Connections

You’re a Teen Challenge director who suddenly finds your way blocked and staring at the business end of a reporter’s microphone.  You are about to experience what is called in the media industry the “Ambush” interview.  The story about your Teen Challenge ministry will probably be devoid of any positive spin.

However, if you understand what a reporter needs and looks for in a story, you can word your answers, also called sound bites, to their questions in a way that gives the best possible chance that at least one of your sound bites will be included and in the context you desire when the story on your center goes public.

The story’s drama is the one thing that every reporter looks for in the story being investigated.  Drama is what makes a story worth reading.  Drama is often displayed as conflict or tension between people or organizations.  The reporter that ambushes you has been assigned a story on your Teen Challenge ministry that has conflict and tension in it and he needs to quickly get it into a story line before the assigned deadline.  Knowing this, you can word your sound bites in a way that both answers the questions surrounding the conflict or tension fueling the story and perhaps leave a more positive image of your ministry within the context of the story.

To illustrate the kind of response I’m talking about, read the questions that were actually put to a Teen Challenge director one morning by a reporter and the sound bite that he provided in his response:

Reporter: People come to your Teen Challenge for help with addiction and they’re being made to work 30, 40 and even more hours a week (conflict), being paid nothing (conflict) and told that if they leave the program early they will go to hell (conflict).  How is this justified when you say that you’re here to help people (tension created by the conflict)?

TC Director: “How do our work assignments HELP these people? Addiction DESTROYS a good well-rounded work ethic … (addressing the conflict).”

The answer was longer, but this portion of the director’s answer was the sound bite that was used by the reporter in his story.  The reporter’s need to weave the drama into the story line was met when the conflict was described between drug addiction and how it contributes to the destruction of a good work ethic.

Notice also that the director didn’t respond to every aspect of the question in his answer. In the days that followed after the story went public, many supporters who saw the story commented on how they appreciated that a good work program was part of the local Teen Challenge ministry.  The director now had time to more fully explain how the work experience fit in the overall program and not spend the next several days trying to do damage control.

There is so much more that can be learned about how to understand and respond well to such interviews. If you would like to do further reading on this, I recommend the following books with the understanding that these authors did not write for a Christian audience but the professional business audience:

Steward, Sally. Media Training 101, A Guide to Meeting the Press. Wiley & Sons, Inc.  Boboken, New Jersey, 2004

Walker, TJ, Media Training A-Z, A Complete Guide to Controlling Your Image, Message, & Sound Bites.  Media Training World Wide, 2005

Weissman, Jerry, In the Line of Fire, How to Handle Tough Questions … When it Counts. Pearson Education, Inc. New Jersey, 2005