Back from a lively session of specialist media training, featuring a no-holds-barred account of my own encounters with the media down the decades.

Highlights included:

  • my disastrous exchange with Peter Fabricius in South Africa on the day Mrs Thatcher resigned my first live broadcast on a global news network – a shared interview on CNN with US super-ambassador Richard Holbrooke. We were perched on a Bosnian hillside talking into a camera listening through an earpiece to the questions coming down the line from CNN in Atlanta
  • my first live broadcast from Sarajevo on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. They promised me that the questions would be purely factual. They lied
  • my live interview on Serbian TV on the evening of 9/11, where I appeared with the Serbian Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic and US Ambassador – all in Serbian
  • the media bombardment following my Warsaw email leak.

Gosh, was I famous for at least seventeen minutes:

D mail 2005

Gazeta 2005

I have worked up some questions that anyone facing an interview (print or TV/radio) might want to consider:

What are the key differences between interviews with print media and interviews with TV/radio?

Differences between TV and radio interviews? Does it matter if they are live or recorded?

How tough should you be in trying to set the “rules” for an interview eg with print journalists?

Is it ever appropriate to ask to see the transcript of an interview before it is published?

What’s the most difficult thing about giving an interview? Any one thing you should really try to avoid?

How do you respond if you start to think that (contrary to your own expectation) the journalist knows quite a lot about something that is very confidential or sensitive to you?

Is it possible to renegotiate the “rules” of an interview during the interview itself?

Should you allow the journalist to use a tape recorder or other recording device?

Should you make clear that you too plan to use a tape recorder or recording device?

Is it always clear when an interview has actually started?

Need the answers? Scared of facing the media? Unsure how to handle the whole business and what technique options you have?

All you need to do is ask. Nicely.