A degree of repetition is no bad thing in an interview, and is particularly important to drive the key points home. Remember, if you chat to a print journalist for twenty minutes, he or she is unlikely to use more than a couple of sentences of what you have said in the average article. So if you say twenty things, eighteen of them are likely to be left out. You have no idea what will “make the cut.” By contrast, if you return to your key point two or or three times, it is very clear to the reporter that this is what you think is important. You can help by using phrases like ‘but as I was saying’ or ‘but coming back to my earlier point’. Or, you could use the technique popular when making presentations – “ tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em!” This has to be more subtle in an interview context, but the principle of setting up your ideas at the beginning, then going into more detail, then summing up the conclusions again at the end, can still be very effective. So when a journalist asks their first question, rather than going straight in, you can preface your answer by saying something like “Well I think there are two areas of concern here, the principle of what’s being proposed, and the sheer red tape angle .. ” You have already placed firmly in the reporter’s mind the idea that they should be conveying both these aspects in the finished piece.
(Taken from The M-Factor: media confidence for business leaders and managers by Tom Maddocks)
