Open courses
Speaking to the media? Make sure you get it right!
London – FULL
Manchester – FULL
Edinburgh – Friday 20 June, Marriott Hotel, Central
1st delegate: £275 + vat
Additional delegates: 195 + vat
– LIMITED DELEGATE PLACES – BOOK NOW
This course will help you to:
• Establish key messages that accurately portray your organisations
• Give you confidence when speaking to journalists
• Take control of your media image
• Promote good news and delicately handle the bad
• Prepare you to perform confidently and calmly in the face of difficult questioning during print and broadcast interviews
Trainers
Harry Smith – ITN –
Hazel Irvine – Loose Women
Hazel Irvine – BBC
Paul Murricane – STV
Fiona Ross – BBC
Daniel Lee – The Guardian
Eamonn O’Neill – GQ and Esquire
Agnes Stevenson – Glasgow Evening Times
For further information, or to book your place:
Phone: 0800 032 11 27
Email: info@media-mentor.co.uk
(all real examples our TV broadcasters have experienced…)
Please visit our television media training page to find out the right way to handle television interviews
(all real examples our radio broadcasters have experienced…)
Have a look at our radio media training course for some real advice.
It’s the large poster with the picture of the President smiling down on the population that stays in the mind as you drive off the airport road into Tbilisi. The President of the United States that is, George W himself. To British eyes, it must be ironic – there to make us laugh, cheer us up by its incongruity. It takes a moment to realise that there is no irony intended at all – this is a country that is determinedly toiling away from a Soviet past and into a Western future, with all of the uncertainties and difficulties that future may hold. But at least it’s their future.
I was returning to Tbilisi, back to the OSCE headquarters in the Dacha complex for a second year, this time with a new cameraman Peter Johnstone who had never been to Georgia before. I did my best to prepare him for the city. Like many westerners he’d been telling his colleagues for weeks that he was going to Russia. We nearly missed our plane because at the last minute he went back home to fetch his winter jacket – a huge fur lined quilted monstrosity which would have sheltered a small family. He never wore it – a fact I pointed out many times as we sat on the rooftop terrace of the Kopola hotel sipping cool beer in the warmth of the evenings after work, mesmerised by the stunning lighting display of Tbilisi’s spotlit public buildings at night. Read the rest of this entry »
Life would be simple if all you had to deal with was re-building trust between communities that had recently been at war with each other, and monitoring the emergence of a democratic nation. That sort of stuff is easy isn’t it? But life is complicated. And the complications often arrive in a vehicle with the word Press on the side.
The OSCE Mission To Georgia press office is one of the most highly skilled media handling operations I have every encountered – and I’ve worked for ITN and Channel 4 television in the UK and the Discovery Channel in the US. To see Martha Freeman in action is to see a real professional who combines charm and efficiency with ruthless protection of the OSCE reputation. Read the rest of this entry »
Gordon Ramsay has reportedly ordered that chefs should be fined if they serve fruit and vegetables which aren’t in season at the time.
Ramsay claims he has already spoken with Prime Minister Gordon Brown about the food issue, and believes it would cut carbon emissions because less food would be imported.
He told the BBC “I don’t want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown.”
Ramsay added that Britain has become a nation of lazy eaters who would rather follow trends than substance. He also suggests that Britain should make out-of-season produce illegal, saying that there should be “stringent laws” in place.
ITV presenters Ant and Dec have had the smile wiped off their faces after they were told to return the prize given to them at the 2005 British Comedy awards.
ITV has revealed that the Catherine Tate show received more votes than Ant and Dec for the People’s Choice Award.
The TV station admitted that Robbie Williams was invited to present the award, and he agreed to do so, on the condition that Ant and Dec win the award. ITV complied with this in order to secure his attendance at the event.
Who would have thought it? Once upon a time Prince Harry was thought of as the irresponsible brother, he went on wild nights out boozing and picking fights with bouncers, while William kept up appearances as Britain’s squeaky-clean Prince. Well no more.
Prince William has royally messed up in the eyes of the media after his three-hour trip to Afghanistan has been deemed as a ‘PR exercise’.
Not a particularly surprising assumption from the media after the Prince piloted military helicopters to a stag party on the Isle of Wight and over to his girlfriend’s house.
It may have been an idea to consider that his brother spent ten-weeks fighting in Afghanistan, a three-hour flight over there was never going to be a heroic comparison really was it?
Clearly some PR person thought ‘OK let’s remedy your insensitive and irresponsible image by flying you over to Afghanistan; yes that’ll work a treat.’ Hmmm not quite.
If you want to learn how to avert PR disasters call Axis Media Group on 0800 032 1127.
