Roughly Speaking...

Welcome to Roughly Speaking where you'll find all the latest news about our training courses and workshops, the best of our blog, plus exclusive tips on how you can make the most of the media.

In this edition:

• Go Team Rough House
• We've grown!
• A quick reminder ...
• What do you think about phone hacking?
• Tip of the month: Always know why

Go Team Rough House

This month we're putting our best feet forward to support the medical charity, Victoria Foundation. We've entered a team in their '5k on foot for £10k' event on 25 September.

At the event over 100 people will be running or walking 5km on Wimbledon Common to raise £10,000 for projects supporting those living with breast cancer and accessible transport.

The foundation is a charity close to our heart - it's just a stone's throw from our offices in Richmond, and it's where we hold our regular open courses.

It's a great cause, and we'd be extremely grateful if you could support the efforts of Team Rough House and sponsor us. All you need to do is click here and follow the links.

We've grown!

We're thrilled to report that the Rough House team has grown over the summer. Our new signings include Sue Carruthers, an expert in presentation & communications coaching. For any clients giving presentations - whether at a major conference or to a small but important meeting - she's skilled at building both the skills and the confidence needed communicate more confidently, flexibly and therefore better!

And our second addition is Justine Fisher. She's an experience television producer and journalist who's worked on everything from Watchdog to This Morning, so she's a great addition to our media training team, as well as being an excellent film-maker. Welcome Sue and Justine!

For more information about them and the rest of the RH team, click here.

A quick reminder ...

... about what we do. At Rough House, our aim is to be a media 'one-stop-shop'. We specialise in helping clients make the most of media opportunities - whether that's promoting themselves effectively via a corporate video, devising a media strategy or learning how to not to be 'Paxo'd' on Newsnight. Between us, our team has so much media experience and expertise that if you have a media-related question, we can most certainly provide the answer.

We're not a PR agency, but we regard PR agencies and departments as our best friends, since they know the value of bringing in real journalists and media professionals like us when the need arises.

Just in the past month, we've trained an entire media team in how to handle calls from pushy journalists, we've developed a media strategy for a business which is changing direction, we've made a series of films for a client - and we're running a workshop on social media and crisis communications at a conference at the Science Museum.

What do you think about phone hacking?

There's been a lot of focus over the past few months on the techniques used by journalists to get a story.

The phone hacking scandal is one that's clearly going to run and run, and obviously it's been a hot topic of conversation amongst the Rough House team.

There's most definitely a valid discussion about what methods are justified and what aren't and when certain activities are in the public interest and when they're just interesting to the public.

We've collected our thoughts in a couple of articles: the first looks at how and why the scandal was able to develop in the first place, and the second discusses the BBC approach to undercover work.

We'd love to know your thoughts, so please take a look and see if you agree.

Tip of the month: Always know why

Listening to interviews this morning on the radio, it struck me how many questions started with 'why'.

'Why do you think the government's policy on the economy is wrong?'

'Why do you believe that you have the right answers?'

If you're doing an interview, and you make any kind of assertion or claim, you will be asked why, you will be asked to back it up. So make sure you know in advance what the answer to that question will be.