Media training still prepares people for the interview, but nobody watches the interview anymore. A five-minute conversation now becomes a dozen clips, cut and posted by people you’ve never met, and the first version of what you said is the one that sticks. The real question for any spokesperson is no longer “what are my key messages?” but “which ten seconds of me will they use?”

I have spent more than 30 years on both sides of the microphone. For most of them, the interview was the thing. You prepared for it, you sat it, and people consumed it more or less whole: a three-minute package, a half-page feature, a radio slot with a beginning, a middle and a presenter saying “we’ll have to leave it there”.

That world has gone. The unit of media is no longer the interview. It is ten vertical seconds.

The interview is now raw material

In my experience a five-minute interview now yields ten to fifteen clips. Each is lifted, captioned and posted by someone you have never met, on a platform you do not control. Most people who encounter what you said will never see the interview. They will see the moment.

Ofcom’s 2026 figures show where they will see it. Online is now the most-used route to news in the UK, ahead of television. Six in ten adults use social media and video for news; among 16-24s it is nearly eight in ten. One in five already gets news from AI tools. None of those channels shows your answer in context. All of them show a piece of it.

Everyone is a broadcaster
The journalist has a phone. So does the creator, the guest and your own front-of-house team. At a launch party, a phone at canapé height is a live broadcast unit with a drink in the other hand.

Their reach frequently beats yours. Plenty of respectable brands have a few thousand followers on their own channels. One guest’s clip can outrun every official post the brand has ever made.

Nothing is reliably off the record

“Just between us” is a format, not a promise. I tell every client to assume they are being recorded from hello to goodbye, including the friendly chat by the coats.

The first version is forever

This is the part most spokespeople underestimate. The first version of a story dominates. Syndication, aggregation, Google and AI summaries all quote the first version, usually before any correction exists. The correction, when it comes, runs smaller, later and somewhere else. It never catches the clip.

So the only thing you fully control is what you say first.

The clip can also save you

This is not all bad news. When “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” became TikTok’s soundtrack for travel mishaps, Jet2 skipped the defensive statement and joined the joke, in the platform’s own language. Speed, tone and a bit of self-awareness turned a pile-on into a brand moment. The clip economy punishes the unprepared. It rewards the people who understand it.

What this means for media training

Most media training still prepares people for the interview: three key messages, a message house, some practice answering hostile questions. All necessary. None of it sufficient.

The message house tells you what to say. It does not tell you which ten seconds of you will be used. That is now the whole game.

So my training starts somewhere different. In the first ten minutes I ask each spokesperson a simple question: “Tell me about your business.” I record it. Almost everyone gives a history tour, a list of facts or a paragraph of brochure words. Nobody gives a headline. By the end of the day we ask the same question again, and the difference between the two answers is the training.

What we are listening for is simple:

• A headline in the first sentence, not the third
• One detail a listener would repeat to a friend
• Specifics, not “unparalleled” anything
• A line only your organisation could say
• A clean stop

That last one matters more than people think. The editor can only cut where you pause. Ramble, and they will cut you where it suits them.

The question to ask yourself

Before your next interview, press event or panel, stop asking “what are my key messages?” Ask “which ten seconds of me will they use?”

If you don’t choose, someone else will. You will like their choice less. To ensure you are “clip ready” for your next media interview email me.

Next in this series: how to write a line that survives the edit.