Being the Trade Expert Local Media Calls

Why this matters

When the first hard freeze comes, a station producer needs someone on camera by four o'clock to explain frozen pipes. When a storm knocks out power for two days, the paper needs a sentence about generators that will keep a family alive. Whoever answers those calls well becomes the person they call next time, and the town hears safety advice from a tradesperson instead of a press release. Whoever answers badly, by speculating about a fatal fire or naming a competitor's mistake, can spend months dealing with what one sentence did.

This card is about the recurring, planned kind of media contact: seasonal tips, storm and disaster advice, and explaining code changes. A moment where your shop itself is the story, good or bad, is a different problem (see related: A Viral Moment, Good or Bad: Response Decision Tree).

What a reporter actually needs from you

A local reporter is usually covering several stories that day and does not know your trade. They need four things, in this order:

1. A call back before their deadline. Ask what the deadline is in your first sentence. A perfect answer at six o'clock is useless to a piece that airs at five.
2. Plain words. "Pipes on outside walls freeze first" beats "uninsulated supply lines in exterior wall cavities". Define the one technical term you cannot avoid.
3. One sentence they can quote. Prepare it before you call back. It should carry the action, not the explanation: "If your CO alarm goes off, get everyone outside first and call 911 from the yard."
4. Accuracy they do not have to check. If they have to call someone else to confirm what you said, you are not the source they keep.

Everything else, including how your shop looks on camera, comes a distant fifth.

The three calls you will get, and what each one needs

Seasonal calls are the easy ones and the ones you can prepare for in July. Write three short tip sets now, one per season your trade cares about, and keep them on the office drive. When the producer calls, you are editing, not inventing.

Storm calls carry the most weight and the most risk. The safe content is the content public agencies already publish: the CDC's carbon monoxide guidance, the Red Cross's power outage guidance, FEMA's flood guidance. Your value is translating it and adding the trade's practical layer. "Do not run a generator in the garage, even with the door open, and keep it at least 20 feet from any window or door" is CDC guidance said by someone who has seen what an attached garage does to a house. "Equipment that sat in floodwater needs a professional look before anyone turns it back on, and manufacturers generally require replacing gas controls that were under water" is the trade layer.

Code-change calls are where an honest "I would check with the building department on that detail" earns more trust than a confident wrong answer. Model codes are not law until a jurisdiction adopts them, often with local amendments and on a delay, so the most useful thing you can tell a reporter is which edition the city has adopted, when it takes effect, and that homeowners with a permit already issued are generally under the old rules. Confirm those facts with the building department before you say them on air. How the adoption process itself works is owned elsewhere (see related: How Codes and Licensing Rules Actually Get Made).

Staying in your lane

Your lane is general advice in your own trade. It is narrower than it feels when a microphone is pointed at you.

• Your trade, not the neighboring one. An HVAC owner asked about a roof collapse after snow says, "That's a roofer's or an engineer's question, I can tell you what to watch for with your furnace vent if snow is piling up." Then they talk about the vent.
• General, not specific. You can explain how carbon monoxide builds up in a house. You cannot explain how it built up in the house on Elm Street where two people died, because you have not seen it, the fire marshal's investigation is ongoing, and anything you say may be wrong and will be quoted next to the victims' names.
• Advice, not diagnosis. If a reporter describes a viewer's symptoms or a viewer's equipment, say what the general cause might be and route them to a licensed professional and, where health is involved, to a doctor or 911.

What not to say, and why each one hurts

• The cause of a specific incident. Investigators, insurers and lawyers will all read it. Saying "that was probably a cracked heat exchanger" about a house you have not entered can be wrong, and a false statement of fact that damages someone (the installer, the landlord, a manufacturer) carries defamation risk. This is not legal advice; it is the reason the rule exists.
• A competitor's name, or a description that identifies one. "A lot of the shops around here skip that step" is an accusation without a name. Say what the right step is.
• A customer, an address or a job. Even a flattering story about a customer goes on air only with their permission, in writing if the customer is identifiable.
• Prices. A price on air is a public promise you will be held to and a sales message the station did not agree to run. "It varies with the house" is a complete answer.
• Absolutes you cannot back. "Always", "never", "completely safe". Use them only for the safety actions that really are absolute: leave the house on a gas smell, never run a generator indoors.
• Medical instructions beyond what agencies publish. You can repeat the CDC's list of carbon monoxide symptoms and its "get to fresh air, call 911" instruction. You do not tell anyone whether their headache is CO.
• Anything off the record. Learn the terms: on the record means you can be quoted by name; on background means the information can be used but attributed only generally ("a local contractor"); off the record means not used at all. Those definitions are not universal and a reporter may understand them differently than you, so agree on the terms before you speak, and assume that anything you say to a reporter can end up in print.

