Media Training

Media training is just one part of communication strategies at Purple. It sounds basic but the number of things that people don’t understand about the media and how to deal with them is extremely high.

I was lucky enough to sit in on one of Purple’s media trainings, they are very intimate with only selected spokespeople attending. The media training started off with a presentation about the media, specifically for the industry that our clients are in. This included who the media are (print and non print), what they do, how the media get their stories and what makes a story news worthy.

The training then went on to discuss what the media want from people/ organisations and how to best work with the media. This included different scenarios such as getting a phone call from the media for follow up questions about a media release that was sent out or getting an interview during a crisis.

Finally, the training ended with our clients being given worst case scenarios specific to their organisation. One of the Purple consultants acted as the media in an interview with each of the spokespeople about the issue on camera. We then played back the footage and highlighted good and bad answers, gestures and any of the organisations key messages that the spokesperson was able to highlight.

I found the training very interesting, we have done some media training and interview related work at university but this was a chance for me to be able to put it all together in my mind.

I was also able to give some follow up information to our client which you may also find interesting, a study recently spoken about on Hack, proved that in 10 of Australia’s top newspapers over 55% of the stories were derived from some form of public relations activity.