The members of the press are busy people and they don’t always arrive for appointments on time, God bless them. Any given day could consist of a press conference, editorial meetings, interviews, research, launch events and the unforgiving deadlines of print media or the relentless deadlines of online media.

As a PR person its important to remain cool, calm and collected when sitting with your spokesperson or spokespeople and waiting for your journalist to arrive. You know they were confirmed by phone or email on the morning of or afternoon before the briefing.

Here are some things that PRs can do to fill the time when waiting for a journalist to arrive for a briefing. I am assuming that the executive briefing has been completed and the two or more of you are literally sitting in room waiting for the journalist to arrive.

1. Re-cap over the key messages for the briefing. Ask your spokespeople to repeat – succinctly – the key messages that you want to convey in the briefing.
2. Role play the journalist for five minutes. Ask your spokesperson a red flag question and see how they respond. Advise them on how they might improve the response – if possible.
3. Ask your spokespeople which questions they don’t want to be asked and work with them to develop the appropriate response.
4. Talk about your industry. Use the time as an opportunity to ask intelligent questions about your client’s industry sector and current issues and trends.  Demonstrate your understanding of the industry and your opinions.
5. Provide some insight and information about the journalist that they are about to meet. What have they written about lately, where are they coming from (you may know that they are a specific event). This is a good way to provide your spokesperson with some ice breakers if they have not met the journo before.
6. Put a call into the journalist or his co-workers to try and find out their ETA.
7. Highlight some recent team successes. Talk about something that has gone well recently and provide some suggestions on how you might extend or repeat the success.
8. Remind your spokesperson that the journalist will likely ask if there is anything they want to add at the very end of the questions and provide some suggestions on strong answers, incorporating the key message.
9. Work with your spokesperson to develop some analogies that help bring the story to life or try to tease out some examples (i.e. customer stories) that they can build into their answers to illustrate a point.
10. Ask your spokesperson to explain something about their business that you have never understood.
11. Get Personal. People love to talk about themselves. Use this time as an opportunity to find out more about your spokesperson, their family, interest, hobbies, background.

You’re in trouble if you find that you’ve used up all of these and the journalist still hasn’t arrived. You’ve obviously been trying to reach your journalist throughout this process via text, SMS, email.

Next step:

Apologise on behalf of the journalist and provide a deadline when you will get back to the spokesperson to re-schedule the meeting. Apologise for wasting their time but highlight the fact that you’ve made use of the time and the fact that they are fully prepared for the re-scheduled briefing.

Follow up and demonstrate how you have put the insights and information provided by your spokesperson to good use.

Tags: briefing, interviews, journalists, PR, preparation, Public Relations, punctuality, relationships