Two hours for a thirty-minute interview
A client's CEO has an interview with a business journalist on Thursday. The account executive prepares a brief: who the journalist is, what they have written recently, how they interview, what the title's readers care about, what the client has said to them before, the key messages, likely questions and difficult ones, and the approved answers to both.
She reads the journalist's last twenty pieces, searches old emails for past contact, checks the coverage spreadsheet for previous pieces about the client, copies key messages from the campaign plan, and pulls approved lines from a document last updated in the spring. It takes most of an afternoon. The next day she does it again for a different journalist.
Why every brief starts from zero
- Journalist history lives in inboxes and coverage lists, not in one record.
- Previous briefs for the same journalist are saved in client folders and not found.
- Key messages and approved lines are held in separate documents per campaign.
- The journalist's recent articles have to be read each time.
- There is no template, so each brief looks different.
What the time goes on
Most of the effort is collection, not insight. The valuable part of a brief, the likely hard questions and how to handle them, gets the least time. Spokespeople notice when briefs are inconsistent, and a thin brief before a difficult interview can be expensive for the client. Executives also do far fewer interviews than they could support, because preparation takes so long.
How we build the briefing pack generator
- The executive chooses the client, spokesperson, journalist and topic.
- The generator pulls the journalist's record: title, beat, previous contact with the agency, relationship notes and coverage they wrote about any of your clients.
- Recent articles by the journalist are found from public pages and summarised by a language model such as OpenAI or Anthropic Claude into themes and interview style, with links to the originals.
- The client's current key messages, approved lines and spokesperson background are pulled from the agency's records for that client.
- A draft brief is assembled in your template in Word or Google Docs, with sections for likely questions and difficult questions left for the executive to write or refine.
- The finished brief is saved against the journalist and the client, so the next brief for that journalist starts from it.
| Brief section | Source | Who finishes it |
|---|---|---|
| About the journalist | Journalist record and recent articles | Executive checks |
| About the title | Title profile | Executive checks |
| Previous contact | Agency history and coverage | Filled automatically |
| Key messages and lines | Client records | Filled automatically |
| Likely and difficult questions | Draft suggestions only | Executive writes |
Summaries of articles are drafts with links. The executive reads enough of the originals to stand behind the brief.
Preparing for Thursday
The executive generates the brief in the morning. The journalist section, previous contact and client lines are there. She reads the summaries, opens two of the linked articles to check a point, and spends her time on the difficult questions, including one about a competitor that the journalist wrote about last week, which the summary flagged.
The CEO gets a brief that is consistent with the last one, and the executive has time left to prepare the next interview.
After the interview, a short debrief field on the brief records how it went: questions that came up that were not expected, anything the spokesperson said that needs following up, and whether the journalist promised to send a link. That note is on the journalist's record next time, so the following brief starts from what actually happened rather than what was planned.
Is this how briefs are made at your agency?
- Every brief is researched from scratch.
- Previous briefs for the same journalist are not easy to find.
- Key messages and approved lines are copied from several documents.
- Briefs look different depending on who wrote them.
- Difficult questions get the least preparation time.