Getting a journalist interested is genuinely hard work — research, pitching, relationship-building, timing. So it’s a strange, common mistake that founders often walk into the interview itself with zero preparation, treating the hardest part of earned media as an afterthought to the easiest.
The biggest risk isn’t saying something wrong. It’s saying something unclear, and letting the journalist fill in the gap with their own interpretation, which may not match what the founder actually meant. A founder who rambles through five different points without a clear throughline gives a reporter no obvious quote to use — so the reporter picks whichever line sounded most quotable in the moment, regardless of whether it was the founder’s main point.
Media training, done properly, isn’t about coaching someone to sound rehearsed or evasive. It’s about identifying the two or three messages that actually matter for this specific story, and practicing saying them clearly and concisely enough that they survive being cut down to a fifteen-second soundbite or a single pull quote.
It also means preparing for the questions a founder doesn’t want to answer, not just the ones they do. A reporter who asks about a competitor, a setback, or a controversial decision isn’t trying to trap anyone — they’re doing their job. A founder who freezes or gets defensive in that moment creates a worse story than one who answers directly and moves on.
The bridge technique is one of the simplest tools here: acknowledging the question honestly, then pivoting to the message that actually matters. “That’s a fair question, and here’s how we’re thinking about it” works far better than dodging or over-explaining.
Founders who get real coverage regularly — not just once — tend to be the ones who treat every interview as a skill to practice, not a one-time performance to survive. The story a journalist writes is shaped as much by how clearly the founder communicated as by the facts of the story itself.
