Crisis Media Training

Our expert trainers can provide a one-day on-site or live online training on crisis media relations, giving you the skills needed to handle the demands of the 24-hour news cycle and get your message out in a clear, timely, and efficient manner.

Typically, most public education institutions have a press or public information Officer – PIO, or a communication officer. This person usually has a relatively small staff (if any) and is in charge of all of the media releases and press contacts conducted by the department, agency, or school. Sometimes this person is augmented by a designated relief person, but this main PIO, for the most part, handles all daily public information and media issues.

The system works very well for almost all of our contacts with the media. However, it becomes totally inadequate to handle Crisis Media Relations. When a crisis or significant event has occurred such as a fatality or pandemic in your agency, school, or company, all the rules of usual contact with the press seem to change; and we need to go to a configuration that can handle these problems.

In this new 24-hour crisis time of rapid-fire hurried media communication, the typical person handling public information during a major incident can drown very quickly in a sea of media problems. When a crisis occurs in your organization, you need to go into a specific expanded format to handle these media problems. In a time of crisis, the format for media relations must change to handle the following three issues: press briefings times 100, VIP tours, and manning an information room.