Media Cooperation and the Interview
Media cooperation is a suggestion for media relations. Depending on the type of the services or products you offer and the resources you have at your disposal, propose the media to cooperate. These proposals can come in various forms:
Introduce your products using your media resources and pay a fee to media in return.
If you are a service provider or you have a product to offer, you can offer free-of-charge services to media, and media can prepare a report of your product or introduce it to wider yet right audience in return. These terms depend on your business. For example, a restauranter invites media and offers free food so the media would write a report (or review) about the restaurant's food. In this case, both parties will reap the benefits from this offer.
If you have a common target market, hold an event together. Look for common goals and common market with media and start a cooperation accordingly. For instance, offer cooperation to a newspaper which is a form of hypermedia. They may charge you 10 instead of 50 thousand dollars and cooperate with you.
You can have joint investments in form of projects.
It is always interesting for media to interview business owners and managers.
In the process of establishing relations with media, set the stage for your interview.
Based on types of questions that would probably be asked in the interview with media, prepare an answer script and deliver it. You can even ask them to send you the questions as an audio file so you can exactly find out about the tone of each question.
If you convince a medium and a reporter that you attribute importance to their demands and respect them, you can be confident that your presence on media will increase and you will be in the contact list of that medium.
Be ready for the interview and try and answer every unplanned question properly.
If you demand the interviewing medium to send you a copy of interview for editing before publishing it, you will receive the coup de grace to your bilateral relation. While trust must be mutual and the material must be coordinated in a way that it would be publishable from the beginning, it is media which holds the power. So, ensure you see the material before it is released by the media.