Handling The Media
My name’s Steve Attwood and I’m the Group Manager of Communications and Public Awareness for the Families Commission. My first twenty-odd years in this game has been on the “light side” as a real journalist working in print, and a little bit of radio.
Steve's Top Tips
#1: People react to emotion, not facts
#2: Don’t use jargon
#3: When a journalist calls, take control
#4: Be mindful of editing
#5: Breathe before responding
#6: Always tell the truth in interviews
#7: Write good letters: short and sharp
#8: Three key messages, maximum
#9: Community papers are very influential
#10: Establish relationships with journalists
Transcript
#1: People react to emotion, not facts
A good story is one that has that emotional hook. A lot of the time people make the mistake of thinking that the facts are so compelling that they’ll sell the story. People tend to react emotionally – they don’t react as much to the facts.
What you’re trying to do is grow your friends, and you do that by telling people what they don’t know and what’s interesting. Use something that relates it to real people.
#2: Don’t use jargon
You need somebody in your organisation who’s your jargon filter. When I was with Department of Conservation we actually produced a resource that was called ‘the DOCtionary’ – it was essentially a list of all of the jargon words that DOC Scientists and DOC use, and it had the English interpretation beside them, and the rule was ‘no more than one or two of these in any press release, and preferably none’.
#3: When a journalist calls, take control
The first thing you have to do when a journalist phones you is take control – find out who they are, what they’re calling about, what story they’re working on, what are the sort of angles they’re likely to be taking, and whether they need the information straightaway, or whether you’ve got time to have a think about it and call them back.
Never be afraid to interview the journalist. The golden rule that goes across all of this is never say anything, or put anything down on paper, that you’re not prepared to stand up and defend. It’s a good idea to never speak off the record. A lot of people actually really think that if they say ‘off the record’ that there’s a legal obligation for the journalist not to use them – that’s just not true. The journalist may get back to the newspaper and say ‘oh these guys told me this in confidence’, and the news editor says ‘nah, that’s a really, really good story, we’re going to use it’, and the journalist might go ‘I promised’, and the news editor’s going to say ‘I don’t care’.
#4: Be mindful of editing
Don’t talk in long sentences. You need to remember that the whole item might be three minutes, and your part of it might be two or three ten-second quotes. And if you are talking in long, rambling sentences with lots of clauses and ‘by the ways’ like I’m doing now, then all of that’s going to get cut out, and you’re giving them the choice of which bits to use instead of you being in control.
The other thing is don’t let the journalist put words in your mouth. If a journalist says to you ‘the situation’s quite bad, wouldn’t you agree’, if you say ‘yes, but...’, the but’s going to be cut and you’re agreeing with the journalist.
You need to start thinking about ‘well you might think that, but I think so and so’.
#5: Breathe before responding
One of the really easy traps to get into is jumping in to fill a journalist’s silence, and they’ll often ask you a question and then just sit back and wait. And you get anxious, and you rush to fill the silence, and in the process you make a mistake.
Do the breathing. I often say if anybody’s ever watched skilful orators on the marae, you’ll see those guys, they breathe, they consciously breathe before they enter the next phase of their oratory.
If it’s a really, really aggressive question, pause longer. The more aggressive and challenging the interviewer gets, the slower you should respond and the slower you should speak so that you’re giving plenty of time for that brain to mouth connection to happen.
Don’t react to aggression with aggression. You’ll always come off second-best. If you remain calm and even, and just not tolerate that aggressive behaviour, you’ll actually come off looking better than the interviewer. Whereas if you get angry with them, you can just be made to look a fool.
#6: Always tell the truth in interviews
Don’t bullshit. Don’t pretend you know, or bluff. If you get a question you don’t know the answer to, say you don’t know, but promise that you’ll find out and get that information back to them.
The listener, or the viewer, and the journalist can really tell if you’re making stuff up or covering for a lack of knowledge, and it just blows your credibility out of the window.
Really, really don’t do spin. Spin-doctoring is actually done by a very exclusive group of journalists, and most of them happen to be people who are paid by political parties. Truth is absolute, and transparency is absolute.
#7: Write good letters: short and sharp
Letters are well-read, and they’re quite influential because people believe them as being a real opinion and not slanted news. Editors have a rule of thumb that if one person’s writing in, at least five other people think the same thing about that issue.
The good thing about it is within the word limit, provided you’re not being libellous, you can say exactly what you want to say. The mistake that people often make is that they don’t make the most important point first. And most newspapers have a 200-250 word limit. Make your point, really short, sharp, because if you are edited, usually for space reasons, most sub-editors tend to edit from the bottom and they’re assuming that the stuff at the bottom is the least important.
#8: Three key messages, maximum
Don’t try and say too much. If you’ve got ten key messages and you try and give ten key messages in an interview, you’re giving the journalist control over the story because they can then choose which of those ten messages they think is the most important.
The mistake with print media especially is to think ‘oh they’ve got plenty of time, and they’ve plenty of space, so I can give them heaps’. You still need to make sure that you’re keeping it confined to those maximum, we always say, of three key messages.
Just practice. You get quite clever at turning any question back to what you want to say. It’s good fun to practice it with your colleagues. Get them to ask you all sorts of questions and see how you can turn it around to go back to what you want to say.
#9: Community papers are very influential
It’s just as important to engage with your community newspapers and your provincial newspapers as it is to engage with the big boys, because quite often you’ll actually get seen by more people.
If you’re trying to create better awareness of what it’s like for people living with mental illness in their community, then those little community papers have far more muscle for you than being buried somewhere in the New Zealand Herald, or the Dom Post. Don’t forget the little guys when you’re planning your media strategy because they can be really, really influential.
#10: Establish relationships with journalists
It’s really important to find out who the journalists are that are covering your issue, and get to know them. Ring up and ask to meet them, not to give them a story or anything else, but just so that they know who you are. Make sure that they know how to contact your organisation.
And then you cultivate it like a relationship, thinking of it as a date, so your first date is just getting to know them, letting them put a face to it – so that breaks down some social barriers and also forces people to think of you as a person instead of just a purveyor of information.
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News organisations these days, their journalists teams are chronically understaffed.
If you can make a journalist’s job a lot easier by having the information for them, having some photo ideas, having an idea of what would look good on TV, having some real people to talk to about the issue – if you’ve organised all of that in advance, man, you stand a much higher chance that you’re going to get your stuff into the paper, where the other hundred ideas that have gone across that journalist’s desk that day just get into the rubbish bin.
