Year: 2012. When I made the jump from BBC to crisis communications.
15 years producing undercover investigations for programmes like Watchdog taught me how journalists think, how they work and what they’re looking for when they ask questions.
That’s the foundation of everything I do now. Training spokespeople isn’t about teaching them to dodge questions, it’s about understanding what’s coming and being prepared for it.
The best crisis communicators I work with think like journalists. They know what the story is before the reporter does. They anticipate the follow-up questions. They understand what will get used and what won’t.
That doesn’t come from reading a media training handbook. It comes from knowing how the other side operates.
I’ve now run Mangold Consultancy for over a decade, but this is still where it all started: understanding crisis communication from the journalist’s perspective first.
If you’d like your spokespeople to think the way journalists do, not just prepare for them, get in touch to find out how our media training works, or learn more about the team behind Mangold Consultancy.
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