MEDIA TRAINING SAYS "OFF THE RECORD" A NO-NO WITH NEWS MEDIA

I tell all my media training courses that going off-the-record with journalists is possibly the dumbest thing you can do with the news media. Journalists are trained to repeat and report what they’re told so why anyone in their right mind would given them a heap of information and then ask them to NOT report it is beyond me. You frustrate any journalist worth his/her salt - they can’t broadcast or publish your information and it’s therefore not good for their career. You then run a huge risk that they will reconsider their agreement with you once they leave your presence and might go ahead and publish the information anyway.

I remember seeing a story on the front page of a major newspaper once that said, among other things, “in an off-the-record comment, Mr Jones said...blah,blah, blah.” The other risk you run is that journalists socialise with other journalists and they might run your off-the-record comments by a friend who is not bound by any agreement with you. Big Risk.

Just think about these examples to see what a risk it really is.

1. Senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama, Samantha Power, was forced to resign after describing Hilary Clinton as a monster in an “off-the-record” comment to The Scotsman newspaper. The Harvard Professor and foreign affairs specialist had been likely to become Foreign Affairs Secretary if Obama wins the Presidency - and if she hadn’t tripped up giving off-the-record comments to the media.

2. Xu Lejiang, the Chairman of leading Chinese steel company, Baosteel, learnt a valuable lesson on how to take on the world’s biggest mining companies; don’t share your thought bubbles with journalists in elevators. What did Xu think of unsourced reports that Baosteel would lead a steel-making consortium …to snatch Rio Tinto from BHP Billiton? “It’s very likely”, he told the journalist. The journo, Li Qingyu, wasn’t carrying a tape recorder but says he has no doubt he quoted Xu correctly and in context. Chinese officials were furious with Xu’s quoted comments.

3. In 2003, one of the main Bali bombing suspects, Idris, was arrested and the head of the investigation team, General Pastika, said police regretted that three other suspects might have slipped away when news of Idris’s arrest leaked out. Detik.com said Indonesia’s national Police Chief, General Bachtiar, told a group of editors of Idris’s arrest although reporters were told the information was “off-the-record”.

If you need to tell a journalist some background information, do it as a background briefing. This is similar to an off-the-record comment but differs in that the journalist can publish/broadcast the information but is not allowed to identify you or your organization. That leads to stories with phrases like “reliable sources said”, “sources close to the ? industry told me that…” etc etc. I’ve never heard of such agreements being broken (unlike the dreaded off-the-record comment) because the journalist is not frustrated and his/her career is not affected. You win - they win, which in the news media is a good result.

The author has spent the past 22 years media training thousands of executives and one of his key messages to them has been to not use off-the-record comments. He always advises a background briefing instead. More details of Graham Kelly’s media training are at or his latest media training book, Managing the Media 3rd Edition at .