Expert Guide: How to handle on or ‘off-the-record’

Expert Guide, Media Training / By Andrew Caesar-Gordon

Electric Airwaves is the UK’s largest communications training company and the most frequent question we are asked by participants on our courses is whether they should ever go ‘off-the-record’. Implicitly linked to this is the question ‘do journalists honour such conversations?’ So is there such a thing as ‘off-the-record’? The answer is – ‘yes’ with …

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Expert Guide: How to Manage ‘Down the Line’ TV Interviews

Expert Guide, Media Training / By Andrew Caesar-Gordon

As broadcasters’ resources are stretched, ‘down-the-line’ TV interviews are increasingly common. Interviewees in one location talk to a camera, listening via an earpiece to the journalist who is questioning them from the studio. The most difficult type of interview Spokespeople often find these interviews unnerving. It is unnatural to be talking to a camera rather …

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Expert Guide: How to devise soundbites and get quoted

Expert Guide, Media Training, Presentation Skills / By Andrew Caesar-Gordon

Many participants on Electric Airwaves’ media training courses ask how they can ensure that they don’t get unfairly edited by a journalist and can get their soundbites broadcast or published. Why was I misquoted? For busy journalists in a busy newsroom, confronted with something new, a few minutes on Google can often be the totality …

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Media Training for Receptionists & Security Guards?

Media Training / By Andrew Caesar-Gordon

Watching the extraordinarily cack-handed response of Ask.FM to the suicide of Hannah Smith following her being cyber-bullied on their website, have a look at this video clip from Sky News doorstepping an employee of Ask.FM here. http://news.sky.com/story/teen-suicide-site-refuses-to-answer-questions-10437918 When covering your organisation's issue or crisis, journalists will try to speak with senior executives. If your organisation …

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Parliamentary Committee Woes

Case Study, Media Training / By Andrew Caesar-Gordon

Mike Ashley’s appearance today before the Business, Innovation & Skills Parliamentary Select Committee today has all the makings of a classic. The self-confessed loudmouth who had called MPs a “joke” was done up like a kipper, particularly by Labour MP, Paul Blomfield (a star in the making?). Electric Airwaves published our latest short animated video …

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Can you get away with controversial media comments?

Case Study, Media Training / By Andrew Caesar-Gordon

When an organisation's leader says something contentious in public, its PROs often cringe. A press release is issued to 'clarify' the comments in "'order to restore calm to troubled waters; the executive may be urged to take a holiday. But if the comments are not on the scale of BP' s Tony Hayward "I want …

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Crisis Communications: A Canadian Blame Game

Crisis communications, Media Training / By Andrew Caesar-Gordon

You would have thought that with over 50 people dead following a runaway train destroying the heart of Lac-Megantic in Canada, the rail company would be focused solely on the human impact of the tragedy. Not so if you are Edward Burkhardt, chairman of Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. Generally, his media interviews have been …

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