The team will be returnng to Doha several times in the coming months to complete the training of some 140 senior mangement and country chairs.

Vernon Mann would be delighted to discuss the media spokesperson/media crisis response training needs of other companies in the Gulf or indeed anywhere else in the world. +44(0)7710459620 . Or email: vernonmann@mediamann.com

In the late eighties, as an ITN correspondent, I was in Pakistan hoping to be able to get into Afghanistan to cover the Russian withdrawal. I took over from veteran war reporter Sandy Gall. I was told we would not be hotel-based but that ITN had a house in Peshawar and “connections” who would help get our team into Afghanistan.  These were the very early days of live news satellite transmissions and our aim was to transmit one of the first live reports from inside Afghanistan. Journalists in Afghanistan now can take camera, satellite transmission and laptop editing kit in a couple of briefcases hidden beneath their robes. Then we needed three long-wheelbase land rovers. Our house was hidden behind massive iron gates constantly manned by one of  our several servants, and supplied with fine wine and beer by the British Embassy in Islamabad, a “perk” much appreciated later by our Muslim cook while we were away in Afghanistan. Our contact was a Major Kha Kha, obviously from Pakistan Military Intelligence; our satellite engineers all ex-British Military. We spent a week or more hanging about in Peshawar waiting for Kha Kha to click. You could walk the streets without fear of suicide bombings. We passed the time by taking carpets on approval from the antique rug shop and laying them out in the house to see how they’d look back home. We bought  quite a few. Every day or so our producer would be summoned for a meeting with Major Kha Kha, usually late at night behind the Peshawar equivalent of the Odeon Cinema. No news. We grew impatient. Then word arrived that we were to prepare to leave in 24 hours. Major Kha Kha arrived in his hire car - for which we were paying the bill - and began issuing orders to the staff. Our three four wheel drives were to be covered in mud so that that there would be no rooftop sun reflections to attract enemy bombers. The boys made a meal of it, plastering the vehicles with a thick layer, leaving only a clear circle on the drivers’windscreen about the size of a breadboard. So, we drove in convoy, led at a reckless pace by the Major in his hire car, through the tribal and legendary North West Frontier, over the Khyber Pass and to the gates of Afghanistan. Major Kha Kha explained that he had arranged for a Mujahedin “freedom fighter” group to escort us to the front line near Jalalabad Airport. They would guide us and hopefully offer us some protection and we would stay in their compound. The gates opened and we were allowed in. Major Kha Kha said goodbye and left after negotiating a cash payment for an extension of the hire car contract. Our new “friends” had little English. There were twenty or more of them from young boys barely into their teens  to old men with grey beards who could have been over seventy. They appeared to be an extended family group. We followed them for an hour or so along bomb-cratered tracks,  burned-out Russian tanks, blackened tree stumps.I saw a dog chewing on the ribcage of a dead uniformed Russian. Eventually we reached the compound which was to be our base. It was in the middle of no-where, an old mud fort , its ramparts manned by Mujehadin fighters with AK 47s. They offered us rice and tea. At dusk, with no electricity, they retired, and indicated we were to share the floor on which they slept. We got out our sleeping bags and made a space. Somewhere around  2 am all hell broke loose with gunfire, shouting, people running around in the dark. The Russians? No, another group of Mujahdeen trying to steal our group’s camels. At dawn I was shaken awake by one of the Mujahedin. He pointed at my little Sony shortwave radio. “Give me,” he said. “No,” I replied. That morning, eagerly watched by our hosts we set up our satellite telephone and there was soon a line of Mujahedin making calls to London, LA, Kabul, wherever, at a huge cost to ITN.  Were they ordering arms? Doing drug deals? I’ll never know.

