public relations Archives - Clapperton Media

When PR teams prepare a client for a media opportunity, messaging quite rightly takes centre stage. But strong messaging alone doesn’t guarantee strong interviews. At Clapperton Media Associates, we regularly see spokespeople who know their content inside-out still fall short — not because they lack knowledge, but because they’ve missed three critical skills that shape how journalists receive and use their words.

These skills are often overlooked in pre-interview briefings, or dismissed by clients who believe they “sound fine already”. In practice, they make the difference between an effective interview and a frustrating one. Here are the three that matter most:

1. Tone: Expertise Isn’t Enough

A spokesperson can hold every relevant fact in their head and be a world-class expert — but if they sound dismissive, bored, defensive or aloof, the interview immediately suffers.

Tone determines whether a journalist warms to the speaker or braces for a difficult conversation. The goal is to sound engaged and engaging: confident without arrogance, warm without gushing, authoritative without condescension. It’s a balance many senior executives underestimate.

2. Structure: Think, Then Speak

A common issue is that a journalist asks a question and the spokesperson dives straight into an answer with no reflection. To the expert, it makes perfect sense — they can mentally stitch it all together. To the journalist, whose expertise lies in interviewing and shaping stories, the result can feel fragmented, unclear, or unmoored from the point.

Training clients to pause, structure, and signpost before they speak leads to clearer quotes, better coverage, and far fewer follow-up questions driven by confusion rather than curiosity.

3. Length: More Isn’t More

Well-meaning spokespeople often want to be as helpful as possible. If they have 20 years’ experience, they may feel obliged to offer every angle, nuance and historical footnote.

Unfortunately, this overwhelms rather than assists. Long, meandering answers encourage journalists to conflate issues, lose focus, or latch onto details the client didn’t intend to foreground.

Shorter, sharper answers maintain control of the narrative and make it easier for journalists to extract accurate, useful quotes.

Helping PR Teams Reduce Risk and Improve Results

These issues are rarely about lack of skill — they’re about lack of practice. The right training helps spokespeople communicate in ways journalists can immediately use, reducing the risk of poor coverage and increasing the likelihood of meaningful, positive stories.

Clapperton Media Associates specialises in preparing senior leaders, technical experts, and fast-moving startups for exactly these challenges. If your clients are heading into interviews, we can help ensure they deliver with clarity, confidence and impact.

To discuss tailored training for your team or clients, get in touch.

PR agencies large and small are under constant pressure to deliver results efficiently. Yet many teams find that one task quietly drains far more time and energy than they realise: ineffective media pitching.

For many agencies and in-house teams, the cycle is all too familiar. Drafts that don’t quite land. Endless rewrites. Promising stories that somehow never make it out of the inbox. Hours lost to a process that should take minutes, and opportunities slipping away simply because the initial pitch missed the mark. Journalists just don’t care, hence the shruggy image.

At Clapperton Media Training, this is exactly the problem our Pitch Perfect session is designed to solve.

An Investment in Skills — and in Efficiency

When PR managers send junior colleagues to our masterclasses, they’re not just supporting early-career development. They are strengthening their own pipeline. Stronger pitching skills mean fewer rewrites, fewer dead ends and fewer hours spent salvaging work that was never likely to succeed.

This isn’t just training. It’s an operational upgrade.

What Better Pitching Really Delivers

Our training helps delegates understand:

How journalists actually think — and what makes them respond.
What to cut from a pitch to avoid instant deletion.
How to spot weaknesses before the email is ever sent.
How to build long-term media relationships rather than chasing one-off wins.

The result?
Managers spend less time correcting and amending pitches. Success rates increase. Junior staff gain the confidence to craft smarter, tighter, more relevant story ideas. Teams become faster, sharper and more aligned with what journalists genuinely need.

A single story placement can be a success — but long-term relationships built on intelligent, relevant pitching are far more valuable. Our sessions are designed to help PR teams move from the former to the latter.

Upcoming Pitching Masterclass — 8 December

Clapperton Media Training still has places available on our 8th December morning and afternoon courses in London.

For agencies asking themselves where their time and energy are disappearing, this is often the most effective place to start.

For details, or to reserve a place, simply get in touch.

At Clapperton Media Associates, we work closely with public relations professionals who want their clients to be visible, credible, and memorable. But one phrase keeps resurfacing in conversations that makes us wince slightly: “thought leadership.”

Like many bits of jargon, it began with good intentions. The idea was simple: if a client has genuinely original insight or a fresh perspective on their market, then helping them share that view is an invaluable service. Done well, it can spark discussion, shape perception, and position a business as an authority worth listening to.

