.

Clapperton Media Associates specialises in preparing senior leaders, technical experts, and fast-moving startups for exactly these challenges. If your clients are heading into interviews, we can help ensure they deliver with clarity, confidence and impact.

To discuss tailored training for your team or clients, get in touch.

PR agencies large and small are under constant pressure to deliver results efficiently. Yet many teams find that one task quietly drains far more time and energy than they realise: ineffective media pitching.

For many agencies and in-house teams, the cycle is all too familiar. Drafts that don’t quite land. Endless rewrites. Promising stories that somehow never make it out of the inbox. Hours lost to a process that should take minutes, and opportunities slipping away simply because the initial pitch missed the mark. Journalists just don’t care, hence the shruggy image.

At Clapperton Media Training, this is exactly the problem our Pitch Perfect session is designed to solve.

An Investment in Skills — and in Efficiency

When PR managers send junior colleagues to our masterclasses, they’re not just supporting early-career development. They are strengthening their own pipeline. Stronger pitching skills mean fewer rewrites, fewer dead ends and fewer hours spent salvaging work that was never likely to succeed.

This isn’t just training. It’s an operational upgrade.

What Better Pitching Really Delivers

Our training helps delegates understand:

How journalists actually think — and what makes them respond.
What to cut from a pitch to avoid instant deletion.
How to spot weaknesses before the email is ever sent.
How to build long-term media relationships rather than chasing one-off wins.

The result?
Managers spend less time correcting and amending pitches. Success rates increase. Junior staff gain the confidence to craft smarter, tighter, more relevant story ideas. Teams become faster, sharper and more aligned with what journalists genuinely need.

A single story placement can be a success — but long-term relationships built on intelligent, relevant pitching are far more valuable. Our sessions are designed to help PR teams move from the former to the latter.

Upcoming Pitching Masterclass — 8 December

Clapperton Media Training still has places available on our 8th December morning and afternoon courses in London.

For agencies asking themselves where their time and energy are disappearing, this is often the most effective place to start.

For details, or to reserve a place, simply get in touch.

At media training sessions and roundtable discussions, one of the most valuable aspects is the freedom participants feel to exchange ideas openly. These conversations spark fresh thinking and help people see issues from new perspectives.

Often, that sense of safety comes from operating under the Chatham House Rule. It’s meant to create space for honest dialogue — but as many professionals have discovered, it’s also one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern business communication.

One Rule, Not “Rules”

People frequently refer to “Chatham House Rules,” as though there’s a whole set of them. In fact, there’s only one — and it’s surprisingly short. Here’s what Chatham House itself says:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

That’s it. One sentence.

This means anyone who attends such a meeting is entirely free to share what was said — provided they don’t identify who said it. In journalistic terms, that’s easy enough to navigate: a quick “sources close to the company said…” and the Chatham House Rule is technically upheld.

Where It Goes Wrong

The problem is that many professionals assume the phrase means total confidentiality — that nothing said under the Rule can leave the room. It’s a common misunderstanding, even at senior levels. One senior banker once argued fiercely online that the Rule guaranteed complete secrecy and that any breach would have consequences.

That’s simply not what the Rule says. It was never designed as a confidentiality agreement, and it’s not legally binding. It’s an understanding — and one that depends on everyone in the room knowing what they’ve actually agreed to.

Off the Record? Be Careful There Too

Chatham House itself advises that if something truly must remain private, it should be kept “off the record.” Even that, however, can be risky. Journalists and other media professionals sometimes interpret “off the record” differently — often as “unattributable” rather than “secret.”

The Case for Simplicity

So what’s the safest approach? Simplicity. If you genuinely need something to remain confidential, say so — directly and clearly. “Confidential” is unambiguous. Everyone knows what it means.

By contrast, saying “Chatham House Rules” (plural) can signal uncertainty. It’s often used to sound authoritative or sophisticated, but it can actually blur the boundaries of what’s permitted. When it comes to professional communication, clarity beats elegance every time.

The Takeaway

In media interactions, roundtables, or any kind of professional exchange, precision in language matters. It protects reputations, ensures trust, and avoids misunderstanding.

So next time you’re setting the ground rules for a sensitive discussion, skip the fancy phrasing. Just say “confidential” — and mean it.

And you can tell anyone you like that this came from Clapperton Media Training.

Attention public relations professionals!

Have you ever spent ages on a story pitch, combed through it for accuracy, made sure it says exactly what you want to say, hit “send” to the press, influencers, podcasters and everyone who might be interested – and then been met by the proverbial wall of silence?

You could be making the classic error of telling the media professional what you want to say rather than what their audience needs to know. Journalists aren’t thinking about your client’s milestone, partnership or new product — they’re thinking about what will make their readers click, share, or stay tuned. So before you hit send, ask:

👉 “If I were the journalist’s audience, why would this matter to me?”

If you can’t answer that in one sentence, you don’t yet have a story — you have a press release waiting to be ignored.

And if you’d like your team to learn how to think like a journalist — to craft story ideas that actually land — that’s exactly what I’ll be covering in my very interactive “Pitch Perfect” Masterclass on 8th December in central London. If you’d like to come or would like to send delegates, ask me about pricing.

Plus…

This time around the price will include a rebate on any media training or staff training you might book with Clapperton Media Associates during 2026.

Go on, drop me a note at Guy@Clapperton.co.uk – you know you want to!