How to get your spokesperson on talk radio – Robbie Hawkins’ PR tips

Alessia Horwich (00:08):

Welcome to On the Rox, a podcast from Roxhill Media that asks some of the best journalists in the UK their solutions to the kind of dilemmas that face PRs every day. At Roxhill we know that there’s not a one size fits all way of communicating with journalists. Instead of trying to tell you how to do your job, we are going direct to the writers in the newsroom for their advice on how best to communicate your stories to them. My name is Alessia Horwich. I’m a former Sunday Times journalist now director of the creative content and brand team. Today we’re going to be talking about how to pitch reactive comment to radio with Robbie Hawkins. Robbie is now a senior journalist at Newsnight, but before he was a senior producer at LBC for many years. Hi Robbie, how are you?

Robbie Hawkins (00:52):

Hi, very well, thank you. Thanks for having me in.

Alessia Horwich (00:54):

You’re very welcome. Did you always want to be a journalist?

Robbie Hawkins (00:56):

Yes and no. I always had a bit of an idea in my head that maybe something that I would like to do. I was very into politics when I was a teenager. I remember my local MP coming into school to sort of speak to the students thinking he was going to get quite an easy ride and I ended up asking about various things to do with the expenses scandal that he’d been involved in and he basically said to me, have you ever thought about being a journalist? And that sort of planted the seed a little bit. Then I think, and then when I went off to university, I went and did a politics and history degree at university, got very into student radio but doing very much the music side, I completely threw myself into that. It was by far the highlight of my university experience but didn’t do a great job of while I was at university of particularly thinking about what I wanted to do afterwards and I remember literally doing my last show on the student radio station and thinking, oh, I haven’t got a radio show anymore. I’ll apply for work experience a radio station and applied for the BBC’s work experience scheme, applied for basically as many options as I could that I could see a way of actually being able to go and be in the place to do them. And the first one that came back luckily was BBC in Northampton, which is where I’m from and they offered me a week’s work experience. I remember turning up on the first day wearing a tie and everyone thinking I was incredibly overdressed, but I think my enthusiasm really sort of shone through. A big thing that we always do when we have work experience people is getting them out of the studio and getting ’em out and about and doing stuff. You can really see where people have the enthusiasm and the confidence to go and put themselves forward and they sent me out to go and get a thing called a Vox pop, which is when you go and ask people what’d you make of this story? And then you come back in and then you’d edit together what you’ve got and put it together and it would be used across the broadcast if it was any good. Quite often you have people coming in and it’s just a series of people saying, yes, I do think that’s good,

Robbie Hawkins (02:51):

And it can really highlight when someone’s actually thought about what they’re doing. I thankfully had done little bit of vox popping at university with my student radio station, so I had a bit of an idea of what I needed to do. Came back impressed them and they ended up getting me doing a lot of them and yeah, end of my week of work experience, loved it, but was going off to do a development project thing in Ghana for three months and one of the great things that I’d done while I was in Ghana was I’ve been very lucky in that the team leader that we had from the uk, she was also a filmmaker. So alongside doing all of the development work we’ve been doing, we together made a series of sort of short films about the community and I just remember walking through essentially the Ghanaian jungle while this farmer showed me all of these different things that he was growing in the bush and thinking, yeah, I think this is pretty cool actually, maybe I should pursue that storytelling journalism side.

Robbie Hawkins (03:51):

It was all prepared in my final week to be like, right, going to get back, I’m going to get back in touch with BBC Northampton and say, had a great time, can I come in again? Can I come and make tea? Is there anything you need? Just show that I was keen. My mum got in touch with me and they’d got in touch with her basically saying We need someone to work over Christmas and essentially got back to the UK on the 23rd of December, went straight from the airport to the radio station for some sort of basic training and then had my first paid day in broadcasting in journalism on Christmas day, two days after I got back from Ghana.

Robbie Hawkins (04:27):

Where I hadn’t used a computer for three months. I was there for 18 months and then basically got to a point where I wanted to cover bigger news stories. Let’s maybe challenge myself a little bit and basically the first job I applied for, I managed to get, and it was at BBC Radio London, it was amazing. I was there producing the early breakfast programme. I was in lots of ways, incredibly lucky in quite an unfortunate way in that my first five weeks there on the job we had three terror attacks. We had the Grenfell Tower fire and we had the 2017 general election result and I was very much on my own having to deal with these massive news stories. It was an amazing experience that sort of just gave me this amazing insight and amazing experience so quickly on, because I mean my first 18 months at BBC Northampton, we’d had Trump’s first election, we’d had Brexit. I remember one of the old hacks that had been in the newsroom for 30 years turning to me and just saying, you’ve had more news to me in 18 months than I’ve had in 10 years. Make the most of it.

