Media Training: Learn it like a song, not a script

The spokesperson who gets quoted isn’t the cleverest in the room. It’s the one who spoke in headlines.

I should start with a confession: I am famous for my monologues. Ask me a simple question and you may get an answer with chapters, footnotes and an interval.

That habit bit me with the BBC. I gave a reporter a five-minute interview and walked away rather pleased with myself. Then came the verdict: “That’s great, Mark, but I can’t use any of it. What you said in one breath is longer than my entire piece, and I have to fit in three people plus you.”

Five minutes of my finest material. Not a second of it broadcast.

The reporter wasn’t being unkind. It was simple arithmetic. A short news package with four voices leaves each of them a few seconds, and my opening sentence alone had spent the whole budget. Everything else I said, however clever I thought it was, was unusable.

It is the most useful thing a journalist has ever told me, and it is why I teach what I teach.

Since then I’ve seen the same pattern everywhere. Put six people in front of a journalist on a press trip and one of them gets quoted. It is rarely the most senior, and never the one with the most facts. It is the one who spoke in headlines instead of paragraphs.

That is a skill, not a personality type. It can be taught in a morning. Here is how I teach it.

A script is read. A song is remembered.

Most executives prepare for an interview by writing a script. Long sentences, lots of facts, carefully approved. Then they try to remember it under pressure, and it comes out different every time, sounding exactly like the press release it came from.

I ask clients to learn it like a song instead:

• Short lines: 10 to 15 seconds each, about 30 to 40 words
• A chorus: the same four clips, said the same way every time
• A verse: one story, a guest or a colleague, told the same way every time
• Rehearsed out loud until it flows, not read silently until it’s “learned”

We are rehearsing a song, not a Shakespearean drama. Nobody forgets the chorus.

Speak in pictures

If a listener can’t picture it, they won’t repeat it. And if they won’t repeat it, a journalist won’t use it. Compare:

Brochure speak	Paint a picture
“A premium pre-flight experience”	“A seat, a socket and somewhere quiet before a long-haul flight”
“Increased space per guest”	“Travelling alone? A seat of your own, not half of someone else’s table”
“We take all feedback seriously”	“Guests told us it didn’t work, so we’re rebuilding it”
“A contemporary British design”	“It feels more like a country house than an airport”

The test is brutal and simple: could someone repeat it to a friend at the gate?

Make the number mean something

Executives love numbers. Audiences love what numbers feel like. “28% bigger” is a fact. “Your bag beside you, not in the aisle” is the same fact, felt. Lead with the feeling and use the number as proof. One number per clip; two and neither lands.

The best clip I heard this year did both in eleven words: “We could have added nearly 40 seats. We added 13.” A decision, a number and a value, with nothing left to explain.

The four tests before a line leaves your mouth

I borrow these from how travel desks judge a pitch. A line has to be:

1. Distinctive: could only you say it?
2. Timely: why now, not any Tuesday?
3. Audience-first: whose life does it touch?
4. Forwardable: would you send it to a friend?

Then the swap test. Replace your organisation’s name with your nearest competitor’s. If the line still works, it isn’t finished. “We’re passionate about quality” survives the swap for every business on earth, which is exactly why nobody quotes it.

Four clips, one bell

The exercise that does the most work in my sessions is embarrassingly low-tech. Each spokesperson writes four clips, one for each of the four questions they’re most likely to be asked. Then I ring a bell every 15 seconds. One clip per ring. Four rings, one minute.

We do it three times:

1. Get it down. Read all four aloud as written. Which would you want quoted?
2. Cut and sharpen. Cut every word the clip doesn’t need. One number or one picture per clip.
3. Your voice. Sheet face down. Land each clip before the bell. End the last one with a hook.

By round three, people stop sounding like their press release and start sounding like themselves, only sharper. That is the point. The messaging framework supplies the lyrics. The spokesperson supplies the singing.

Why this is the clip economy’s core skill

A journalist can only file what fits. An editor can only cut where you pause. A creator can only post what makes sense out of context. A 15-second line with one picture and one number does all three jobs for them.

It doesn’t guarantee they’ll use it. Nothing does. But it makes your line the easiest one in the room to use, and in a newsroom that is click-audited to the second, easiest usually wins.

Next in this series: why the way you decline a question matters more than the answer.