PR Archives - 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.

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!

You’re in an interview and you’re the sales director. The journalist starts asking about marketing. Or sales. Or HR.

There are ways of coping. Blurting out answers because you think you ought to say SOMETHING isn’t the best.

Check this video for Guy’s thoughts.

“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.