Alessia Horwich (05:33):

It feels nonstop though now these days there’s news and news and news. Then you went to LBC. Well, what does a day look like as a senior producer on a radio station? So for the PRs to understand what you are doing.

Robbie Hawkins (05:44):

For a station like LBC, which is all live, it’s not prerecorded, almost all of it is on the day. We do some forward planning, but a lot of it is literally getting in the morning we’ll have an editorial meeting across the station and then there’ll be me. Also, a thing that people don’t always realise is how small our teams are. So at LBC I was the senior producer essentially programme editor, but it was me, another producer, the presenter, it was us three that were making the programme most of the time. And then when we were on air, there’s an assistant producer assisting with us and then a technical team. Obviously LBC is a phone in station, so it’s not just about what is the big story, it’s also about what’s the big story that people want to talk about.

Robbie Hawkins (06:27):

And it’s thinking about, right, this is a story that we must talk about. How are we going to angle this? What’s the question that we’re going to ask people? It’s the big thing we spend a lot of time thinking about. So this was when I was producing drive time, which is on at four, so it gets about half 11. We’d have a bit of an idea about what we want to do with a programme. We have a rough running order and it’s then a matter of bidding, getting out there, finding people to comment on this. Sometimes people have come to us, sometimes you’ve got someone who you’ve spoken to in the past that you can go back to who’s well suited for it, but a lot of it is trying to find the perfect voice, trying to find someone who is both going to explain what the story is, give us an opinion on the story, and then if we can ideally find a way of moving the story on as well. And that sort of day-to-day is the main structure.

Alessia Horwich (07:15):

I mean it strikes me that a lot of the stuff you’ve just said isn’t just applicable for LBC,

Robbie Hawkins (07:19):

No

Alessia Horwich (07:19):

especially the way that you’re talking about approaching a new story,

Robbie Hawkins (07:21):

For sure

Alessia Horwich (07:21):

Those three magic things and actually thinking about it in terms of what is the question that people are going to be asking and how do we answer that? That’s relevant for all radio, isn’t it?

Robbie Hawkins (07:32):

Yeah, for sure.

Alessia Horwich (07:32):

Why is reactive comments so important to radio? Why do you need voices on radio?

Robbie Hawkins (07:36):

I think the brilliant thing about radio is that it is instant and it has that instant connection with people. We’ve all been there in a situation where we’ve heard a bit of news is happening and we turn on the radio to find out more about it. And when you’re in a studio, a story is breaking. If you are able to respond to it as quickly as possible, you’re winning. That’s what you’re doing it for. So that reactive comment is so helpful. If we know that this person who knows a lot about the subject, who is well briefed, who is across the story is able to come on pretty quick notice and both inform our presenter about it and inform our audience about it and add that nuance, maybe help us explain why this is so important or if there’s particular things that particular consequences or particular elements that we should be aware of that can be incredibly helpful because ultimately we as journalists, we don’t know everything. That’s what these guests are there for. They’re to help us understand that and then we can work together in order to make that more effective and help our audience understand it as a result.

Alessia Horwich (08:44):

What’s your experience of PRs in this scenario then? You’ve just made a rye face. Can they be brilliant and what’s the other end of the scale?

Robbie Hawkins (08:55):

They can definitely, definitely be brilliant. I’ve worked with some brilliant PRs and I think when you have a PR that is on top of the brief completely understands what they’re doing, is thinking about how to get the best out of the person they’re putting forward, the person they’re working with, it can be brilliant. It can also be less brilliant. Say if it’s reactive comment. The number of times I have been in the LBC newsroom and someone has rang in saying, oh, this thing that’s just broken, I’ve got a really interesting angle on this. It might be of interest to James O’Brien and anyone who’s listened to James O’Brien’s programme will know that James O’Brien doesn’t really speak to guests and if he does speak to guests, it’s probably not someone that a PR is pitching.

