media training Archives - Clapperton Media

Clapperton Media Training is proud to announce that founder, chief executive and tea maker Guy Clapperton has been named among the inaugural Independent Impact 50, which aims to showcase the influence, commitment and contribution of the UK’s independent PR sector.

“It’s great to be able to share in this long-overdue celebration of an independent practitioner community that been ignored for too long,” says Guy. “It is so refreshing to see independent practitioners being truly celebrated and showcased for the value what they do, not who they work for”

As Guy says in the video, this was a particular pleasure because he and his colleagues are trainers rather than pure-play PR practitioners which makes this sort of recognition very special.

The winners aren’t ranked, just listed. PRovokeMedia has the full story here.

I once media trained a woman and she was panicking before we even moved to the second question. My opening query was as simple as “Tell me about yourself and your organisation”,

She thought I was asking something dreadfully personal. She wanted to know why I’d need to know about her rather than her business. Actually “My name is XX, I’m a product manager and I’ve worked here for five years” would have been fine.

As you’ll gather from the video, just a minute and nine seconds, she’s not the only one. Have a look at it and let me know what you think!

“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.