Unfortunately, “thought leadership” has been overused to the point of meaning very little. Somewhere along the line, it became something to tick off a to-do list. We’ve seen well-intentioned PR teams ask clients for “thought leadership content” as if it’s a deliverable that can be produced to order. Occasionally, that works – a founder or expert may have untapped insight they didn’t realise was valuable. But more often, it leads to clients feeling pressured to produce opinions that sound authoritative without offering anything new.

When “thought leadership” becomes a formula rather than a spark, it risks doing the opposite of what’s intended. Instead of making someone sound like an innovator, it makes them look like they haven’t done their research. And it gets worse when that phrase – “thought leadership” – is used with journalists. Talking about “offering thought leadership” to an editor is like a magician explaining an illusion before performing it. Everyone knows it’s positioning, but it’s best not to draw attention to the wires.

The solution? Focus less on “leadership” as a label and more on what’s genuinely interesting or useful. A strong opinion, a data point that challenges assumptions, or a story that reveals something new – those are the real currency of influence.

At its best, great communications work helps ideas travel. But when every article, quote, and podcast appearance is branded as “thought leadership,” the words lose their meaning. So, by all means, help clients share their insights and opinions – just don’t call every thought a leading one.

Ifg you’re in public relations you’ll be well aware that media interviews are a critical component of shaping a client’s public image and conveying key messages. Many PR companies engage media training specialists—like our team—to prepare their spokespeople for live interviews with journalists. The common concern? Fear of “winging it”—the worry that their CEO or key executive will stumble, ramble, or be caught unprepared on camera or microphone.

However, while poor preparation is definitely a problem, there’s a nuanced challenge that often goes unnoticed: overpreparation. Some executives are so accustomed to meticulously rehearsed responses and detailed briefs that they end up delivering their messages with robotic precision. This leads to an interview that feels less like a genuine conversation and more like a memorised monologue.

The Pitfalls of Overpreparedness

Colleagues in the public relations industry often come across this issue. An executive might know every key point inside out but struggles to vary their script. They have done no preparation for someone asking something not in their playbook. So when an unexpected question arises, they stumble or retreat into delivering their rehearsed lines, failing to engage authentically with the journalist or audience. This over-reliance on scripting can undermine credibility and diminish the impact of even the most compelling messages.

A Cautionary Tale – this spokesperson had done his preparation but…

To illustrate this, we recall a particularly extreme example from a media assignment our lead trainer Guy undertook. He was invited to interview a government minister in Portugal. Leading up to the interview, Ihehad met one of his colleagues—a personable and approachable individual who was straightforward without being overbearing. He was genuinely looking forward to the meeting.

When the official entered the room, he was flanked by soldiers—nothing threatening, but a striking visual. He took his seat between two flags, and then, quite unexpectedly, opened a folder and launched into a pre-written speech, reading aloud to me in full. His PR representative, sitting beside Guy, visibly shrank at the spectacle.

Guy attempted to ask a few questions without being rude, but the minister continued reading his script with a smile, nodding politely as if it were a conversational exchange. When he finished, he shook Guy’s hand and left. Later, his PR team admitted they were as baffled as we were about what it was all supposed to achieve. The minister’s English was excellent, so it wasn’t a matter of language barrier or discomfort.

While this was an extreme case, it underscores a key point: journalists—and in fact, any audience—are rarely satisfied with overtly scripted interviews. Even without the soldiers, a rigid delivery can come across as disingenuous or disengaged.

Mastering, Not Memorizing

At our media training sessions, we emphasise the importance of mastering your key messages rather than memorising answers. Actors, for example, spend years honing their craft to sound natural—even when reading lines—so their delivery resonates as authentic. Most of us don’t share that training, and attempting to produce a perfectly rehearsed performance during an interview can backfire.

When a client delivers a rehearsed, robotic response, journalists quickly perceive a lack of engagement. This perception ramps up the pressure, prompting them to ask more challenging, unexpected questions to test the interviewee’s spontaneity and authenticity.

The Key Takeaway

Preparation remains vital—but it should serve as a foundation for confidence, not a script to recite. A well-prepared spokesperson should be able to navigate interviews with authenticity, drawing on their knowledge and core messages, and adapting to unexpected questions with ease.

If your organization invests in media training—either through our sessions or others—you’ll find that empowering your team to speak naturally about your brand will deliver far better results than forcing them into a scripted performance. Authenticity builds trust and rapport, qualities that no rehearsed answer can truly convey.

Conclusion

Remember, the goal of a media interview is genuine communication, not performance. Preparation should enable your spokespeople to articulate their points clearly and confidently, without sounding like they’re reading from a script. Whether it’s a press conference, an interview, or a one-on-one dialogue, authenticity will always resonate more effectively than robotic recitation.

If you’re interested in helping your team master the art of authentic communication, contact us to learn more about our tailored media training programs. Let’s ensure your executives not only know what to say but also how to say it with confidence and sincerity.