If you're giving a speech at a press conference, it's part speech. But it's also part media appearance. You've got to really figure out what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish, and then prepare accordingly and rehearse accordingly. Now, even though you are speaking and you're in front of people, and it may be a room with 50 journalists, you do need to realize that, if it's a press conference, it is primarily about the press. It is primarily about the news media, which means it's about the people at home or their offices, watching you on TV or reading about at newspapers and websites.

Now, unless it's such extraordinary news that you're going to be going live all around the world. You do have to think primarily about how will sound bites, bites out of your sound be used for TV, radio, quotes pulled out of your statement and put it into newspapers. So don't lose sight of the fact some people They Oh, well, it's a speech and they spend all their time with rhetorical flourishes. And making it too long, and forgetting about what the real goal is communicating with the news media audiences. So even though it feels like a speech, and there are certain things you need to do that you would do in any speech, good eye contact, for example. It's not a regular speech.

It's not like you're really talking to 1000 people in that room or listening to the whole thing. The news media are listening from a very different standpoint of, they're looking for how to frame this story, how to pull quotes of yours to make the story more interesting. So please, please keep that in mind. We're going to hop right into basic ground rules of preparing your speech right now.