Can You Learn to Become a Media Trainer Online?
It’s a perfectly reasonable question.
There are online courses that will teach you about media training. There are books, videos, podcasts and articles covering everything from interview techniques and messaging to presentation skills and giving feedback. And now, of course, there’s AI.
Ask a good AI tool to create a media training workshop and within seconds you can have an agenda, a set of exercises, some mock interview questions and perhaps even a suggested pricing structure.
So, if you’re an experienced journalist or communications professional thinking about becoming a media trainer, do you actually need specialist training to do it?
The honest answer is no.
You could absolutely take what you already know, supplement it with what you can find online and start putting together a workshop of your own. But I think there’s a more useful question to ask: what are you actually trying to build?
There’s never been more information available
When I started delivering media training around 20 years ago, finding good information about how other people trained spokespeople wasn’t particularly easy.
Today, we have almost the opposite problem.
You can find advice on preparing for interviews, developing messages, handling difficult questions, improving body language, storytelling, presentation skills and almost every other aspect of communication.
Some of it is excellent. Some of it I’d question. And, as I wrote recently about the much-repeated 7-38-55 rule, some communication ‘truths’ have been passed from trainer to trainer for so long that very few people stop to ask whether they were ever true in the first place.
AI has accelerated all of this again. It can help you research a participant or organisation, generate realistic interview scenarios, explore different stakeholder perspectives, stress-test a message and suggest questions a journalist might ask. I use AI myself and I think trainers who ignore it will increasingly be missing opportunities to make their preparation and training better.
But having access to all this information doesn’t necessarily mean knowing what to do with it, and that’s where I think the distinction becomes important.
Knowing media isn’t the same as knowing how to train it
This is particularly relevant for experienced journalists and communications professionals, because you’re probably starting with an enormous amount of useful knowledge.
A journalist may instinctively know when somebody is avoiding a question, where the interesting story sits or when an answer needs challenging. A communications professional may understand messaging, reputation, stakeholder expectations and the realities of preparing senior leaders to represent an organisation.
Those are excellent foundations for becoming a media trainer. But once you’re sitting on the trainer’s side of the table, you need to do something else with that expertise.
During an interview exercise, for example, you’re not simply listening for whether somebody answered the question. You might also be noticing whether they got to their point quickly enough, whether their message was memorable, whether their tone matched what they were saying, what their body language was communicating, when their confidence dipped and what happened when you applied more pressure.
At the same time, you’re making decisions about the training itself. Do you interrupt now or let them finish? Do you push harder or is the participant already sufficiently challenged? Which of the twelve things you’ve noticed will actually be useful to raise? How do you give that feedback without overwhelming them? And what should they do differently when you ask them to try again?
Those are judgement calls, and they’re much harder to learn simply by consuming more information.
A tough interview doesn’t automatically make good media training
This is one of the reasons I feel so strongly about training media trainers properly.
I’ve seen media training reduced to a collection of dos and don’ts followed by a difficult mock interview and a critique afterwards. The participant certainly knows they’ve been challenged. They may even leave impressed by how effectively the trainer played the journalist.
But I’m far more interested in whether they leave knowing how to communicate better.
The interview itself is an exercise. Much of the value comes from what you build around it: the preparation, the messaging, the questioning, the observation, the feedback and the opportunity to apply what has been learned.
A trainer therefore needs more than media knowledge. They need a methodology, and enough understanding of that methodology to adapt it when the person sitting in front of them doesn’t behave quite as expected, which, in my experience, happens rather a lot.
AI is changing where the trainer adds value
I find this one of the most interesting developments in training at the moment.
AI can now produce in seconds some of the things that once took trainers considerable time to create, but I don’t think that makes the trainer less valuable. If anything, it changes where our value sits.
If I can generate 20 interview questions in a few seconds, my expertise isn’t demonstrated by the fact that I have 20 questions. It’s in knowing which five I should use, whether they’re realistic, what order to ask them in, what I’m trying to uncover and when I should abandon them because something more interesting has just happened in the answer.
The same applies to messaging. AI can give somebody ten alternative ways to express an idea, while a good trainer can listen to the person saying them and help work out which one is clear, credible, memorable and actually sounds like them.
And it applies to workshop design too. AI can create a perfectly respectable agenda, but the trainer still needs to notice when an exercise they expected to take 20 minutes has fallen flat, when one participant has stopped contributing or when the senior leader in front of them needs a completely different approach from the one they planned.
Used well, AI is an extraordinarily useful tool for media trainers, which is why it has a place in the way I now teach media training too. What matters is knowing how and when to use it, and where human judgement still needs to take over.
So when might an online course be enough?
I genuinely think there are situations where online learning makes perfect sense.
If you’re curious about media training, want some fresh ideas for an occasional internal workshop or are still deciding whether this is something you want to pursue seriously, an online course can be a very sensible place to start.
You can learn at your own pace, explore the subject without a large investment and begin testing some of the ideas in your own work. There’s no reason everybody interested in media training needs an intensive programme.
If, however, you already have substantial journalism or communications experience and want to turn that expertise into training you can confidently put in front of a senior client, the requirement starts to change. You’re looking for more than information because you’re building something you intend to put in front of real participants and real clients, and you need to know that it works.
From learning about media training to building your own
This is an important distinction in The Media Trainer Method®.
I’m not expecting people to arrive knowing nothing about communication. Quite the opposite. The programme is designed for experienced communications professionals and journalists who already have valuable expertise to draw on.
My job is to help you turn that expertise into a structured, repeatable media training offer.
We look at how to design the workshop, work with different types of participants, develop messaging, teach authenticity and storytelling, lead realistic interview practice and give feedback that genuinely helps somebody improve.
I share the five frameworks I use in my own training, and we explore how the role of the spokesperson is evolving into something broader: the Brand Champion who may need to represent their organisation in a journalist interview one day, and on a panel, podcast, webinar, presentation, live video or social platform the next.
AI runs through that conversation too, both in terms of how you can use it intelligently as a trainer and how you can help the people you train use it well.
And because an excellent workshop isn’t much use as a business if you don’t know what to do with it, we also work on the commercial side, including positioning, pricing, potential clients and how you take your offer to market.
The part that’s difficult to replicate online
Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is having somebody else involved while you build it.
A video about workshop design can give you some useful principles, but it can’t look at your workshop and ask why you’ve structured it that way. You can read plenty about pricing, but that won’t necessarily stop you undervaluing what you’ve created. And you can learn techniques for giving feedback without having someone watch how you give that feedback and help you become better at it.
That’s why The Media Trainer Method combines two intensive days together in a group of no more than six with time to go away and apply what you’ve learned. You then have a dedicated 90-minute development session with me to work on your own workshop and offer, followed by 30 days of support as you continue putting it into practice.
There’s a vast amount you can learn online about becoming a media trainer, and I’d encourage you to use it. But if you’re ready to turn what you already know into a professional training offer you can confidently deliver, price and sell, that’s the point at which I think learning alongside someone who has already done it becomes rather more valuable.