Media training and skills development needs practical testing through simulated media activity. Practice in a safe and controlled environment and the resulting self-knowledge and confidence has huge benefits. Many leading organisations know this including the UK Ministry of Defence (to whom we are the exclusive provider of media simulation), other government departments such as the Home Office and Health Protection Agency, many emergency services, councils, charities, large companies and international organisations such as NATO.

It is essential to test skills, systems, and outputs, especially in potentially emergency situations. Realistic practice develops the assertive skills to succeed and use media interviews and other events as opportunities for your messages.

Crown Media provides practical, tailor-made simulation environments. Preparing for work with the media is not a purely academic exercise. We test processes from message management, clearance and delivery, to individuals' interviews and media skills. Team development, and the vision of media being seen as a collective responsibility is essential.

This can be achieved by working with an individual radio or newspaper reporter to a television crew, through to a full Crown Media team with regular broadcast programmes and output, throwing a range of hard-ball questions in a fast and dynamic environment. Creating the actual media output completes the process.

The opportunities range from post classroom training on one-to-one interviews and briefings, to pre-event management, identifying tricky issues and helping you reach solutions and appropriate strategies for handling tough issues. Our advice will always be simple to understand, realistic and relevant.

All our staff are real world professionals trained to focus on the training objective of developing a more skilled and confident media manager and team. We provide the tools through simulated media work to tackle the toughest issues in an appropriate manner, or to make the very best of proactive opportunities.

Case Study 1: The UK Home Office Emergency Planning College has a five year project to exercise UK Emergency Resilience Forums. The programme is called 'The Gold Standard' and runs frequent exercises across the UK. Crown Media provides the media simulation on subjects ranging from aircraft accidents to pandemic disease, to test, develop and validate media and communications activity of those taking part through TV, radio and print, alongside direct feedback to the Gold command. Often this includes pre-exercise material to brief and prepare those taking part.

Case Study 2: Crown Media provides simulated broadcast and print media for large military exercises held across Europe and in North America. Clients include the UK Ministry of Defence, to NATO forces of different countries and the NATO Joint Force Training Centre. Many of these exercises specifically train for deployments overseas. We take care to recreate an authentic media environment, for example providing international television mixed with local radio and print. Exercises can last up to three weeks with large (20+) media teams. We have received repeated enthusiastic commendations and certificates of appreciation for our work.

Case Study 3: A leading UK Government institution which trains future diplomats and military commanders (some who've become our world leaders) uses Crown Media to provide simulated print, radio and TV for its major annual exercise. Based in their London HQ, we provide hours of coverage, ranging from agency and newspaper print, live radio and TV output, to built television programmes. All outputs challenge the 80 participants and move and help manage the five day exercise.

Case Study 4: An international high-class clothing retailer wanted to examine its response if a series of disasters hit the private company. These included destruction of a major distribution centre by fire, and protests from animal welfare activists. Crown Media provided real-time TV news bulletins to show how the national and international media would react, to enable appropriate responses to be formulated.