TJ Walker breaks down how to craft messages for media: prepare three core messages, each in 10 words or less, deliverable in 30 seconds total. He argues three messages hit the sweet spot between memorable and varied, and offers exercises like writing a story's first paragraph to find what actually matters.
Chapters
What is your message? Anytime you're speaking to the news media, you need to have a clear sense of what's most important to you, your message. You're not simply there to be a reference librarian to just answer questions. People have Google for that. There's Wikipedia. If you're speaking to the news media, you need to have a clear sense of what is the message. You want people to know. If you're making your own media, focus on just one or two or three ideas in any one communication. So, for example, in this video, I'm not being interviewed by a reporter. This is media I create and control on Udemy. But I'm just going to focus on messaging. I'm not going to talk about sound bites here. I'm not going to go back to tips on how to look good on camera. Just going to focus on messaging. When you're speaking to the news media, I believe you should go into an interview with a strong sense of, okay, here's the topic. Reporters will let us know what the topic is, but now you get to figure out what is most important to you that you want the readers, viewers, listeners of this media outlet to get from you. So when they are opening up their newspaper or clicking on a website or watching tv, this is the part that you want them to see from you. My recommendation? Have three ideas. Each idea, each message, is something you should be able to say in 10 words or less. You should be able to say the whole thing in 30 seconds or less. Well, why three? It's because if you only have one message and you come back again and again and again in every answer to one message, then it seems boring, monotonous, there's not enough there. If you try to do more than three, in my experience, it's highly unlikely you'll get more than three messages into any final interview. Even if it's unedited, it's unlikely anyone will remember more than three messages. Three is a number that just works. It works in speeches, it works in religions, it works with a lot of symbolism in every aspect of life. It's easy for people to remember, and it's just enough to have a little variety, not be boring, but it doesn't overwhelm. A lot of times people say, well, you know, I've just got too much stuff. I want to share all my knowledge. You're not sharing knowledge if you're just overwhelming people with lots and lots of data. I hear this. People say, well, teacher, I don't want to dumb it down. I want to respect my audience and Respect this journalist. I want you to respect them too. And a part of your way of respecting the audience and the journalist is by using your judgment. You're the expert on whatever it is you're being interviewed on. So it's up to you to figure out everything you could say on this subject. What's most important? What do people most need to know? As Mark Twain and a lot of other famous writers have been credited with saying, I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter, I didn't have time to write you a short letter. It actually takes more time and judgment to narrow things down to your top three messages than to just tell people everything. Here's one way of thinking of this messaging process. If the London Times came to you and said, we're going to let you write the first paragraph of this story any way you want, what would you put in it? Your first three sentences, what would you put it? Now, they're not going to do that. But as a mental frame, it's very helpful to really figure out what's most important. If the BBC or France 24 came to you and said, we're going to let you run a free 30 second public service announcement commercial on this subject, you can say anything you want to, what would it be? I'm pretty sure you would figure out what your top three messages are. What you could say that fits in 30 seconds, major news outlet comes to you and says, you can only take the 30 minute, 30 seconds and you say, well, unless I have five minutes, I'm not going to take it. I don't think you would turn down the 30 second AD just because you insist on five minutes. You would figure out way of making it work. So that's my challenge to you now, is you got to think of some topic, something you talk about in your real business, your real career, your real civic organization. Whatever you do, think of a topic where reporters likely to want to interview you. If the reason you're here is just to prepare for your own social media creation, then think of a topic. Whether it's cooking, muffins or whatever it is, think of a topic that you want to tell people about and really focus, focus on what those three messages can be. I'm going to give you more tips in a moment on how to come up with these messages.
