Maverick Indonesia

Bridging Dialogue Through Media Handling Skill

What is the Indonesian media? How do you handle this ‘creature’ properly? How should you react when an uninvited journalist comes to your press conference demanding interviews? What should you do when ‘a journalist’ asked for money?

Those are some of the burning questions raised by our NGO partners during our last Corporate Social Leadership (CSL) training on Media Handling Skills (06-Feb-2008).

The session was attended by our friends from the Borneo Orang Utan Survival (BOS) Foundation, B-Trust and Yayasan Jurnal Perempuan.

Understanding how the media works, what their function is in society, what kind of relationships we must build with them, and how ready we are as news sources in handling interviews, are the core issues in media handling skills.
As with other CSL sessions in the past, this one was more of a sharing moment, where questions or statements were raised to support or contradict the training materials and real-life cases were analyzed.

The last part of the session was dedicated to role playing, where participants were given the chance to test their newly-acquired knowledge on how to handle media interview.

The participants shared their stories on past experiences with the media, while others offered possible solutions.

For example, B-Trust is an NGO focusing on good corporate governance, and they try to help their partners, local government bodies in West Java, in creating a more transparent system.

However in doing their job, they constantly need media’s help to communicate about the improvement achieved by their partners.

Unfortunately, some of their partners have the habit of giving out money to journalists, and this has put pressures to the NGO, whether to follow suit or keeping their ground, that is not to give money.

Some of the participants were former journalists, so the discussion got more interesting as more real-life issues were presented and possible solutions were tested.

The discussions generated in our CSL program is the kind of conversation Maverick is hoping to participate more in the future.

Maverick may not be able to provide lightning-speed solutions for all of our friends’ problems, but we could at least, help facilitate an atmosphere were dialogue is as important as achievement.