How to triage media enquiries: a risk and opportunity framework

Every experienced comms professional triages media enquiries. Few can explain how they do it.

Ask a senior media adviser why one enquiry went straight to legal and another got a same-day quote, and the answer will vary. The trouble is that instinct doesn't transfer to the next hire, doesn't survive annual leave, and can't be defended in a review after something goes wrong.

This article sets out a framework for doing it properly: what to weigh on every enquiry, the response options available, and how to keep the process consistent across a team. It comes from years of doing this work inside large corporates and government, and it's the basis of how Pressia's assessment engine works.

Why triage goes wrong

Three patterns come up again and again in conversations with comms leaders.

Urgency gets mistaken for importance. A 5pm deadline creates pressure, but it says nothing about whether the enquiry deserves an on-record response, a holding line or a polite decline. Teams that triage by deadline alone end up giving their best effort to whoever shouts loudest.

Risk is the only lens. Most informal triage is defensive: how much trouble could this cause? But enquiries are also chances to land a message, build a relationship with a journalist, or get into a story early. A purely defensive lens undervalues the enquiries that could do the most good.

Different people reach different answers. The same enquiry assessed by two team members gets two different responses. Neither is necessarily wrong, but the organisation now has no settled position, and leadership has no view of how the decision was made.

The remedy for all three is the same: assess risk and opportunity separately, against named factors, every time.

Five risk factors

1. Topic risk

How contentious is the subject, how big is the underlying issue, and which stakeholders does it touch? An enquiry about your graduate programme and an enquiry about your prices during a cost-of-living debate are not the same thing, even if both arrive politely. A useful question: if this story runs at its worst, who is affected, and how loudly?

2. Timing risk

Two clocks matter here. The journalist's deadline sets your response window; a same-day deadline with afternoon publication compresses every approval step. The second clock matters more: proximity to your own events. A routine enquiry becomes high-risk in the week before results, during a live regulatory process, or in the middle of a restructure. Triage that ignores the corporate calendar is incomplete.

3. Journalist and outlet risk

Who is asking changes what the question means. A senior business correspondent at a national outlet asking about price rises is writing a cost-of-living story, not a piece about market mechanics, and your response should be built for the story they're writing rather than the one you'd prefer. Track record, the outlet's influence and the journalist's usual angle all belong in the assessment. So does the relationship. An outlet you'll deal with for the next decade warrants different handling from one you'll never hear from again.

4. Financial and disclosure risk

For listed and regulated organisations, this can override everything else. Does answering risk disclosure? Does it touch material that is market-sensitive, before the courts, or inside a regulatory process? When the answer is anything but a clear no, legal review isn't optional, and the job of triage is to flag that before someone starts drafting.

5. Reputation risk

Distinct from topic risk: how does this touch trust in the brand specifically, and how visible is the issue right now? A modest issue inside a national conversation that's running hot carries more reputational weight than a serious issue nobody is watching.

Four opportunity factors

Score these separately. They are not the inverse of risk. High-risk, high-opportunity enquiries exist, and they're often the ones that matter most.

1. Reach. Does the outlet put you in front of people you want to reach: customers, policymakers, investors, talent?
2. Message alignment. Does the question give you a legitimate opening to say something you already wanted to say? Many of the best media outcomes are answers to questions you were hoping someone would ask.
3. Relationship value. Will handling this well pay off in future coverage? Journalists remember who was useful on deadline.
4. Narrative position. Is this the first wave of a story you can still shape, or the fifth wave of one already set? Early enquiries reward speed. Late ones rarely reward anything.

From assessment to response

Triage is not a yes-or-no decision. In practice there are six response paths, and choosing between them deliberately is most of the job:

• On-record comment, when the opportunity is real, the risk is manageable and the message is ready.
• A short holding statement, when risk or timing means you need to say something, but a full position isn't ready or wise.
• A background briefing, when the journalist needs context you want them to have, without your name attached.
• Referring to a prior statement, when you've answered this before and consistency matters more than novelty.
• Declining with background, when you won't comment but don't want to leave the journalist with nothing.
• Declining outright, which should be rare, and a decision rather than a default.

Alongside the path, triage should settle two routing questions. Who needs to see this: the press office alone, legal, the executive, or a crisis group? And if you do respond, who is the right voice? That last one is a strategic choice, not a seniority contest. Putting the CEO on a routine enquiry escalates it. Putting a junior spokesperson on a serious one diminishes it.

Keeping it consistent

A framework only works if it runs on every enquiry, not just the alarming ones. Three habits help.

Assess on arrival. Triage within minutes of the enquiry landing, while the response window is widest. The enquiries that look routine at 9am and serious at 3pm are exactly the ones early assessment catches.

Write it down. A two-line record of the risk, the opportunity, the path chosen and who approved it turns triage into institutional memory. Next time a similar enquiry lands, the team starts from a position rather than a blank page.

Check the context every time. What has the journalist written lately? What did we say last time? What else is live on this topic? This is the step that gets skipped under deadline pressure, and it's where the expensive mistakes hide.

Where this gets hard

None of the above is complicated. What's hard is doing it consistently, at ten to five on a Friday, on the fifth enquiry of the day, with your most experienced comms manager on leave.

That gap is why we built Pressia. Every enquiry that lands in your forwarded media inbox is assessed against this framework straight away: risk and opportunity weighed across the factors above, the journalist's recent work and your past responses checked, a response path and spokesperson suggested, and red flags raised before anyone drafts a word. Your team keeps the judgement. Pressia makes sure that judgement always has the full picture.

If you'd like to see the framework run on one of your own enquiries, join the waitlist.