PIO ToolkitLighthouse for Public Safety
Intermediate
3 hours

Interview Skills for the PIO

Interview Skills for the PIO
$69USD

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About this course

A practical, self-paced course on preparing for and giving media interviews as a government communicator, from the first call with a reporter to the hostile question you've been dreading.

A reporter calls at 2 p.m. with a deadline of 5. You have three hours to find out what they already know, check what you're allowed to say, decide who should speak, and turn a stack of facts into something a resident will remember after ten seconds of a news package. Then someone has to sit in front of the camera and answer the question everyone in the building hoped wouldn't come.

This course works through that whole process in the order the work is actually done. It covers what different interview formats demand, including podcasts, creators and remote interviews; how to pitch stories and negotiate reasonable terms with reporters; the intake, research and clearance work that decides most interviews before they start; building key messages and soundbites with the message mapping method used in risk communication; answering directly, striking an honest tone about bad news, and knowing when to stop; how you look and sound on camera; and bridging, false premises, hostile interviewers, doorstep ambushes, live broadcasts and news conferences.

Every lesson draws on real, documented interviews, from Hurricane Katrina and the Flint water crisis to the Paxman–Howard exchange on Newsnight, and each ends with an exercise you can run with your own team. The course includes a detailed Interview Preparation Worksheet with key message development built in, which you can use for every interview request you handle.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Government and public safety communicators who give interviews or prepare others to give them
  • Communicators who prepare chiefs, directors and elected officials for difficult interviews
  • Subject-matter experts and program leads who are occasionally asked to speak to reporters
  • Anyone who wants a repeatable way to prepare for interviews, including hostile and live ones

Read a sample from this course

The microphone is still on

On April 28, 2010, a week before a general election, the UK prime minister Gordon Brown stopped on a street in Rochdale to talk with a 66-year-old voter named Gillian Duffy. She asked him about taxes, tuition fees, immigration and the national debt. The exchange was civil, he shook her hand, and he got into his car. He was still wearing a Sky News wireless microphone. In the car he complained to an aide about the encounter and called her "just a sort of bigoted woman." (CBC News, 2010)

Within hours the BBC had played the recording back to him, and the remark was leading the news. He went to Mrs. Duffy's home and spent about half an hour apologizing to her. She said she probably wouldn't vote at all.

Nothing about that moment was a formal interview. There was no reporter asking a question, no agreed format and no studio. That's exactly why it belongs at the start of this course. Most communicators think of an interview as the ten minutes between "we're rolling" and "thanks, that's great." Journalists, and the public, don't draw the line there. The interview starts the moment you're within range of a microphone, a camera, a phone or a notebook, and it ends when you're well away from all of them.

This course is about the formal interview: getting it, preparing for it, building the messages that carry it, and delivering under pressure, including in hostile and live settings. But everything in it rests on one habit you can start today. If you wouldn't be comfortable hearing it played back on the evening news, don't say it within reach of anyone who could record it. That includes the small talk before the interview, the chat while the crew packs up, and the call you make to your director from the parking lot while a reporter is still standing nearby.

Keep reading — this course continues with 6 more lessons and 55 more sections.

What you'll learn

Identify what each interview format demands, from phone and live broadcast to podcasts, creators and remote interviews.
Pitch stories reporters will use and negotiate reasonable terms without overstepping editorial independence.
Run a structured intake, research and clearance process before agreeing to any interview.
Build key messages, proof points and soundbites using the message mapping method from risk communication.
Answer questions directly, deliver bad news honestly, express compassion without admitting liability, and know when to stop.
Manage how you look and sound on camera, including in remote and down-the-line interviews.
7 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.The microphone is still on
  2. 2.Every interview has a job to do
  3. 3.The format changes the preparation
  4. 4.Where the audience actually is now
  5. 5.Ground rules are agreed before, not after
  6. 6.Try this: audit your last three interviews
  7. 7.The interview is the smallest part of it
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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