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This story is part of our CSC 360 package for August 2023, to view more stories, click here.
Pictured above: JMU Director of Communications Chris Brooks with quarterback Todd Centeio before he did a TV interview on field following a comeback win in 2022.
Rate yourself: How do your media interview procedures stack up?
by Beau White – College Sports Communicators, Director of Creative Services
“Technological advances have helped our communications department a great deal at JMU, to the extent of saving hours a week on interviews alone ... I’m very happy with the route our department has taken in recent years, especially in a time where mental health and trying to balance home and work life are extremely important. We have great support from the top down in our administration, and they give us the resources to be a successful team.” - Chris Brooks, JMU Director of Athletics Communications
If you are among the fortunate to work with local or national media to help tell the stories of your student-athletes, coaches and teams, how would you rate your experience doing that task?
Is it easy or inconvenient? Are you protecting the privacy of your people? Are you able to fulfill media requests quickly? Do you have a readily available record of your media interviews? Are you spending a lot of time worrying about your spokespeople showing up for an interview?
When I did this type of work on campus it was inconvenient, we sometimes had to give out personal phone numbers, it was slow, I often had to deal with student-athletes or coaches who felt like they were misquoted, and it was constant stress trying to track people down.
My least favorite thing when I was an athletics communications director on campus, by far, was handing my phone to a football player after practice so they could talk to out-of-town media, only for them to hand it back sopping wet from sweat. Gross.
This process played out often well into the evening — long after I would have rather been home with my family, at a time when the player had things they would rather do, and certainly not under the most ideal circumstances for the media member trying to do a meaningful feature story.
In 2023 the technology exists to alleviate all these problems but how many of us are taking advantage of it? Not many, it seems.
So much has changed making it even harder. The media cycle is even more 24/7 with the most common deadline being ‘now.’ Our phones are smarter and more powerful allowing us to tell stories wherever we are in the world. Fake news and AI have created even more trust issues. Covid has changed the way we work in general and, yeah, don’t forget the germs we’re passing around when we hand our phones over. Do you want to be the person to get your quarterback sick?
Members like
Chris Brooks, director of athletics communications at James Madison, and
Tom Satkowiak, associate AD of strategic communications at Tennessee, are among the trailblazers elevating their work in this area through technology.
“Technological advances have helped our communications department a great deal at JMU, to the extent of saving hours a week on interviews alone,” Brooks said. “With Blinder, we can set up a number of calls in advance, players and coaches can do the interviews from anywhere and don’t need to meet us at a specific location just to hand them our devices. It automatically records the call, which benefits media members. Most importantly, the media and our teams can connect directly without having to give out any personal cell phone numbers to the media.
“Zoom is still a nice tool to use, especially when out-of-town TV stations conduct interviews with our coaches and players,” Brooks added. “We also use it for both the Sun Belt Conference coaches teleconference and our TV teleconference prior to each football game. Interviews and conversations done over video tend to provide more context to aid media members and broadcast personnel for stories or game preparation. Blinder also offers a video chat function that we plan to use when needed this coming year.
“I’m very happy with the route our department has taken in recent years, especially in a time where mental health and trying to balance home and work life are extremely important. We have great support from the top down in our administration, and they give us the resources to be a successful team.”
We have a tremendous duty to promote our student-athletes, coaches, teams and athletics departments in the fast-changing NIL era, while also protecting the people and brands entrusted in our care. When a crisis strikes, we must be prepared to make our spokespeople available quickly.
The scorecard below has been created for you to perform a self-check on your media interview processes. Give yourself one point for each ‘yes.’
How does your media management rate?
1-4: Needs Work
You're rolling the dice regularly and flying blind on many elements of your media management. Headaches and hassles are hovering (and growing).
5-7: OK
Not bad. You're doing some things right but you're also taking shortcuts that are adding challenges to an already challenging situation.
8-10: Great
You're ticking a lot of boxes and taking care of business. But there's probably room to step up in a key area or two.
The scorecard above and the five fundamentals below for improving your media management procedures were created by
Caley Wilson of New Zealand-based
Blinder, who has given us permission to customize his work for the benefit of the CSC membership. You may have met Caley in our exhibit hall in Orlando during #CSCUNITE23.
Caley used to do the job that we all do on our campuses for the New Zealand Rugby League where he managed press interviews for some of the most high-profile athletes in his country. He really knows his stuff, and a growing number of teams on our side of the world agree as he works with Tennessee Athletics, James Madison Athletics, the Mountain West Conference, the Atlanta Falcons and U.S. Women’s Soccer to name a few. CSC uses Blinder to connect with our Academic All-America Team Members of the Year in every sport.
Here's more from Caley on how CSC members can step up their game in the modern media landscape.
5 steps to great media management
1. Safety first
Providing great access to your student-athletes, coaches and administrators is one of the fundamentals of media management. The power of seeing rich stories told and critical information shared is what attracted so many of us to the profession.
The student-athletes and others you represent are in the public eye, doing special things, on huge stages. They operate on a knife edge because their words and actions are among the most scrutinized in all of society. Everything can change in a heartbeat (or Tweet) — do we still say Tweet?
As society has shifted — with 24/7 news expectations, huge advances in mobile phone usage and firepower, and more of us working remotely — media management teams have increasingly realized that they need to not only deliver great access but protect personal privacy. Human beings, as well as stories, need looking after.
