The ZimmComm Team is on the AgriBlogging Highway early in 2018. Cindy and I conducted a session on media training for Minnesota Soybean yesterday in Naples. Cindy was the friendly/not-so-friendly reporter who conducted interviews while I was the videographer. I estimate that we conduct between 1,000 and 2,000 interviews/year and we got started in this business back in 1980 so we have a lot of fun being teachers and speaking from long experience about things to do and not to do.

The best way to get better at doing interviews is practice, so the bulk of our media training focused on doing interviews on different topics with different scenarios. Most of the farmers on the boards of MSR&PC and MSGA had already had media training at some point so we focused more on letting them see and critique themselves, so we recorded and played back interviews with each participant.

Thanks to my brother-in-law for providing the projector equipment, and to FMC for the Boxanne that provided good quality audio!