How to Handle Interviews

Let us say that your company helps indigenous people fight to get back their ancestral land which was taken away during colonialism and sold to settler farmers. One particular community has just had their land given back to them after a long and hard battle. This is clearly newsworthy – partly because there is controversy. And this means there are different voices to be heard. Those dispossessed for so long, farmers who were forced to sell the land so that the government could return it to the original landowners, government voices, human rights company voices, and more. The mass media is vigorously pursuing this story as it "has legs". This means they are likely to get more than one story out of it over days or weeks.

This is one success story amongst other struggles that your company is engaged in. You are approached for an interview on this story. Your company is not used to handling the media, and has no policies on doing interviews.

• Would you do it?
• If yes, why?
• If no, why?
• If you went ahead with it, how would you handle it?
• What main messages would you want to get across?
• How would you handle the organizational part?