The picture for this post is not an iceberg. Well, it’s not a complete iceberg. The fact is that icebergs are largely underwater so you can’t see them without the proper equipment. What we’ve got here is the tip of the iceberg. About one tenth of one.
You probably knew that but you will be thinking, never mind the pedantry and detail, that’s an iceberg. You’d be right. And yet loads of people still think that when they’re explaining things to the press, the thing to do is to explain all the detail they can. And the result is a confused journalist.
This is very frustrating if you work in PR. You spend ages pitching a story to journalists (maybe even after doing one of our courses, he hinted), you pare it down so it attracts attention and then your client does the human thing of trying to help with all the information they possibly can.
This is where that information can become garbled. The journalist may be a specialist in the client’s field but they may not (and even if they are, their skill will be in writing about it rather than being a practitioner). Their real specialism is in getting stories out of people and constructing a narrative.
So if your client has been working in their field for 20 years and the journalist asks them something, their instinct can be to try to impart everything they’ve learned in those two decades. This is actually going to be a lot for the recipient, who will be doing other interviews too, to take in and assimilate.
Pare it down
In our media training sessions we try help your client to cut down on what they deliver to journalists, podcasters and other stakeholders. If they can start with what sort of headline they’d like to see and work their way backwards from there, they are more likely to offer the important bits rather than every last detail.
Going into too much depth can come from a good place, it’s the client trying to be helpful. It’s just that when you’re talking to someone whose job is to report what’s happening in a condensed amount of words, keeping it simple and cutting out the unnecessary stuff is actually more use than the detailed version.
Basically we all know we can only see about ten per cent of an iceberg above the surface but if someone asks you to show them a picture of an iceberg you’ll show them something like the image we’ve used here. We can help get your clients to do the same – just show the journalist the iceberg.
