Media training is a ‘must do’ professional development program for any serious leader or manager.
Media interview training provides you with the skills to effectively deal with the media.
Media relations training, with a specific focus on media presentation training for television can be seriously nerve wracking for first timers.
Here’s why you should consider doing a media training course and some essential tips from our media skill training courses.
If you go to the archives of any commercial television station and pull out footage from a news bulletin from the 1960s and view that footage with a stopwatch, you will find the average length of the quote (known as a sound bite or news grab) from the person being interviewed for the story is around 60 seconds.
If you watch commercial television tonight with your stopwatch at the ready, and measure each sound bite or news grab, the average length will be seven seconds.
This is why its being called McNuggett News! Its quick, slick, fast and tasty, but not very satisfying.
There are three reasons for this shortening of length.
1. Increased competition for our ever diminishing attention spans,
2. Increased choice, noise and clutter in our lives, and
3. The merging of information and entertainment dressed up as news.
So how do you get your message across about a complex, detailed issue through the media in seven seconds?
Well, you need to work out your key message and deliver it flawlessly as a media friendly quotable quote.
Remember, you have only one chance to get it right. The professional TV news crews I work with are constantly telling me about people who ring them after the interview and say “can you come back, I forgot to say this and that?”
Of course, the media are so time poor and deadline driven they never come back.
So you only have one opportunity to maximise your media moment.
How do you do this, especially for TV? Keep reading this blog for daily feature media training tips. Or give Sahl Communications a call and book a full media training session.