The front line  staging post was half-an-hour’s drive away near Jalalabad Airport. Four of us, myself, cameraman, sound recordist and producer, followed the Mujahedeen to another ancient and crumbling range of buildings where several hundred fighters were congregated. These, we were told, were leading the fight to push the Russians out of this art of Afghanistan and would be launching an attack on Jalalabad Airport any day now. Meanwhile, we had to get a story so we urged our escorts to take us closer to the action. We drove a couple of miles further up the broken road, stopped, and were invited to climb a ridge from where, the Mujahedenn indicated, we would get a distant view of any action that might be going on. A shell landed fifty yards away. We’d been spotted. Our escorts fled.  Another shell. We could hear the sound of aircraft high overhead. There was a”whooshing” sound and we hit the deck. Loud firecrackers went off all around us for what seemed like an eternity. Then it went quiet. They’d dropped cluster bombs, carpeted an area the size of a football pitch. Luckily we’d been on the touchline. But we had the story. Back at the compound we edited the piece, our editing kit powered by our own generator, the process watched with child-like enjoyment by the entire Mujehadin group. We  transmitted the piece to London and then went “live” into News at Ten at 0330 in the morning Afghan time. Each day we would drive from our base to the attack staging post in the hope that something would kick-off. On I think, the third day we could sense we were not so welcome as we had been. An obviously anxious commander told us to hide. Quickly. He manhandled us into a small dusty building full of  old bedding and sacks and indicated frantically that we should cover ourselves up and keep quiet. Why? The Wahhabis are coming, he said. They don’t like you. The Wahhabis are strict fundamentalist Sunni Muslims. Saudi Arabia had sent many such fighters to help expel the Russians. Our Mujehadeen group were terrified of them. We survived the visit, emerging from the sacks and blankets dusty but unscathed. A couple of days later we were told there was to be a major assault on Jalalabad Airport, then held by the Russians.  The Mujehadin assembled at dawn, several hundred of them, hyped up for action and tooled up with weaponry paid for by the West. Two of them held aloft a brown bedding blanket with a copy of the Koran in it. Fighters lined up in single file to pass under the arch, touching the book as they went, exulting the greatness of God, pumping themselves up for the battle ahead.  Mujehadin fighters don’t march to war. They walk, a long line of men laden with guns and grenades taking care not to veer of the track because of land mines. Russian aircraft had dropped hundreds of thousands of such devices during the war. We walked with them in the heat for two hours and we saw the earth embankments ahead marking the perimeter of the airport. There was the odd gunshot. I had read of bullets whistling through the air. I can confirm that they do. We tensed up in anticipation of the fight. The Mujahedin soldiers sat down on the grass and went to sleep. We asked their commander what was going on. They are tired, he said, they must rest. So we dozed too, expecting things to hot up later, after the midday sojourn. Mid-afternoon there was movement on the grass. The soldiers stood up and stretched and scratched, formed up into a ragged line - and headed for home! There was to be no battle today. Why? we asked. What’s going on?  We never found out and so far as I know they never did mount an attack.  Back in Peshawar a week later we discovered our cook had vanished with all our beer and wine so we headed for the American Club, the only establishment in town that sold alcohol. A condition of membership for non-American journalists was that you gave the American manager, openly CIA, a few tit bits to relay to Washington. Nothing he couldn’t have gleaned from watching our reports on TV. The next morning we had a visit at the house from a a military man from the British Embassy. What do you think, chaps, he asked. Will they take the airport? God knows, we replied. Exactly what we thought, he said. The intelligence community one felt, had grown weary of this particular conflict. The Russians were on the run. The Mujehadin had done their job for the West. It would all be over in a matter of weeks. My last venture inside Afghanistan was to witness what was billed as the first meeting of the new, free Afghan Government. Along with other reporters I was driven for seventeen hours in a cattle truck through the Khyber pass and into the interior where a motley crowd of armed Mujahedin commanders from an assortment of tribes and clans had gathered in tents to declare that this was the beginning of a new order, that Afghanistan was free at last. A few months later, of course they were fighting each other.

Vernon Mann

I was wrong. Very wrong. My very first job, for Shell, took me to Peru, Malaysia, and Oman.

Within a few months I was in Nigeria, media training for oil companies in  Lagos and the Niger Delta towns of Port Harcourt, Warri and Eket. I have been training there , a couple of weeks a year, for eleven years now and I love the place and the people. Going to work in a rocket-proof van in the Delta or having your own armed police escort from Lagos Airport into town adds a certain edge to a media training session.

I have trained a number of times in Equatorial Guinea, again for an oil company. Once, we were confined to camp because of a major cholera outbreak in Malabo the capital town - not big enough to rank as a city.

One afternoon I spent a couple of hours handing out mosquito nets to schools.

There is no media community in Malabo, just the Government radio and TV station. So, little chance of a reporter knocking at your door and asking tricky questions. But the sessions there were very rewarding because  the local oil company employees had absolutely no concept of aggressive journalism, no knowledge of the media at all and were desperate to learn all they could, not just about the media, but generally about the world outside Equatorial Guinea.

