Is traditional media training dead?
It’s time to retire the idea that media training is something that’s needed only once in a career.
Are we still saying happy new year?
If so, I hope you all have a joyous 2025.
The new year is a time for reflection: I recently remembered that it must be two decades since my daughter came home from school and proudly announced her class had studied history. There were Romans, she said. A week or so later I asked whether they’d done any more history and she said, in that tone you reserve for the extremely slow, that she’d already told me – they’d done history the week before. There were Romans.
I was reminded of this when asking a non-client about the difficulties selling media training (hint: always talk to non-clients if you want to improve, the clients are already buying from you). She said she often mentioned media training to the C-suite at clients where she was often greeted with the response: “I did media training as a manager, why would I want to do it again?”
You can take the vested interests from my end as read but I was left wondering whether many people regarded their comms as a ‘one and done’ process. If this is the case, we’d need to think about the following:
Too many organisations view comms as a ‘nice-to-have’
The ‘one and done’ approach might be symptomatic of something bigger. Too many organisations view communications as a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than an essential. This is probably based on the notion that if you can’t draw a line in thick marker pen between a function in the company and increased income, it gets a bad press.
In fact, communications is the way businesses explain their organisation’s existence and justification to internal and external stakeholders. This includes colleagues, prospective colleagues, shareholders, clients and prospects.
Like the much-derided customer experience specialisms, comms is important but it’s not always recognised as such. This means any “extras” such as media training are relegated even further down the chain.
The delegate has changed…
There are three basic areas, though, where ‘one and done’ won’t do. The first of those is the delegate – the CEO who is being briefed and offered a mock grilling. They might pushback by saying they received media training when they were managers – which was often long before they reached the C-suite, maybe even 15 years ago. This is fine, but only if they expect to communicate at the same level they did in 2010.
From my own experience, I was a mature adult in that year, an experienced journalist who did a little training on the side. But I didn’t have the experience of speaking, of volunteering with professional associations – of all sorts of things I can’t call to mind right now. The C-suiter’s experience will similarly have expanded, as will their organisation’s expectations of their communication skills. 2010’s training was probably great, but only for the junior manager they were back then.
Today’s media is very different too
Even in 2010 it would have been out of date to boast about your Myspace presence, but you get the idea. The media has been in a constant state of flux for decades; in the 1920s the cover of The Times would have been covered by advertising so that people could have some privacy with their news – that’s a different world. In the 1980s USA Today and Today launched us into a world in which colour photography became a thing for newspapers, not just glossy magazines. Now the electronic world has accelerated change beyond all recognition.
In 2010 our manager might have been aware that some newspapers were becoming available online but there’s a decent chance they still would have bought a hard copy publication. Now many won’t remember the last time they did so. As such, they should be looking at a bigger array of information sources including social media and user-or-corporate-generated video, which has turned everyone into a publisher. Standing out against that backdrop is a very different task compared to how it used to be.
The message
There may be some companies that exist the same as they did in 2010 but not that many.
High street behemoths have vanished or adapted; even something as basic as shoe repairs is now dominated by a company (Timpson) noted for its societal contribution and employee enthusiasm as much as the quality of service.
Customer experience was barely talked about a decade and a half ago. The culture and the messages that will resonate have evolved and they will continue to do so, partly because the recipient has changed too – the 25-year-old adult they want to reach was probably at primary school with my daughter when our C-suiters last had their training.
All of which is a convoluted way of saying that all the moving parts addressed by anyone in comms have moved on. It’s therefore up to us as practitioners to resist the one-and-done approach. Media training should be something senior professionals replenish regularly throughout their careers.
But meanwhile, you’ll have to excuse me. That daughter of mine has given me a book by Mary Beard for Christmas and I’m looking forward to reading it. It’s about history – apparently, there were Romans.
Guy Clapperton is the owner of Clapperton Media Training.