Robbie Hawkins (09:35):

So it’s just one of those things that I can see why people, they see LBC, they think that’s the big presenter, let’s pitch it to them, but you’ve really got to know the audience that you’re pitching it to. If the minute I hear get a call from someone saying, I’ve got something that I think might work for James, I switch off, I think, well, you don’t understand what James O’Brien is actually looking for. You clearly haven’t even listened to the programme. And that can be massively unhelpful and it actually makes it unhelpful for those PRs that are really across across it who are really aware of the different elements and how different programmes might look for different things.

Alessia Horwich (10:13):

We just were speaking to a journalist in the FT recently and he said that he can tell from the structure of an email whether it’s going to be a go or not. I mean is that something similar for you? Is there a tell immediately when you know it’s not going to work?

Robbie Hawkins (10:27):

Oh, almost immediately. I mean if I can’t understand the first sentence of the email, then yeah, it won’t work. So the amount of emails that I get and I quite repeatedly go back to him saying, I dunno why I’m on your mailing list. This is so irrelevant to anything I’m covering. Or I will go back to him and say, thanks for this. I don’t understand any of it. Can you make it understandable for people who aren’t experts in this particular industry?

Alessia Horwich (10:52):

Ok.

Robbie Hawkins (10:52):

So I think even in that first sentence, you can really make it very clear. The way that we always say to guests is explain things is if you’re explaining it to someone in the pub, if you’re explaining this story to your mum, if you are pitching a story as a PR, imagine you were pitching it to someone whose knowledge is very, very base level, both because sometimes people do know more about it, but also I get 400 odd emails a day. A lot of them are from PRs. I don’t have time to go through and properly sit down and think, right, what’s this here? That would be the main thing is just making it really clear from the off what it is and you can really tell straight away when someone’s taking the care to do that.

Alessia Horwich (11:44):

Okay. So if an email hits your inbox and it is the perfect email, what’s it look like? I mean jargon free. Is it very short?

Robbie Hawkins (11:51):

Yeah, pretty short to the point, or at least have almost a summary at the top. I think you want a quick layout of the story and the relevance of the guest to that story. If you can give us a comment, just the sort of top line. I’m not saying we need to know every part of the interview that’s coming on, but the angle that you are coming from is always really helpful. But then it’s also the name of the guest, the title, that sort of thing.

Alessia Horwich (12:16):

Do you need links to social profiles? That kind of studd?

Robbie Hawkins (12:18):

Yeah and that can really help. That is something that we look at now, radio isn’t just about audio now, it’s very much radio plus big thing that where LBC’s success has come from is through their digital output. We actively would look at guests sometimes and we’d think, well, this person’s got more of a following than that person. We’re trying to grow our audience. If we put a post up, it gets tagged, they reshare it, it’s going to help our audience grow. And that sort of thing is definitely, definitely worth keeping in mind when you do that. And similarly with titles as well. Sometimes I get a pitch and one person might sound really interesting, very engaging, but their title is such a mouthful that I don’t know how almost we’re going to get it on air or it’s going to take half the interview just explaining why they’re relevant. So sometimes it’s just a matter of saying rather than this person, this director of such and such, you can say this person is an expert in this from such and such. And we see it the same with universities. We see it with private companies sometimes you just want to say, okay, this person’s an expert in cybersecurity from this place and that’s all you need to do. All our listeners are going to hear

Alessia Horwich (13:25):

Yeah

Robbie Hawkins (13:26):

If it takes 10 sentences to explain who this person is and if it’s got on air by that point, then the listeners aren’t going to get much out of it either.

Alessia Horwich (13:35):

Are there types of people that you’re more keen to speak to?

Robbie Hawkins (13:38):

The key thing is always someone who’s going to say something interesting. We have to make it engaging. And someone might have the most amazing cv, they could be on paper, the most amazing experienced person who’s been in the heart of things, but if they’re not an engaging talker, then the interview isn’t going to get the time it deserves.

Alessia Horwich (14:02):

Can you know that in advance? Would you speak to them on the phone?

Robbie Hawkins (14:05):

Yeah, if we can. So in commercial you don’t always get as much time as you would like to properly go through a briefing call. But a good producer, if they have concerns around it or whatever, then maybe they would have a chat with them before. Sometimes it’s literally just saying, can we get a quick top line, couple of sentences that can be really helpful. So if you have a guest who is available to have a quick briefing chat beforehand, that’s really, really helpful and a good producer should really be checking that over. But actually a really helpful thing that PRs can do, and I know that some PRs do do this, is keep in mind of the range of voices that they might have, who are the more interesting ones and maybe if they’re not that interesting, maybe just don’t pitch them that much. You’ll have an endless list of slots you are needing to fill. You don’t have time to do a briefing chat with everyone. You really, really need to be able to rely on this PR that’s pitching it. And I know that there are some PRs that I have worked with that I can call up and say, can you point me in the direction of so-and-so? If a certain PR pitches to me, I know that I can generally rely on them so they’re not going to make those things. So that’s like I’d say is rule one.

