Media Training
Getting your message across is more than just sending out a media release.
Your company representatives need to be animated and effective in interview situations while also staying on message to ensure the coverage reflects you in the best light.
Reflected Image PRoductions offers a range of tailored media training programs designed to ensure your key spokespeople have the skills to get your key messages out and to put them at ease with the media, regardless of whether the medium is print, radio, television or online.
Our media training presenter, Michelle Smytheman has extensive media and media liaison experience and has provided media training to politicians at all levels of government, within government departments and the corporate world as well as to academics.
Below are outlines of our three base programs, which we customise to suit the individual needs of your organisaiton.
Media Training Basics – Getting your message out there
This simple three-hour introduction is designed to give participants the skills and confidence they need to deal with the media to promote your product, achievements and company. There is a lot involved in Media Liaison but this course will focus on the fundamentals, giving participants a strong platform from which to build.
Topics and issues to be addressed include:
- What you want to achieve
- Why is media so important
- Social media and online blogs
- Journalists – who are they really
- Who’s who in the newsroom
- The different forms of the media
- What makes News
- What to do when a journalist rings
- How to Stay on message
- What happens to your story now
- Providing photo opportunities
- Resources you have to support you
- The Interview – Questions you need to be able to answer
- When you don’t want attention – a brief introduction to Crisis management
Media Liaison Training – Media Awareness and Interview Skills
In this program, we focus on giving you the skills so you have the confidence and knowledge to deal with any media interview, ensuring your message will get through. Where our introductory media training course – Getting Your Message Out There – focusses on giving you a general overview of media relations, this course will concentrate on teaching you the art of using a media interview to get your point across.
This course, run over three to five hours, will include some practical exercises as well (which can include on-camera interviews) and includes:
- The Media – what they do, why they do it and what to expect
- Social media and online blogs
- What makes news – the difference between what you think and what appears – rates or sells and what appeals to local, state and national outlets
- Interview set up – setting yourself up for success right from the start
- Questions you need to be able to answer
- Staying on message and in control of the interview
- Stuck for words – how to avoid the un-winnable questions and give you time to think
- Poise and Presentation for interviews and tips for television
- Golden rules of Interview
- Building relationships and setting yourself up as the go-to expert.
- What’s your point – honing your message for the short attention span of modern media and simplifying complex issues.
Crisis and Issues Management Training- communicating effectively under pressure
This specialist training session follows from the basics and media liaison sessions and is tailored to suit client needs with a focus on issue and crisis preparedness training and the provision of more advance communications and message control training.
