Keeping media skills alive
24 July, 2007
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At the end of almost every media training course we run, the question comes up “How do we keep these skills alive?”
It’s a question that tells the course director that people are seeing the problem that can occur with any skill – whether it’s playing tennis or chess or doing a cryptic crossword.
If you don’t do something regularly, you forget how to do it. And let’s face it – many of our graduates’ would not do more than three or four interviews in a year.
Well, we run refresher courses. These are usually a fast-paced half day session which jumps straight into practical interview work. With this approach, the skills come back very quickly, and can then be fine tuned or advanced.
Some organisations we work with will do a refresher series one or two years after initial training.
Recently we’ve been asked to ‘refresh’ skills taught by others. One person said to me that she didn’t really believe she’d been given the right skills because participants interviewed each other for the practice work. She found it very different when a journalist or former journalist did the inter viewing.
With individuals, such as ministers or CEOs, we might do more frequent refreshers, or even a dress rehearsal for an important media appearance.
But not everyone wants to budget for constant professional support. Such people may carry out regular analyses of their potential media situations making use of their Roger Fry & Co green sheets. This gives a collegiate approach to the issues management of a situation, and produces a key message ready for support with news quotes or, in the case of live radio interviews, examples.
Others circulate their media monitoring clippings and transcripts, with the media savvy people making informed comments on how newsmakers have performed.
The art of refreshing is also possible in reading the newspaper or listening to a radio news bulletin.
If we take in the news as structure and sequence – rather than as content – we can see things like the number of words or seconds in a news quote, or the number of sentences of information in stories before the quotes appear.
People also analyse the features of news quotes. For example readers of the NT News were intrigued a year or so ago by the high level of analogies in that paper’s news quotes – much higher than in other capital city papers.
Despite this wide range of ways in which one can refresh media skills, it has to be said that the simple task of sitting down for a practice grilling by an experienced interviewer is the quickest, most effective way of keeping skills in the sharpest condition.
Roger Fry