Media training Archives - Clapperton Media

“No Comment” is something people often say when they don’t want journalists to write anything.

It doesn’t work. When lead trainer Guy was a very young journalist the chair of a major technology company told him he didn’t want to comment on something and he didn’t want to see that coming out as “NAME declined to comment” either.

At the tender age of 24 or so, Guy allowed himself to be pushed into this and didn’t put it in. Which was wrong as stating that the chair had declined to comment would have been a perfectly accurate statement of what took place in the conversation.

The chair in question was presumably savvy enough to realise that “no comment” never sounds completely neutral. Here’s a short video with another example – seriously, try never to say it. It really doesn’t work.

International media training can mean a lot of things to different people. Some might take it to mean “multilingual” in which case services from Clapperton Media Training are not the right place to look – Guy is learning Spanish on Duolingo but unless a small boy walks in eating an apple his vocabulary so far is not going to be much help.

He has. however, been to Germany over the last couple of weeks (and a firm hello to the friends and contacts he made in Stuttgart) training a technology business. He wss in Paris earlier this year doing the same thing and although it was virtual. he was training someone in Hungary yesterday – a country he’d visited for some in-person training in 2023. So why, he asked the clients, did they choose a British media trainer rather than a local and equally skilled journalist and trainer?

International media training for international publications

The first answer was, gratifyingly, that they didn’t just want a British trainer, they wanted one trainer in particular (Guy) because of the amount of time we’ve been around. That’s always good to hear.

The second might resonate with you if your PR company has clients abroad. Our network, our testimonials and our recommendations were invaluable when making the final choice, our German client told us, but there were other factors.

For one thing they were targeting international media. International media training rather than focusing on a single country was therefore imperative. And no matter how we might feel about it, for most of the international media you’re going to need to do the interviews in English. The best way to practice this is with a native English speaker.

That’s not all though. The German contact also commented that the British media is often known to be tougher than the Americans. For this reason and of course for common-sense geographical proximity, engaging an English trainer was thought to be essential.

If you’re in PR this might sound like your client. It might sound like your company if you’re the internal comms person. It certainly sounds like our sort of client; remember, if you’re looking for media training but you’re not in the UK, we’re nonetheless not that far away.

(Image: holiday snap by Guy from Trinity College in Dublin, which we decided was actually livelier than any of the paid-for globe pictures we might be able to find for you!)

It always amazes us at Clapperton Media that so many people think they can ad lib a media interaction and go without interview prep. The same people who will rehearse and prep a presentation that’s going to go to 200 people in a hall will cheerfully claim they know what they want to say to the press (when they will effectively be talking to thousands) and they don’t prepare.

It will stagger you, no really, stagger you, that this approach can often go wrong. A question comes in that doesn’t suit your agenda exactly. Your tone doesn’t suit the occasion completely. The instant rapport you imagined you’d have with the journalist just isn’t happening. It is all told a bit of a nightmare.

We knew one PR professional whose client had exactly that attitude going in – didn’t need support. They spent an hour with the journalist and it didn’t go well. They came out of the meeting, called the PR person and said they didn’t want the interview to go out. They were then stunned to find out that the PR person had no power or authority (and let’s be honest, no inclination) to prevent the publication of an interview that had been given willingly. It wasn’t paid-for content so there was nothing to be done about stopping the write-up, which then wasn’t pretty when it appeared.

Interview prep needs taking seriously

A variant on this is the person who just doesn’t take it seriously. The PR people have prepared a document and the executive who’s going in front of the press intends to read it, honestly, and might even have glanced at it before the event. But they don’t give it enough time so they’re not on top of the figures, the latest research, the journalist’s readers and therefore how they can connect with them.

Clapperton Media Training works with many PR companies, some regularly and some on one-off bases. We often hear from them that their biggest frustration is the client that takes the prep documents and almost immediately discards them. Clients are busy people, they get that – but seriously, those prep documents are gold dust and invaluable – take them to heart, you’ll do a better interview.

So many people think media trainers will help you to become fundamentally dishonest but lying rarely works. No good media trainer will help you to do so and here’s why.