Interview
Suitable for:
All types of organisations
What is it?
An interview is a conversation between someone from your organisation, or an expert that you are working with during the campaign, and a journalist.
Benefits
- An interview gives you the chance to present your campaign to the media directly, to help sell it and bring it to life.
Limitations
- There is no guarantee that the journalist will ask easy questions. Be prepared for any questions they may ask.
Contacting a journalist
- When you run a campaign you will probably be asked by journalists to give an interview.
- Equally you may also ask journalists if they are interested in interviewing the campaign spokesman or a specialist.
How to prepare
- Find a journalist that is interested in Occupational Health & Safety topics:
- Do the research on radio/TV programmes, newspaper Health & work sections – who runs them?
- Look at articles published to find who is writing on your campaign topic and who might be interested in your campaign.
- If you find a journalist, ask them if they have particular issues they would like to discuss and make sure you do your homework on these issues.
- Do some research on the journalist and the publication:
- What kind of media is it?
- What is their reporting style?
- Are they serious and balanced reporters, or are they aggressive and 'scoop' driven?
- Try to foresee the questions and prepare a list of questions and answers.
- Prepare the most important hard data that may be useful during the interview.
Running the interview
- Don’t forget you are driving the interview:
- You should always anticipate what the journalist will want to ask you, and be prepared with some good answers.
- Also know what key points you want to get across.