Who in the shop talks

Pick one or two spokespeople, usually the owner and one senior tech who explains things well, and tell everyone else in writing. Techs are approached on job sites after storms, especially at houses that made the news. They need one script and permission to use it:

"I can't speak for the company or about this customer's house, but our office can help you. Here's the number." Then they keep working. A tech who is told the script in advance will use it. A tech who is not will improvise, standing in front of a customer's house, on camera.

A worked example: the cold-snap call

A county has had two carbon monoxide deaths in three days during a cold snap, both in houses using space heaters or generators during an outage. A TV reporter calls a mid-size heating and cooling shop at 1:40 p.m. and the office takes a message. The owner calls back at 2:05.

OWNER: Hi, it's Dana at the heating shop, returning
  your call. What's your deadline?
REPORTER: Four o'clock. I need someone on camera about
  CO. Can you speak to the deaths on Route 9?
OWNER: I can't speak to those houses, I haven't seen
  them and the fire marshal is investigating. I can
  talk about how CO gets into a house in a cold snap
  and what families should do tonight.
REPORTER: That works. Was it the generators?
OWNER: I don't know, and I'd be guessing. What I can
  say is: never run a generator in the house, garage
  or basement, keep it at least 20 feet from doors and
  windows, and have a working CO alarm on every level.
REPORTER: Can I use your name and the shop?
OWNER: My name, yes. I'd rather the shop not be the
  headline. Can you come to us at three?

Dana says no to three things in under a minute: the specific incident, the cause, and the shop as headline. She says yes to the reporter's real need, which is a credible person on camera with usable safety content before four.

Before the reporter arrives, Dana writes her quotable sentence on a card: "If your CO alarm goes off, get everyone out of the house first, then call 911 from outside. Don't stop to find the cause." She pulls the CDC's carbon monoxide page to make sure the generator distance and the symptoms she plans to mention match it exactly. She asks her senior tech to bring a combination smoke and CO alarm from the truck, still in the package with the brand turned away, so the camera has something to look at.

On camera, the reporter asks about space heaters. Dana answers with the general rules that apply to any space heater: keep it at least three feet from anything that can burn, plug it directly into a wall outlet, and do not use a fuel-burning space heater indoors unless it is designed and listed for indoor use and the room is ventilated as its instructions say. She does not name a product or say any fuel-burning heater is safe in an occupied room.

The piece airs with two of her sentences. One is the alarm sentence on her card. The other is the 20-foot generator rule. The shop's name appears once, in her caption.

What would have changed her answer: if the fire marshal had already released a cause, Dana could reference the released finding as the marshal's ("the fire marshal has said..."), still without adding her own view of that house. If the reporter had asked about a death in a house her shop serviced, she would decline the interview entirely and call her insurance carrier and her attorney before saying anything to anyone, because now she is a potential party, not an expert.

Being the source they call again

Reliability is built over a dozen calls, not one:

• Return every call by the deadline, even to say you are not the right person, and name who is.
• Say "I don't know" in those words when you do not. Reporters remember the source who saved them from a correction.
• Ask for a correction quietly when something you said was misquoted in a way that matters to safety, and let small misquotes go.
• Keep the tip sets current. Re-check them against the agency guidance once a year; generator distances, alarm recommendations and outage guidance do get revised.
• Do not trade access for coverage. Never ask a reporter to mention a promotion. The station's trust in you is the asset, and the first time it feels like advertising, the calls stop.

References

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, carbon monoxide poisoning prevention guidance (generator placement, alarms, symptoms)
• American Red Cross, power outage and space heater safety guidance
• FEMA and Ready.gov, flood and storm recovery guidance
• See related: A Viral Moment, Good or Bad: Response Decision Tree
• See related: How Codes and Licensing Rules Actually Get Made