Media training sessions often open with a clip reel showcasing what both a good and bad interview can look like and what's at stake when it goes wrong. The bad example invariably gets the bigger response, and any press interview with Kendall Roy’s character in "Succession" is the perfect illustration of that. Seriously, take your pick—he was consistently defensive, evasive and visibly calculating every word. A masterclass in what not to do, and it rarely fails to get a room's attention.
And yet, for all his car-crash energy, one thing is clear: Kendall knows what he wants to say. Underneath the deflection and the desperate pivots, he clings to a couple of key messages and tries to land them any way he can. That instinct to protect the message, find the line and get out clean is at the heart of how most media training has been built. We trained spokespeople for the soundbite.
In fact, most traditional media training was built around landing the soundbite. Get your message to a tight, quotable sentence, bridge back to it relentlessly, and don’t give the journalist anything they can twist. It works beautifully for a 15-minute Zoom call with a reporter writing a 600-word article.
It fails, sometimes spectacularly, on a 90-minute podcast.
The Format has Changed, but the Training hasn’t Caught up
Just over half of U.S. adults now listen to at least one podcast per week. But the more urgent signal for communications professionals came recently, when research showed YouTube overtaking Reddit as a primary citation source for AI-generated search results. Video and long-form audio content isn’t just where audiences are, it’s increasingly where AI systems go to learn what your spokespeople stand for.
That changes the stakes considerably. A clipped, deflecting answer in a podcast interview doesn’t just frustrate a host with 200,000 listeners. It potentially shapes how AI summarizes your executive’s point of view for years to come.
Yet the vast majority of spokespeople arrive in training sessions armed with three bullet-pointed messages, a set of bridging phrases and a deep instinct to answer and close. Now these are all useful tools, but not the right ones for a format built on open-ended conversation, genuine curiosity and the kind of authentic exchange that audiences can immediately sense is being performed rather than lived.
What Actually Goes Wrong
When soundbite-trained spokespeople appear on long-form podcasts, a few patterns emerge reliably.
The first is bridge overcorrection. Classic broadcast training teaches spokespeople to answer, bridge and communicate and ultimately steer every question back to a key message. In a written interview, this is invisible. On a podcast, it’s obvious within about three exchanges. Hosts notice, audiences notice, and spokespeople end up sounding like politicians. The spokesperson might technically land their messages, but the interview feels transactional, and the credibility effect is the opposite of what was intended.
The second is silence aversion. Broadcast training teaches spokespeople to fill silence, to never let a pause hang in the air and to make the most of your limited time. On a podcast, especially one with a thoughtful host, silence is often an invitation, not a trap. Rushing to fill it cuts off the kind of reflective, nuanced answer that makes for genuinely compelling audio.
The third is the inability to course-correct in real time. A podcast host who senses their guest is being evasive will probe, rephrase and come back. Spokespeople who’ve only been trained in defensive techniques often don’t know how to acknowledge a flawed answer and reset naturally. The result is escalating awkwardness that an editing suite can’t always fix or perhaps don’t want to fix. We all remember the painful story about Intuit’s chief communications officer asking The Verge to delete part of a Decoder podcast episode and then it becoming a fully blown PR story on its own. Not somewhere any comms professional wants to be.
What New Media Training Actually Looks Like
The shift in modern training practice goes beyond simply treating podcasts like a longer version of a broadcast interview but instead treating it as a fundamentally different skill set.
Story architecture over message discipline. The goal isn’t to abandon key messages, but instead build them into narratives that earn their place in the conversation. This is called “story mapping” where you identify three or four genuine stories from a spokespersons experience that each carry a core message organically. The message doesn’t arrive like a press release; it arrives like a conclusion the listener reaches alongside the speaker. An executive who stops leading with product stats and instead opens with a story about the moment a company knew it was solving a real problem delivers an identical message with completely different impact.
Listening as a performance skill. The best podcast guests respond to what’s actually being asked, not to the version of the question they prepared for. Effective media training today includes active listening exercises, such as mock interviews where the ‘journalist’ deliberately pivots away from the pre-briefed territory, and coaching spokespeople on how to follow up genuinely while still finding their way back to substance. It’s closer to improv training than traditional media prep.
Preparing for the host, not just the topic. In traditional media training, we teach spokespeople to research the journalist and the publication. For podcasts, that’s not nearly enough. Listening to at least three full episodes before a training session—not to find the questions, but to understand the host’s worldview—has become a standard preparation step. What do they get excited about? Where do they push back? What kind of tangent do they love? A host who’s deeply interested in the human psychology behind business decisions needs a completely different preparation than one who wants to interrogate your competitive strategy. Understanding the difference is the work.
Naturalness as a strategic asset. This is perhaps the hardest mindset shift. Traditional training optimizes for control. New media training has to optimize for authenticity, which means getting comfortable with imperfection. Correcting yourself mid-sentence isn’t a mistake on a podcast; it’s a signal of genuine thinking. Saying ‘I’m not sure, but here’s how I’d think about it’ builds trust with an audience far more reliably than a polished non-answer. Role-playing real-time resets in media training sessions is now crucial so that the moment feels natural rather than panicked.
The Bigger Picture
The fast, transactional, soundbite-driven media environment that most training was built around isn’t disappearing. But it’s no longer the only game in town, and for many executives and subject matter experts, it’s no longer even the most important one.
Long-form conversations are where reputations are built slowly and credibly. They’re where complex ideas actually land, and increasingly, they’re where LLMs are drawing their conclusions about what a person or a company believes and represents.
The spokespeople who are going to win in this environment aren’t the ones with the tightest three-point message architecture. They’re the ones who’ve learned to tell a real story, to listen with genuine curiosity and to trust that being themselves—clearly, confidently, and with a point of view—is enough.
Christine Reilly is a Senior Communications Strategist. She offers media training programs for executives across traditional and new media formats.