What is media training and do you actually need it?
Most founders need exactly one round of media training, run before the first interview, not a standing program. Media training is the prep your agency does before you go on the record: a brief on the reporter and the angle they are chasing, a rehearsal of your key messages, and a dry run of the questions you hope nobody asks. If an agency books interviews for you, this prep should come with the booking. Standalone workshops from specialist trainers run a few thousand dollars a session, and at the early stage you rarely need one.
You do need the prep itself, because the interview is the one piece of PR you cannot delegate. The agency lands the booking and handles everything around it, but your name carries the quote. Reporters want the founder who decided to build the thing, speaking in plain words. In Edelman's trust research, CEOs rank below technical experts and even ordinary employees as a believable source about their own company, so a founder cannot coast on the title and a scripted interview only deepens the doubt. Training that tries to script you makes you sound worse without making you any safer. Good training sharpens your judgment in the moment.
Judge the prep by what it hands you:
- A reporter read - what this person actually covers, so you know the likely angle before you sit down.
- Your messages, out loud - the three to five points you want quoted, tested until they sound like you. The messages themselves come from the messaging work, covered in the messaging-and-positioning page.
- The hard questions - the down round, the layoffs, the competitor, rehearsed cold.
- The on-the-record rule - the recorder is still running after the notebook closes. Everything counts.
Who to train: whoever the reporter will actually quote, which is usually you. One spokesperson trained well beats three trained badly, so skip the all-hands workshop.
How to tell the hour paid off: you stop reciting and start answering, and you can say "I don't know" or "I can't comment on that" without flinching. That composure is the actual product. It matters most when the news is bad, because one improvised line in a hard interview can undo months of careful coverage.