Who is this service for?

Often working alongside public relations agencies, we help executives up to and including the C-suite prepare for media interviews to ensure they are productive and the executive's voice is heard. We also help executives preparing to deliver keynote speeches and our value goes beyond this as many of the skills are transferrable to other stakeholders.

What actually happens?

A team often including an experienced journalist and a camera expert will offer input and advice on what journalists, podcasters and other media professionals will need. The core of the sessions, however, is a practical interview session under lights and playback/feedback on the spot. We do this at least twice.

How long does it take?

A basic half-day session will take three and a half hours for up to three delegates.

How much does it cost?

Costs vary but a three-person half-day session will cost £2320 plus VAT. This excludes travel. Extras can include the hire of premises or indeed a full-blown TV studio if required.

What is your catchment area?

We are based in London but over the last couple of years we've worked in Greece, Bahrain and elsewhere. Just ask – we can probably make it work!

media training Archives - Clapperton Media

Why do people use external media and presentation trainers like us, for example last week when lead trainer Guy Clapperton was joined by Paul Angell on camera duty and Martine Croxall on presenting skills in the afternoon?

Guy’s summary of what happened is here but there are a number of reasons to get outsiders to help with sessions like this. The first is that if you want a full-time current BBC presenter like Martine, you’re just not going to be able to stroll in and hire them. Likewise an award-winning documentary maker like Paul to help with your skill set. If you want their help, it’s going to be on an engagement-by-engagement basis.

The other reason is even simpler. If you’re in PR either internally or externally and the chief exec or whoever needs to hear some hard truths about their skills with the media. If you tell them and they don’t like it, you still have to see them the next day – we, on the other hand, can say what they need to hear and vanish – making your job easier!

If you want to know how else we can make life simpler for you, just get in touch.

Want to confuse a journalist? Tell them everything you know about your top subject, don’t worry about focus, just come out with all of your experience. That’s what a number of our media training delegates do in the first interview practice sessions we run with them and it almost never helps.

It’s like this. Journalists are experts in many things: storytelling, interviewing, maybe editing a video or audio package together, collating quotes into a written article. As they progress they may become superb managers and developers of young writing and interviewing talent. They are superb at working to deadlines (or they won’t last long).

They might – just might – also be an expert in your client’s field. Equally they might not. So let’s say your spokesperson has been doing whatever they’ve been doing for 20 years and the journalist uses a light opener like “tell me about yourself” – and the well-intentioned interviewee comes out with everything they can think of that might help.

It comes from a good place and a wish to help. But without focus it’s going to damage an article. If someone is not an expert in your field already, telling them 20 things about it is more likely to end up in confusion than clarity. And that’s when mistakes and factual errors creep in, not because anyone is stitching anyone up but because the interview just wasn’t clear.

Focus is essential

The classic picture of a media trainer is someone who tells you to pick three things and come out with those whatever the question might be. This is extreme and likely to offend journalists who know when they’re being ignored. It’s worth going into interviews with three prepared messages, though, for three reasons. First, you need some area of focus just to stop yourself rambling. Second, if the interview goes off piste then you’ll have something to get back to. Third, it’s actually courteous to the journalist to think about what you want to say in advance.

Stick to a few core messages and try to ram them home. By all means answer the rest, the politician’s trick of ignoring the question is something the listeners and viewers will spot at some distance and it makes the spokesperson look arrogant – but there’s noting wrong with having an intention and a focus for every media interaction.

If you’re reading this then the chances are that you’ll be in PR and you’ll have noticed the problems you face are multiplying and going off in different directions. The chances are that you’re facing a “credibility crunch.”

Here’s where it starts. You can use AI to write a press release in seconds, but so can everyone else. This has led journalists to become more cynical than ever – only last week on Reddit I was engaging with someone who’d had a pitch rejected by a journalist because a piece of software had identified it as AI-generated (he was quite annoyed because he’d written it himself).

At the same time, AI search engines (like Perplexity and Google’s SGE) are prioritizing “original expert opinion” and “lived experience” to rank brands. So AI content doesn’t help and false positives when people use software to root out the non-human stuff are a real problem.

(We will pause here to reflect that the journalist using software to detect AI was also using AI so more than a little hypocritical – OK, as you were.)

So PR professionals are under immense pressure to put their executives forward as “thought leaders” because they’re human and then we’re back to the spokespeople being terrified by a live mic or cynical journalist with a difficult question. Many will resort to going really bland and slipping into what I think of as “corporate droid” mode in which case you might as well have gone to AI in the first place.

Help your spokespeople to be human

This is where it’s worth getting help and by all means I have a vested interest. There can be good reasons to opt for external input: someone like me can say something to a C-suite director without having to bump into them in the lift the following day, I will have a different set of experiences to most internal PR professionals and probably more experience as a journalist.

If you want to keep it internal, though, be aware that the needs of media training have changed quite a bit. Here are some examples”

Podcasts are a thing so chattier approaches are more acceptable than they were. Just check what’s happening on popular TV; if you’re in the UK then you might be aware that “The Apprentice” is back but instead of the audience-based review aftershow “You’re Fired” we have the podcast-ish “Unfinished Business”. You can read my thoughts on why “podcast” is becoming a meaningless term here but the informality is probably here to stay.
A consequence is that changing topics in an interview and steering away from uncomfortable areas is still a thing but an audience can spot a clunky change of gear at several paces.
Journalists and other media professionals increasingly expect a personal side to an interview. Not only will they appreciate it but a good interview full of engaging stories and individual content will feed the algorithms and help AI-based searches to find it. Until they change it all again.

The same goes for your own pitches. Not only is using AI to generate them a bad idea but it’s worth checking to see whether your style sounds a bit robotic so you don’t join my contact on Reddit and get the boot for being AI when you’re not!