Working with the Media: Training for Tree Professionals

Join us on 29 November for this online webinar, hosted by Just Farmers’ Anna Jones, that will provide media training for professionals working across the forestry and arboriculture sector.

With growing public awareness around the role of trees in fighting the climate emergency, tree professionals are increasingly being approached by the media to comment on current environmental policies and research. We are pleased that Anna Jones from Just Farmers is joining us to deliver this half-day online webinar that will provide essential media training.

Please note that this is a bespoke webinar that is tailored by current news and by its attendees, so the agenda will not be available until just before the event takes place.

Webinar content

This webinar will discuss how the media operates and what journalists are looking for, explore barriers to effective communication and help overcome fears about working with the media. Delegates will learn how to identify a story and how to get the media interested in it, develop editorial judgement and ‘news sense’, with top tips for being interviewed ‘on the record’.

A range of topics will be covered, including:

• ‘The 3 Way Disconnect’ between foresters, agriculture, and the media – why it exists and what we can do about it
• What is news?
• What the media wants – and how you can work with it
• Understand what makes a story – and what doesn’t
• How to develop and pitch a good story idea
• Good Talkers – and how to be one. Top tips for interview situations.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the day, delegates will be able to:

1. Understand the media on a deeper level
2. Engage with the media more positively and constructively
3. Understand what makes a story – and what doesn’t
4. Pitch a story idea (improving chances of securing coverage)
5. Feel more prepared for being interviewed.

About the speaker

Anna Jones – Founder, Just Farmers

Anna Jones is a freelance rural affairs journalist, writer, broadcaster, and a farmer’s daughter. She has worked across a wide range of television and radio programmes including BBC One’s Countryfile, Radio 4’s Farming Today, On Your Farm, Costing the Earth and The Archers and reported on agricultural issues for BBC News and the World Service. She has written for The Guardian, Countryfile Magazine, Farmers Guardian and Farmers Weekly.

Anna’s career took an unexpected turn after doing a Nuffield Farming Scholarship in 2016/17, which looked at how the media portrays farming and country life to the public. She travelled the world and discovered a deep disconnect between the metropolitan mainstream media and a distrustful and defensive farming industry.

It made Anna determined to motivate farmers to step up and share their stories. In 2018, she left her staff job at the BBC to set up a communications project called ‘Just Farmers’, aimed at connecting journalists and programme makers with independent, authentic voices at the grassroots of farming. Her mission to improve the national conversation around rural issues, agriculture and the environment inspired her first book ‘Divide: The relationship crisis between town and country‘, published by Kyle Books in March 2022.

Anna splits her time between Bristol and Shropshire and is yet to find a place that feels more like home than the family farm on the Welsh Borders.