The powerful cyclone which hit Burma last Saturday is thought to be the worst natural disaster the country has experienced in modern times.
Sadly, the death toll has been enormous with over a 100,000 people feared dead, and thousands still missing.
The disaster has been compared with the Indian Ocean tsunami which hit in 2004, the crucial difference between the two: in Burma’s hour of need the government refuse to accept aid.
Read a great article here on why the media can make or break you.
Newspaper coverage in the wake of Gordon Brown’s hammering at the polls will have had Labour Party strategists choking on their low-salt muesli.
And nothing will have alarmed them more than the verdict from The Sun, whose switch of allegiance from the Tories to New Labour in the run-up to the 1997 election was a huge PR coup for Tony Blair.
“We were watching a dead man drowning,” was The Sun’s veteran associate editor Trevor Kavanagh’s opinion of Gordon Brown’s tour of the TV studios after his ballot box rout.
Placing the sting in the tail, he added: “I give him six months.” Read the rest of this entry »
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The dairy industry are intending to reduce the impact of milk production on the environment; an excellent PR move.
Industry officials and environment ministers will shortly release information detailing how they propose going about this eco-friendly task.
Plans include sourcing half of all packaging from recycled materials by 2020 and cutting greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farms by 20-30 percent.
As the elections draw to a close for the mayor of London, figures have been released which state Conservative Boris Johnson is in the lead polling at 44% compared with Labour’s Ken Livingstone a close-second at 40%.
The Sun published that Boris thinks the reason Livingstone is struggling is because he is too out-of-date and sleazy. But the Labour candidate lashed out saying “It’s not an election for Have I Got News For You or Celebrity Mayor; it’s about who is best placed to run an £11billion budget every year.”
Livingstone said he thinks of his rival, Johnson, as a “joke”.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has admitted that the local election results are “bad” and “disappointing” given that they are the worst results the Labour party have suffered in 40 years.
Labour has lost 160 seats, while the Conservatives have gained 147 and it is now believed Conservative Boris Johnson will be elected as the mayor of London.
Unsurprisingly Conservative party leader David Cameron has called this “a big moment” for the party.
So what does this mean for the Brown administration?
Here’s a lesson in how not to act when promotion your mayoral campaign – the day before the election!
There was a Boris-shaped absence on Jeremy Vine (Radio 2) yesterday. While Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick were ready to talk, the other leading mayoral candidate had gone awol. “Where are you, Boris?” cried Vine, all fidgety. “We’ve got an all points bulletin out on Boris,” he explained over the end of a track. “That’s Blondie,” he added, with a chuckle. “How about that? Coincidence.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Telegraph reports that Wal-Mart is facing a potential public relations disaster – set to plunge the global giant into the same category as the infamous Mr. Ratner – after a batch of videos documenting the company’s meetings for the last 30 years was put up for sale.
Clips of male store managers parading in drag in front of thousands of colleagues as they all sing the corporate song, employees mocking dangerous uses of a product sold in its stores, and even founder Sam Walton referring to then non-executive director Hillary Clinton as “one of us”. Read the rest of this entry »
After scenes of BA execs literally running away from camera crews The Guardian’s Maggie Brown asks the very good question: Is it ever ok to run away from the media while you’re dealing with a crisis? Here’s what the experts say…note the response from the head of corporate comms at BA. Read the rest of this entry »
Suddenly, Hillary Clinton is all the rage in the US media. Newspapers appear to have switched their enthusiasm from Barack Obama to Clinton. It’s happened “in the blink of an eye”, writes seasoned political commentator Thomas Edsall in Huffington Post article.
He argues that the media are now “pressing just the message” that Obama would be a likely loser against the Republican candidate, John McCain, which is just the message that Clinton has been promoting for the past six weeks.
He points to switches of direction at Time, The New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Read the rest of this entry »
An electronics factory in East Kilbride is set to close and move to Poland, losing the jobs of 300 people.
Workers are said to be “stunned” by the news, and so far no-one from JVC has been available for comment.
Jim Farrely at the East Kilbride factory told the BBC “This is extremely disappointing for the workforce and loyal team there, and I’m very disappointed to hear that such a well-respected workforce is being treated in such a way.”
Hollywood actor Wesley Snipes has been sentenced to three years behind bars for tax evasion.
He was issued with the maximum sentence for dodging federal income taxes on earnings of £7 million from the peak of his career.
The actor was also convicted in February of three counts of failing to file tax returns from 1999 to 2001 but was acquitted of felony fraud and conspiracy charges.
Both of Snipes’ tax advisors, if you can call them that have been jailed too.
