Answering questions from a reporter is NOT like answering questions from a friend, colleague, boss, employee, investor or family member. It is NOT like a real conversation (live TV and radio interviews are slightly more like live conversations, but not exactly the same.) In a real conversation, you have context, you understand the context, and usually your audience understands the context. If you are explaining something to an employee, you can reference sometime you said 5 minutes earlier. If you are answering a question from your boss and he stops to take a cell phone call when you are in the middle of a sentence, you understand that you need to stop talking because anything you say while he is talking on the phone won't be heard and it won't have an impact.

If you are giving a speech, you can see that if most of the audience is paying attention, you can build one idea on another, referencing something you said earlier, to put a spotlight on a complex idea. You don't have that luxury when you are talking to the media.

In a real life conversation, if your son says to you, "You are the worst mom in the whole world because you won't let me play with firecrackers the way my all my friends get to." it may be fine to preface your response to your son with "Son, I understand that you think I am the worst mom in the whole world for not letting you play with firecrackers, but."

However, what is good conversational skills in the real world can DESTROY you in the media world.

Many people who are great speakers and one-on-one communicators never make the adjustment to being good media communicators because they don't understand this one key concept: YOU DON'T CONTROL THE CONTEXT FOR A CONVERSATION WITH THE MEDIA. Because you can't control the context, unlike every other conversation you have in your life, it fundamentally alters how you must talk and answer questions. Unlike every other conversation in life, in a media conversation, every single idea you utter must be judged on its own, not within the context of what you said before or after it.

Why is this?

Because you aren't actually having a conversation with the reporter. You are having a conversation with the readers, viewers or listeners of that reporter and you don't know which of your ideas are going to make the final cut. Consequently, you must take a radically more disciplined approach to how you answer questions in a media interview.

Want to work together on building your media message? .

~ TJ Walker

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