Alessia Horwich (15:16):

I guess it works in the other way though as well. If a PR pitch is someone and they’re not good.

Robbie Hawkins (15:19):

Yeah, exactly. For sure. And it can be either someone’s not good or any number of technical issues. A lot of the basic things that haven’t been done.

Alessia Horwich (15:27):

Like?

Robbie Hawkins (15:29):

Phone line not being good enough quality, the amount of times I will get in touch with a PR or respond to a PR and say, we would like to do this in video, we try and visualise all of our interviews. This is the thing that people don’t realise now as well. The amount of times a guest joins the meeting and we’ll say, oh, can you turn your camera on please? And they say, I was told this was a radio interview and it’s like, it is a radio interview, but we’d still like you on camera because, and we will make this poinnt to PRs a lot of the time we’ll say we would like them in camera. We generally, if we’re say doing this over Zoom, the reason we’re doing we want the video, there are other ways that we can do things if we’re just after the audio.

Robbie Hawkins (16:09):

So it’s little things like that, but it’s also the guest being available, actually joining the zoom at the right time, a big one that is almost always basically I will stop working with someone afterwards is when I have a guest come on and we ask them a question and they say, oh no, I don’t want to talk about that. And it’s like I completely understand that people have their guidelines, they have their areas that they don’t want to talk about, but that’s what the PRs job is there to do and it’s what the producer’s job is there to do. I know am I’m going to get a load of stick from a presenter if they think they’ve got this great question that they’re really interested in hearing about and the guest on the radio says, don’t want to talk about it. This is the conversation that the producer and the PR should be having beforehand. If there are red lines of stuff that you don’t want to talk about, that’s fine. We get it. There are things sometimes that we don’t want to talk about either and then at least we can go into that situation informed and aware. And it might be that we really want to talk about that subject and it means that, sorry, we’re not going to do the interview today.

Alessia Horwich (17:11):

Yeah.

Robbie Hawkins (17:11):

Good PRs will quite often say, this might not seem particularly relevant, but just to make you’re aware, we’re in talks about a commercial interest at the moment. I don’t expect it’s going to come up, but just to make you aware, can we try and avoid talking about it? And normally it’s absolutely fine because as the PR said, it probably wasn’t going to come up anyway, but it’s just good to be aware and if these basic things haven’t been covered, you’re a bit like, well, am I going to get caught out by this person again in the future?

Alessia Horwich (17:36):

Yeah. What about sort of like a CEO versus somebody who works in a factory floor? What works better?

Robbie Hawkins (17:42):

I mean it really varies and it really depends on the story. If someone came to me and said, oh, we’ve got the CEO of Barclays, I’d be like, yeah, great, cool. I’ll take that the CEO title can really help because there is an element of people listening to the radio, hear CEO, and they prick up. There’s always an element more of they can help move the story on a bit more easily. But there is a balance too that if it’s a CEO of a company that nobody’s ever heard of, you’re a bit like, well, is it that important? What I remember was doing a interview a couple of years ago about a company that works with nuclear fusion or fission, I can’t remember which one it was. And their PR was great and he said, look, we can offer you the CEO or we can offer you one of our scientists who I’ve spoken to lots before in the past. He’s really good at explaining the tech of it, but he’s also part of the senior leadership team. So you can talk about both sides. CEOs are great, they do a really, really important job, but a lot of people who are CEOs aren’t necessarily experts in nuclear power or something like that and can answer those questions.

Alessia Horwich (18:54):

And they can often be really media trained, can’t they as well, which is obstructive in a way.

Robbie Hawkins (18:57):

Yeah, you can offer me the CEO, but if they’re so media trained that are not going to say anything, I’d rather

Alessia Horwich (19:04):

Waste of your slot.

Robbie Hawkins (19:05):

Yeah, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Alessia Horwich (19:06):

Yeah. Talk about speed and time that it’s going to take. What are you expecting from a guest and how quickly, I mean if it’s reactive, they’ve got to be available pretty soon, right?