A key element of protecting privacy is not circulating personal contact details. Doing so takes some work, though, because many media management teams have inherited systems that haven't prioritized privacy and are broken for modern times.
But the best media managers find ways to provide great access and protect privacy. They also record all their interviews, which means they can keep across everything, act with confidence if there's a dispute, and provide media training. Otherwise, they're flying blind.
Summary — Sharing is caring, but not when it comes to circulating the personal contact details of the student-athletes, coaches and administrators you represent. And, for everyone's peace of mind, record every interview.
2. Keep it simple
A surefire way for a remote interview to start on the wrong foot is for people to have challenges connecting. That ups stress levels, introduces distraction and increases time pressures.
The combination of those factors means there's a good chance your interviewees and the media — or both — will come across well below their best in an interview. That can mean a golden media opportunity turns into something that actually sets you back.
The top media managers know to keep things simple. And that means phone calls are still a big part of their media management mix.
Phone calls are obviously less complex than video interviews because they're a hugely well understood system and they remove the demands of needing to look the part.
That can be a big deal, not just if you're Lady Gaga or a police commissioner not wanting to reveal a place of interest, but for anyone who'd prefer to do an interview from the comfort of their bedroom.
Video interviews bring other benefits — especially around branding — but you need to ensure you're set for simplicity there also, and that both parties know exactly how and when they're connecting (along with how to look good).
The same simplicity message rings true for briefing notes. What are your 3-4 key points? Sort them out and then get them out.
Simplicity also brings the benefit of speed — and speed is increasingly critical in the time-pressured modern media landscape.
Summary — Simplicity is key to getting a lot of things in life right and that certainly rings true for remote interviews, both with your technical setups and your briefings.
3. Align schedules (and expectations)
If a spokesperson thinks they're doing a 5-min interview and a journalist thinks it's a 60-min conversation for a double-page Sunday newspaper spread, there's plenty of room for someone to come across as unreasonable. It's your job to establish the expectations and boundaries in advance. Otherwise, you're inviting trouble.
Another area where trouble can easily emerge is around time zones and daylight savings. That's because the most common time zone people think of when scheduling an interview is: 'My time zone.'
When interview participants are on different sides of a country, or the world, conditions are primed for a time zone error. Remove that by using tools that clarify time alignment between specific time zones on specific dates (which is where daylight savings becomes an extra trip hazard).
Also, when you're working with student-athletes whose number one priority is scoring a touchdown in front of thousands of people on Saturday, it's easy for remote interviews not to be right at the top of their mind. Remind everyone of what's expected of them and when.
Pronunciation of names is another critical area to sort in advance, or at the start, of interviews. We can all feel less love for someone who mauls our name each time they say it. You're in a beautiful position to help by recording your spokespeople saying their names and having that audio as part of your media kit.
And make sure your interviewees knows the correct pronunciation of the name of the person interviewing them and uses it. This isn't 'suck-up' behavior. It's common courtesy and ensures an interview starts on a respectful note.
Summary — Do your homework so everyone is sorted in advance and it's plain sailing on the day.
4. Use your smarts
Let's say you're a college football team. Your coaching staff wouldn't dream of playing a game and not recording it to analyze afterwards so they can find ways to improve.
Media managers have the same opportunity when it comes to interviews. The benefits of recordings include:
- being able to provide tailored media training
- being able to address any misquotes
- enhanced behavior during interviews
- additional content
If you're arranging remote interviews but you don't have a recording of them, you're missing a chance for you and those you represent to get better. But you're also exposing your student-athletes and others to unnecessary risks, especially if the non-recorded words they share will soon headline the front or back pages.
So, record your interviews as standard practice. And take things up a notch by transcribing them, too. Then you've got an easily searchable record of what's been said. That means your archive of interviews is now a powerhouse resource for your organization (which a list of non-recorded interviews in an Excel sheet certainly isn't).
Other ways to smarten up your media management game include using automated interview reminders for all parties and removing the bottleneck that exists around you by ensuring you can simultaneously make any of your student-athletes and others accessible.
Summary — To stay on top of everything, record and transcribe every interview. Knowing what's going on is a key part of your role.
5. Let ‘em shine!
So far we've focused on technical ways to lift your media management. But the human side is where things really come to life.
Everyone has a story to tell. But some people are naturally better at having their stories or key points at their fingertips. Others need a little more encouragement to deliver.
It's the job of a media manager to understand the key storytelling strengths of their interviewees, to identify the 3-4 key points to convey, and also to know the needs of the media platforms they're interacting with. But armed with that information, you then want to give some guidance without overplaying your hand. Everyone wins when the interviewee is informed, relaxed and themselves. So, fill them with confidence rather than rules.
To be super succinct, you want 'clarity' and 'vitality'.
Different industries have different norms when it comes to the involvement of media managers, or publicists, during the actual interview. It's good to have the capability to join a remote interview, as some situations demand extra care, but the best tactic in most instances is to support during the prep phase and then step aside. It's easy for the media manager to be perceived by the other two parties as the 'creep in the corner' if it's felt they don't really need to be there.
Then, to ensure even brighter shining takes place next time around, review the recordings of interviews and give your student-athletes, coaches and administrators feedback. That way you gently keep raising the bar.
Summary — Do your prep work early, so that when it's interview time you can step back and your student-athletes, coaches and administrators can step up and shine.
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