Bottom line: Location matters when holding a press conference.
When attorneys plan a press conference, the location of the press conference will go a long way in determining how effective the press conference will be—and how well-attended it will be by reporters.
My number one rule for a press conference in terms of location is never to schedule a press conference where you don’t have total control over the location.
If you are an attorney and you are holding a press conference to announce the filing of a lawsuit, you need to be thinking about a location that you can control.
You can control your office’s conference room. You can control a ballroom that you rent from a hotel or a conference center.
You can’t control the courthouse steps. You can’t control the sidewalk in front of a large corporate defendant you are suing. And you can’t control the weather. (These happen to be the reasons why I advise my clients not to hold outdoor press conferences.)
By being somewhere where an attorney can control the lights, the climate, access, you will have be able to put on a more persuasive and more professional-looking press conference.
That said, the one exception is when an attorney has to give a press conference at a certain location based on circumstances beyond his or her control.
For example, if you are going to a court hearing for a client that you expect to be covered by a number of media outlets and you want to address those media outlets after the court hearing, you don’t really have a choice as to where the press conference will be held.
You’re going to be holding it just outside the courtroom, in front of the courthouse, or somewhere near the courthouse. It’s not like you’re going to be able to say “Hey everyone, let’s go here to my office six and a half miles away so that I can hold a press conference.” That’s just not going to happen.
But in most instances, attorneys are going to be able to control their location for a press conference.
So you need to be thinking about where you could hold a press conference and comfortably fit between 10 and 15 people.
(Remember, you’re going to have hopefully three or four camera crews. You’re going to have a handful of print and perhaps radio reporters. So you want to be cognizant of having enough space in the room for all of these people to move around.)
You want to be thinking about light and thinking about sound. Camera crews typically bring their own lights and they will bring their own microphones. But it wouldn’t hurt to have good lighting from the get-go. Nor would it hurt to have a sound system. Again, these things are beyond your control if you have a press conference outside on the courthouse steps or in a park somewhere.
Also, when it comes to locations, you’ve got to be centrally located. If you are in an office 25 miles away from the local downtown, that distance could impact whether reporters are going to actually come out to your press conference.
If that’s the situation you find yourself in, I would suggest that you rent a ballroom or a small conference room at a local hotel. Or you rent space at a similar facility. Or you work out an agreement to use a local counsel’s space or a colleague’s space at a law firm that’s closer to the city center and closer to where media outlets have their headquarters.
While it’s unlikely that a location of a press conference is going to be the one thing that makes or breaks whether a reporter or media outlet covers your press conference, you still want to stack the deck in your favor.
So pick a location that you control.
Pick a location that hopefully has good lights and good sound.
Pick a location that won’t be affected by inclement weather.
Pick a location that you can control access to.
And pick a location that’s generally convenient to the majority of reporters in the area.
If you do all of these things, you should be able to increase the chances that your press conference will be effective—and well-attended by reporters and media outlets.
Bottom line: Location matters when holding a press conference.
Wayne Pollock is the founder and managing attorney of Copo Strategies in Philadelphia, a national legal services and communications firm. Attorneys and law firms enlist Copo Strategies to engage the media and the public regarding their clients’ cases (to help resolve those cases favorably), and to engage the media, referral sources, and prospective clients regarding their firms (to help bring new client matters in the door). Contact him at waynepollock@copostrategies.com or 215–454–2180.
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