MEDIA HANDLING
Media Handling Essentials
Learn how the most successful comms teams work effectively with the media to influence and generate media coverage.
Learn how the most successful comms teams work effectively with the media to influence and generate media coverage
This half-day Media Handling Essentials workshop supports communications teams to optimise how they work with journalists and media outlets.
What you'll learn
When should your spokespeople do interviews? How should you manage journalists and broadcast crews on your site? What's the most effective way to brief and prepare spokespeople for media interviews?
All this and more is covered in this Media Handling Essentials workshop, to ensure you understand how the media works, what journalists need and how to communicate with your audiences across print, online and broadcast.
Learn from experts
This Media Handling Essentials workshop takes place at your own offices or in person at our central London training centres. Remote training via Zoom is also available, if preferred.
The course is led by a senior broadcast journalist who is also a communications strategy specialist with years of experience training communications teams and spokespeople. They'll share their expertise and use presentations, case studies, discussion and practical exercises to build your team's media handling skills.
After training, delegates receive full course notes by email and a link from which to download their interview recordings.
Who this Media Handling Essentials workshop is for
This course is for teams who brief journalists and pitch stories to media outlets, including press officers and people working in communications, PR, external affairs and public affairs. You may also wish to look at our short courses including How Newsrooms Work course, which looks at how news is made, and Understanding the News Cycle, which considers how and why journalists make decisions.
You could consider following this course with Crisis Media Handling Essentials which focuses on managing the media during the toughest periods of media scrutiny.
Course Modules
Module 1: Media Handling Essentials
Media relations strategy
What journalists want and how to pitch to newsdesks
Pitching stories successfully
Managing journalist and broadcast crews on your site
Supporting spokespeople and prepping them for interviews
Module 2: Practical exercises
Analyse media interview case studies
Craft key messages and headlines
Brainstorm responses to tricky questions
Record a TV interview (optional)
What people say about our training
I honestly thought that the whole day was fabulous!!! You really couldn’t have done anymore for us. The combination of practical exercises and feedback was particularly useful, it was a challenging day (in a very good way) in that we really had to think, learn and adapt quickly. I know the team are significantly better prepared for media interviews after this training.
Press Association Academy were efficient, well organised and genuinely lovely people to deal with and, importantly for us, able to provide flexibility around our needs to create the bespoke training we required. I wouldn’t hesitate to use them for further training or to recommend them to other organisations.
The training scenarios are as real to life as you could possibly get. They took considerable time to research our current plans and issues and used these to design a series of true to life radio and TV interviews. The team is outstanding, and their expertise and knowledge has been invaluable. Book them – you’ll be glad you did.
The team is flexible, slick, well-resourced and overall simply first class. Their expertise and knowledge have been invaluable. I was delighted with our choice, so I’d have no hesitation in recommending them
The lifelike interview settings and tasks that Press Association Academy deal in replicate perfectly the real-world feel of a tough media interview and help the delegates come out of the day feeling much more confident that they can play an active role in representing their organisation.
What a great session we had on Communicating with Impact. Bridgid shared practical techniques to enhance and develop our communications skills so we can present and speak publicly or to senior stakeholders with confidence and impact. I speak for my whole team in highly recommending Bridgid Nzekwu if you are after effective and fun communication training.
The small class sizes nurture a comfortable environment where everyone supports and learns from each other. The staff helped me hone in on my writing skills and develop the confidence to feel comfortable on camera.
Interested in this course?
Talk to the Press Association Academy team about dates, fees and bespoke options.