Preparation is the key to a media interview

Posted by Kate Betts on 8th May 2017

I have been media training for more than a decade and it never ceases to amaze me how many people go in to an interview having done no preparation.  They literally turn up and hand all the control over to the interviewer and, like sitting ducks, just answer all the questions.

Very senior managers have told me that they perform well in interviews because they can answer the questions. When you watch or listen back to those interviews they can be entertaining; and, as a former radio producer, they are the sort of interviews I loved to hear day in day out. But for the organisation they are a missed opportunity. Let’s say you are a not-so-well-known organisation that has secured an interview on your local BBC radio station to talk about an event you are organising. The questions will probably be all about the event, what it is, where it is, who’s coming etc etc. The chat might make good radio, but if you fail to talk about your organisation (or even name-check it) and do not talk about what you do, you are missing a PR opportunity.

You might say ‘ah, but I went on the radio to get people to come to the event’. But the chances are the interview is on the morning of the event, and how many people out of the 100,000 listening are actually going to change their plans that day and come along? Nine?  Ten? The other 99,990 don’t want to or can’t come, but they will form an opinion about your organisation; or not, if you gave them no information. So before any positive interview have a think about why you are doing the interview; what’s in it for you?

The other thing I often hear is that people do prepare for interviews by guessing all the questions they might get asked. This is particularly so for tough interviews. They go through a list of dozens of possible questions and work out how to answer each one. I have a media training book on the shelf that has eight pages of possible questions. I always say, what if you were asked the killer question that would have been on page nine?

By trying to second guess the questions, you are handing all the power to the interviewer. It is as much your interview as theirs. So prepare for it like that. Think about why you are doing the interview and what you want to say. Questions can be unreasonable (‘have you stopped fiddling your expenses, yes or no?’), hypothetical (‘so if this continues what will you do?’), or downright daft (that tends to be when the interviewer is badly briefed or has lost concentration).  So you really don’t need to give the interviewer so much respect (and I say that as someone who was a journalist for 20 years).

Prepare what you want to say and make sure you say it. But remember you can’t talk about something that doesn’t fit in with the premise of the interview. That is when you do start to sound like a dodgy politician – and no one likes that. Doing a good interview that works for you, the interviewer and the audience is a skill – and that’s why media training is so important.