Get Control of Your Media Relations Program

This session will provide public health communicators an unvarnished perspective on how to engage, manage, and survive encounters with today’s working news media more effectively and with purpose. Attendees will learn practical and immediately useful techniques to (1) communicate under pressure, (2) manage every stage of a media encounter from the initial request to the published story, and (3) organize the communications team (regardless of staff count) so it has the time to do more than just react to incoming media requests. The discussion will draw on the advice included in a new guidebook for communicators published by the presenter this spring.  The session includes a copy of the book for each attendee, distributed at the end of the presentation.

Presenter: Robert Johnson, Author of “A Communications Playbook for Public Officials”; Partner, Riester Influence, Washington, D.C.; and Adjunct Professor of Communication, School of Communication, American University, Washington, D.C.