No matter how often you find yourself in the middle – or comprising the whole – of a news story, you’ll likely experience equal parts exhilaration and trepidation over how it’s going to turn out. Whether it’s a live radio segment, a taped TV interview or some quotes you give to a magazine reporter, you’re excited to get your message across but worried you won’t. Did I cover what I wanted to cover? Will viewers forgive that brain freeze as I was answering the first question? Will the reporter relay what I said accurately?
Learn this now and save yourself some heartache later: You’ll be disappointed by the result sometimes, and you’ll be thrilled by it sometimes. If you’re anything like me, you’ll realize every now and then that you blew it. An occasion may even come when you read, watch or listen and think, “Wow, that turned out exactly how I wanted it to! That story couldn’t have been more perfect if I’d done it myself!”
Beware those moments. Here’s why.
Perfection is an illusion in PR. It can make you overconfident about your abilities and not cautious enough about the reporter doing your next interview. You can start to think you don’t need to prepare, that you’ve “arrived,” that you can do this in your sleep. Even more dangerous, you can think the reporter’s job is to make you look good. It is not. A reporter’s job is to get the story. The good ones, the ones you want writing about you, will ask tough questions to get it. You need to be ready to answer them.
And you know what? You should want to answer them. That’s primarily why any story that turns out exactly like you wanted isn’t exactly what you want. You should want to answer tough questions, because they keep you sharp and demonstrate you know your stuff. Reporters who don’t challenge you, don’t bring a little skepticism to their side of the questions, don’t push you to articulate your positions with precision and conviction, make you lazy.
Laziness and a hot mic don’t mix.
(Excerpted from the Niche Pressworks book, Bite the Dog: Unleashing the Power of PR to Make News and Make a Difference, coming February 2018.
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