In Beijing we had a media training session with the head of China’s biggest oil company. I had devised some pretty nasty TV interview questions about the environment, labour conditions and so forth, which had to be posed by my interpreter. “I can’t ask him that,” the interpreter said. “It’s not polite.”  My probing opening question was diluted to something like: ” Honourable chairman, please could you inform us of the latest stage of your oil pipeline development?”  I suspect things have changed.

In Mauritius, a four day training session gave us a day free before we flew home. I booked a half-day-island tour for myself and my cameraman. Part of the deal was lunch on a secluded beach. We were the only non-honeymooners.

I’ve trained media spokespersons in Cote D’Ivoire, Gabon, Angola, Kenya.

Once, after a media training workshop in Moscow, I flew for twelve hours across Russia to Sakhalin Island just to spend two hours on specific media issues with an oil company executive. And then twelve hours back.

Three years after training a manager in London I got a call from Pakistan where he now ran a minerals exploration company. I spent weeks in Islamabad/Karachi, organising a media strategy, press conferences and printed pr materials.

Oil companies apart, we have held hundreds of media training sessions for British Airways over the past 8 years training country and airport manager from around the world and holding one-on-one sessions with senior managers on specific issues.

We’ve media trained the senior management of Etihad Arways, the Abu Dhabi airline, and their regional managers in Bangkok and Sydney; held workshops and seminars in Doha for the national airline Qatar Airways. I have  addressed conferences in Doha on media issues.

We have also held training workshops/seminars in Dubai, Singapore, Prague, The Hague, Belgium, Switzerland and, of course, in London for a range of clients from Shell  to Hello! Magazine; from the Ministry of Defence to Red Circle Technologies and a number of public relations companies.

What’s clear is that companies worldwide now realise they need to know everything about the media: how the news media business works, how best to handle journalists, how to react with the media in a crisis, how to work out what they want to tell them, how to conduct interviews, the works.

I was addressing a conference of airport managers in Prague a while back and was talking about the power of the media when a manager angrily interrupted demanding to know who gave me  - a  despised journalist - power . It’s not me who has the power as such, I replied, it’s the ten million people who watch my newscast or the millions who read what I write in my newspaper. They have the power.

That’s why it is vital you prepare and practice what you want to say before engaging with a reporter. If you don’t get it right how can you expect me to?

Ah, that reminds me. Must renew my passport.

Otherwise we are preparing for a variety of sessions for clients of a leading UK PR company and potential training for clients in the International Hotel industry.

The actual training was in Bangkok,  and   in Sydney, Australia, where the airline’s regional managers had gathered for meetings. The airline felt it was a rare opportunity to get so many managers in the same place(s) at the same time.

Vernon Mann once worked in Australia for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Channel 7 TV News in Sydney, so was pleased to re-acquaint himself with the fabulous city if only for one night.

The team trained fourteen country and regional managers on interview techniques, how to hold a news conference or media briefing and how to cope with reporters in a crisis.

In the Delta transport was provided in the form of a rocket proof van with armed police escort front and rear.  Accommodation was in a company guesthouse, itself protected by police with AK 47’s.

All remained calm during this training trip as it has done luckily over the past eleven years that Vernon has been training in Nigeria.

The course will be a full day with as maximum of six people so you’ll get plenty of individual attention.

We take away the media mystique and at the end of the session you’ll be much more aware of how journalists operate and you’ll feel confident that you’ll be able  handle them in interview situations.

The sessions take place in our Covent Garden Studio. At the end of it you’ll get a media booklet , a media training certificate and a DVD of your interviews.

The cost per person is £350.00 inclusive of VAT.

Register now at vernonmann@mediamann.com for interest in our next open course.

Recently we spent six hours with the newly appointed Managing Director of  one of Nigeria’s biggest oil companies.

He was well accustomed to explaining issues and challenges facing oil companies to a domestic audience  but wanted practice and advice on what to say to an international audience, many of whom might have a negative view of the country after reading reports in the media of social unrest.

True, there are problems, but there a lot of positive things to be said about the place as well, particularly about the people: they’re great. And they all love their country and are excited about its potential in the future.

We’ve become  old West African hands over the years having trained in Nigeria 10 or 11 times and also held workshops in Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Cote D’Ivoire.

The team spent a week in Abu Dhabi before Christmas with Etihad Airways.