This livestream segment features TJ Walker giving practical media-interview advice: prioritize and deliver your core messages and sound bites rather than judging reporters; proactively "rewrite" or reframing questions you view as poor; avoid needless adversarial stances; when appropriate, offer background/off-the-record context to educate inexperienced reporters, then return on-record to restate key messages. The guidance emphasises controlling the narrative and shaping final stories.
Chapters
What do you do if a reporter is lazy, stupid, dumb, and asks idiotic questions? Guess what? Reality check here. Nobody cares about your opinions of a reporter's questions. Nobody cares about my opinions of reporters questions. You need to focus on what is truly important, the messages that come from you, and get into the final story. Now, I love smart, intelligent, savvy, sophisticated reporters who really know about what I do and ask tremendously insightful questions, and we have fascinating conversations. But I also love dumb, stupid, lazy reporters because it's that much easier for me to get the quotes and sound bites I want into the final story. Too many people go into an interview and they think of this as I'm selecting a dinner party companion that I'm going to have to have dinner with every Saturday night for the next year. That's not what you're doing. With a media interview, you have an opportunity to get ideas you care about in front of the readers, viewers, listeners of this media outlet. And if you don't like the reporter, nobody cares. If you don't think the reporter is as smart as you, nobody cares. That reporter might think you're dumb, stupid, or lazy, too. I don't want to start off on an adversarial relationship with reporters for no reason, but there may be times when you think a reporter is missing something. It's not your problem to get this person entirely educated. It's your problem to get. It's your challenge to get the message you want into the final story. When you hear a question that you think is stupid, rewrite the question to make it a smart question. You hear a question you don't like, it just means you haven't done your job of rewriting the question. It's your job to rewrite questions to make them easy for you to answer in a way that gets your messages across and your sound bites across. Now, occasionally, you could talk to a reporter who may be brand new on the beat. You can tell they don't have a bad attitude, they just are lacking in knowledge and they may be really looking up to you for insight. What you could do is say all your messages, say your sound bites, but then also say to the reporter, hey, I'm happy to talk to you more on the record. Could we go off the record or on background for a moment? Typically, the reporter will say yes. At that point, if you feel the reporter is really open to it, you can give them a lot more detail, try to educate them on something. I mean, if they're brand new to reporting on derivatives and they don't know what a derivative is, and you've been in the derivatives business for 20 years. This may be an opportunity for you to really shape a reporter's thinking and help guide them. Don't say anything in the background session that you would hate to see in print, but you can be a little looser, broader, with things less focused than on the record. Then, after you're done with the education process, the background go back on the record with the reporter, hit your messages again, hit your sound bites again, and you'll be in great shape.
