Meet the Press
Interviews with the press can be fun, exhilarating and if underprepared, stressful. After many media experiences with our clients, we felt it was important to give some tips of the trade to make interviews with the media a success!
Be Yourself! We can stress this enough. It is you who the reporter is interested in; therefore, it is you who they will want to really see during the interview. You don’t have to be over-animated or the other extreme of being ‘pre-canned’ where almost everything you say is rehearsed. Just relax and be yourself!
Be punctual. Always arrive to an interview on-time (or early) and know that the reporter has a job to do. This shows respect and starts things on a good note. You want to be punctual in your words and actions. Have ‘sound-bites’ already prepared ahead of time (caution: sound-bites are succinct ideas of how your message should sound, but shouldn’t sound pre-canned). If the reporter was coming to your practice to see a procedure, make sure that the procedure room, staff, and equipment are all ready ahead of time.
Homework Time! Make sure you’re familiar with the journalist’s or interviewer’s work so that you can understand what they are looking for in an interview. Read a couple of their past columns or view their previous work. Get to know their ‘tone’.
Be conversational, but cautious. Know that a good journalist will make you feel as though you are not even being interviewed (that’s when you know they are good!). A lot of times that is their technique to get you to feel comfortable and conversational. This comes with the notion that it is still an interview, and most likely the things you talk about will make the cut.
Never ask to preview an article before it’s published. This faux-pas happens way too often and you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen this myself. This request a waste of time and no reputable journalist complies. It also may send the wrong image that either you don’t trust the reporter to be fair or that you want control of the article or video. These journalists are experts at what they do and their journalistic sense is usually superior.