How do you stall a reporter if you don't want to talk to him or her? Well, we need to dig a little deeper here and look at your assumptions are you stalling because you think if you just avoid the reporter, you're not going to have to see the story, chances are, the story is still going to come out. So if you delay the reporter, then they're just going to be angry at you annoyed at you, they'll have more space in the story to write or say horrible things about you or to quote horrible things from other people about you. So if you just stall, it often doesn't work. Now, a reporter can call you and say, Hey, I'm coming over, I've got to talk to you about such and such a matter. It's 10 in the morning, and you can say, hey, I'd love to talk to you.

I'm tied up. What's your deadline today? And they may say, noon, you could say Okay, can you come over at 1115 and they may say that's fine. So now you've given yourself a set. five minute window, but you did it in a way that was transparent. That was helpful to the reporter.

Reporters are human beings Believe it or not. So if you treat them like dirt and just ignore their calls, don't return their calls. They are going to not like you, they are not going to believe you the next time you need them, they're not going to want to do you any favors. So I'm a big fan of don't stall. Why would someone want to stall? Well, trying to figure out what to say.

That's a problem. And that's very difficult if you're trying to brainstorm 2000 questions and come up with three paragraph answers for each one. But if you followed what I advocate in our messaging session, and you have really narrowed your message down to just three points, it shouldn't take you that law. Now, you shouldn't have to do every interview with two seconds notice, but after You've use these principles. Over time, what you'll find is what used to take you a day for messaging, and then took you a half a day and then a couple of hours. Pretty soon you can do it in about 10 minutes and it won't really take you that much time.

So it's fine to start a little bit to come up with great interesting messages that help you and are going to be great for the reporter and the reporters audience. It's not great to stall simply as a tactic because you don't want to do the interview.