This full-day workshop focuses on three primary areas: Preparing for media interviews, giving effective media interviews and your relationship with the media. It is interactive and pragmatic, but also includes discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of Ed Shiller's unique approach to media relations.

Ed regards every media encounter as a welcomed opportunity for you to communicate with customers, investors, suppliers, employees, government and other publics upon whom the well being of your organization depends. He believes that your effectiveness as a spokesperson depends as much on your nonverbal communication as on the literal meaning of the words you speak; how you say something – your tone of voice, inflection, eye movement, body language – greatly affects your credibility and persuasiveness.

In his training, therefore, Ed shuns such practices as “steering” and “bridging” – under which interviewees interject core "messages" into their answers regardless of whether those statements are relevant to the question – because these behaviours will be detected and interpreted by the reporter (as well as by radio and TV audiences) as manipulative and evasive and will thereby discredit the spokesperson.

Instead, he not only stresses the creation and articulation of the most powerful and appropriate messages, but also the development of a mindset that will most likely produce effective nonverbal communication.

Workshop Agenda

• Identify newsworthy topics that reporters will likely raise during an interview;
• Develop the most truthful, accurate and relevant key points to round out your answers to reporters’ questions;
• Focus your attention so that you will not only speak the truth, but will also be believed;
• Think on your feet even during the most threatening of media encounters, and
• Overcome the anxiety often associated with giving interviews by developing the necessary confidence and skill.

The workshop covers:

• What makes a story newsworthy.
• Corporate fears and media stereotypes.
• The role of the spokesperson.
• The six-step Critical Path for identifying key points and using them appropriately.
• How to maintain focus and think on your feet during the interview.
• How to answer difficult questions.
• Special tips for in-person or telephone interviews with print media.
• Special tips for radio interviews.
• Special tips for television interviews.
• What to do during a crisis.
• What to do at a news conference.
• What to do at "scrums."

Media Training also examines specific do’s and don’ts that flow logically from Ed Shiller’s Seven Axioms for dealing with the media. The axioms serve you in two ways. First, they are a tool to create a mindset that will better enable you to communicate openly, truthfully and accurately with the media. Second, they are principles that you can apply in virtually every media situation to guide your behaviour and to answer such key questions as:

• What kind of relationship should I have with reporters and how do I establish it?
• Should I negotiate with reporters before an interview?
• What's confidential, what isn't?
• How do I keep confidential information from reporters without alienating them?
• What, if anything, is off-the-record?
• Should I offer a reporter an exclusive story and what should I do if a reporter asks for one?
• When and how should I tout a story to the media?
• What do I do if I don't agree with what my employer or client wants me to tell the media?

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