Robbie Hawkins (19:16):

Yeah. I think there’s no point offering me reactive comment if then you haven’t got a spokesperson who is able to come on and talk about it that day.

Alessia Horwich (19:28):

Yeah

Robbie Hawkins (19:29):

Obviously reactive comment, very helpful for press because you can then take the comment and you can work with it, but for broadcast, we’re not going to read out a statement from the company unless they’ve done something really bad. It’s only in that situation where that kind of a statement is helpful. You need someone who’s going to come on and offer it. And actually someone sending me an email saying, oh, a spokesperson for such and such says this, and it’s just a bit of background. It’s just literally just comment, but there’s no voice available. I’m just like, well, why have you sent me this email? How do I make that work on the radio? So I think it’s just that basic question of if you are sending someone that, what am I going to get out of this? I’m sure this comment you’ve given is very interesting and insightful, but I’m under pressure to try and get a guest to come on this topic.

Alessia Horwich (20:17):

Yeah

Robbie Hawkins (20:17):

If you’re offering me this. Sometimes it’s almost a bit of a tease. It’s like, oh, this is really interesting. Can we get this person on? Oh no, they’re not available. It’s like, oh great. Well, I’m really pleased that everything else that I do for the rest of the day now isn’t going to come up to the same standards of comment that you’ve just sent me.

Alessia Horwich (20:34):

It’s like when you get to a restaurant and they’re like, no, this isn’t on, this isn’t on/

Robbie Hawkins (20:36):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly

Alessia Horwich (20:38):

Right. Well look, you’ve given us tonnes of really good information, but let’s do a quick recap at the end. So for you, what are the main things, main three things say that PRs need to know if they’re going to going to pitch reactive comment to you.

Robbie Hawkins (20:48):

Number one is, as we’ve just mentioned, making sure that you have someone available who can talk about it and is going to be interesting. If you can offer us a range of voices, great. We do live in a world now where we are thinking about diversity more. We might have a whole show and it’s all white men, and if you can offer us a voice that is a bit different to that, then that can really help with things. So having that variety of things can really help. Sometimes you don’t need to worry about it, but it is something that comes into that. So I would say yeah, coming back with a range of voices who are available, who are well briefed, but are also so importantly going to say something interesting. The other thing is they might say, we’ve got this person available but they can’t do over Zoom or something like that. They’re very restricted. Just let us know whether there’s any restrictions around that interview. Ideally we would like someone in vision in a nicely framed camera, all of that. But also the nice thing about radio is we can do things over the phone.

Alessia Horwich (21:46):

Yeah.

Alessia Horwich (21:48):

But it’s just about if someone says, oh yeah, they can do over the phone and then we call them and it turns out they’re halfway up Mount Everest and they’ve got really bad phone signal. It’s just those little basic checks. A PR can very easily just do a little line check. When we did the Roxhill thing before, someone asked, well, what do you mean by the line? It’s just the phone line quality. If I can actually hear you, it’s probably going to be a better interview than if I can’t. And that is so straightforward that for the PR to check, you might have your CEO in a meeting room waiting to do it a couple of minutes before, start the Zoom a bit earlier, join from another room, check that it sounds okay. It is as simple as that, and just doing those very basic checks can really help.

Alessia Horwich (22:34):

I mean, it sounds to me like if a PR can front load the work a bit,

Robbie Hawkins (22:38):

Yeah.

Alessia Horwich (22:38):

It’s much more likely to get through to you and then get the green light.

Robbie Hawkins (22:42):

For sure.

Alessia Horwich (22:42):

Yeah

Robbie Hawkins (22:43):

Even if it’s not necessarily you saying, we’ve checked the line, we’ve done this, we’ve done this, please have this guest on. But if I know we’ve got the guest on, it’s a lovely clear line quality. They look great on camera, they’re well prepped, they’re in a good position. I’m way more inclined to look at your emails in future, way more inclined to keep doing that. Like, well, I know I can rely on this person. I know it’s not going to go wrong. You would not believe how many guests fall through, or the interviews wrapped up early for something as basic as it being a quality phone line and being able to hear the guest and they’re quite basic things to handle. And if I know that I don’t, don’t have to worry about that, then that’s going to make everyone’s life a lot easier.

Alessia Horwich (23:22):

Thanks so much to Robbie for answering all of our questions about how to pitch reactive comment to radio to keep up to date on all the questions our journalists answer, and On the Rox. Visit us on social media at Roxhill Media.