Before the interview: what to decide before a journalist ever calls

The pattern we see — An organisation gets a media request, panics gently, drafts holding lines in the two hours before the call, and sends someone in with three pages of notes and no clear idea of what they came to say. The interview is then judged on the spokesperson’s performance. It was mostly lost before they sat down.

Decide who speaks before you need one — The worst time to choose a spokesperson is during a story. Designate one primary and one backup, and get both media trained while nothing is happening. The cost of doing this in advance is a day. The cost of doing it during a crisis is whatever the story ends up costing.

Decide the two or three things you came to say — Not talking points in the sense of paragraphs to recite. Two or three propositions, each phrased tightly enough to be quoted as it stands. If your message needs forty words of context to make sense, it will not survive an edit, and what survives instead will be the sentence you said carelessly.

Write the answer to the question you’re dreading — Every organisation knows what it is. Write that answer properly, in advance, in one or two sentences, and rehearse it out loud until it is boring. Unrehearsed, that question produces either a long defensive explanation or a visible flinch, and both are more damaging than the answer itself would have been.

Understand the format’s arithmetic — A live broadcast hit uses answers of fifteen to twenty seconds. A recorded package might use eight. A podcast will happily take four minutes. Executives who deliver ninety-second answers into a fifteen-second format do not get edited kindly, and they never chose which fifteen seconds ran.

Bridging is not evasion — Moving from the question asked to the point you need to make is a normal part of interview craft, and it only sounds slippery when done clumsily. Acknowledge the question honestly, answer it briefly, then move. The failure mode is skipping the answer and jumping straight to your message, which every listener detects instantly.

Rehearse harder than the real thing — The most useful preparation is being interviewed badly on purpose: interrupted, asked the same question four ways, presented with a false premise, pushed on the number you’d rather not discuss. Clients routinely say the real interview felt easy afterwards. That is exactly the intended outcome.

And decide what you will not say — Not in the sense of a list of forbidden topics, but a clear internal position on the one or two areas where the honest answer is “we’re not discussing that yet,” delivered without apology. Spokespeople get into trouble far more often by improvising around an undecided question than by declining a fair one.

We run this as a half-day intensive, or in three sessions where there’s time — details on executive media training.