Tag Archives: media relations

What three PR & media takeaways would you share?

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Tomorrow morning I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at Leadership Tech Valley’s Media Day. A collaboration between the Albany-Colonie and Schenectady Chambers of Commerce, Leadership Tech Valley is a year-long professional development program in the region that provides courses and networking to a selected class of participants each year.

Media Day will consist of a panel discussion with journalists and PR professionals, as well as a mock press conference and an introduction to media pitching and coverage. The members of the class are from diverse industries and professions – everything from nuclear engineers to banking to healthcare. Many of them don’t work directly in public relations, but no doubt spending a day learning about how the media works will be helpful to them in terms of leading organizations in the future.

I’ll be sharing the stage with some PR professionals as well as TV, radio and newspaper journalists. Gina Luttrell, the panel moderator, has asked each of us to prepare our three must-have resources for members of the audience – it could be a website, a book, or even just an important tip.

I have a few in mind, but thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what you all think. When talking with a group of professionals who have limited knowledge of the media and how it and PR works, what would you tell them? Where would you send them for more information? What resources do you continue to go back to?

Where’s the love for local public relations?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about differences between national and local media lately. The topic has been the subject of my last two posts over on Newsworthy, the readMedia blog, and I’ve been listening intently at the PR conferences I’ve been attending when journalists take the stage for panel discussions. Some have been representing national media outlets, like Slate.com, USA Today, and The New York Times. Others are local reporters for TV networks, metro daily newspapers or hyperlocal web sites. The differences in what these journalists expect from PR people are stark. But more on that later.

First, let’s talk about why solid, locally focused PR gets very little attention among the PR blogosphere/trade press/twitterati. When’s the last time you’ve seen PR Week highlight a kickass local PR success story? Of course, it’s sexier to talk about big brands with big budgets like Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble or Intel. Their PR and social media campaigns try to reach as broad a consumer audience as possible, sometimes within a vertical, but usually regardless of geography.

With location-based networking (Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla) all the rage and talk of hyperlocal journalism reaching a fever pitch, it surprises me that more attention isn’t being paid to local PR. Why is it that the primary discussions in and about our industry are focused on behemoth national or global brands, or even on smaller brands who are deemed “successful” at public relations by virtue of landing stories in national outlets? Do they have a monopoly on newsworthy content?

Hardly. There are thousands of small businesses and non-profits across the country that are doing a bang up job of telling their stories — to the audience that matters to them! If you’re a local organization focused on recruiting volunteers, publicizing events and providing services to a particular county or town, your public relations strategy had better focus on reaching local audiences. That means pitching local media, reaching out to local bloggers and developing a social media presence that local constituents can find and interact with. A hit in The New York Times is great, but you’re far likelier to move the needle on organizational goals if you focus on the channels that your local audiences use to get information.

In many cases, that still means the local newspaper and TV stations. Social media and alternative media have yet to supplant these traditional outlets locally as a primary source of information (according to Pew). Often new media (like local blogs and citizen journalists) take their cues from what mainstream media is writing about, and much of the information that’s shared in social networks originates in traditional media (Pew estimates over 90 percent).

So, reaching local media is key if geography matters to your organization. And fortunately, local journalists want to get your news. This was the main difference that came up over and over again in the journalist panels I’ve been listening to over the last few weeks. Here’s how it would go:

Well-known journalist from renowned national media outlet: “I hate being bothered. I get 955 emails a day. I probably don’t care about your story. I will never cover your groundbreaking or charity event. If you’re going to pitch me, you should read and research everything I’ve written for the last six months. You should tailor your pitch directly to me, and it had better be the absolute perfect story for my readers, and you’d better be able to convey the entire pitch to me in one or two sentences. Don’t send me press releases. Don’t send me any photos or videos or attachments unless I ask for them. And don’t keep bothering me to see if I got your email, because I probably don’t care.”

Small-town journalist from local TV news station: “I want to know about everything happening in this town, and especially how it affects the people who live and work here. I absolutely will cover a groundbreaking or charity event if it’s local and has an impact on residents. When you send me press releases, make sure they’re well-written and have all the information I need. Extras like photos and other documentation can be helpful. Make sure the title of the email and press release convey the key information I need to know. Be responsive when I call for follow-up information or interviews.”

Slight hyperbole, but that was essentially the gist. National reporters are busy and over-pitched, and they get a lot of bad pitches so they don’t trust press releases. They don’t have time for long pitches. They don’t do reportorial journalism, because they don’t have to. They get so many story ideas pitched to them that they rarely have a hard time filling the “news hole” each day.

On the local side, these journalists are also busy, but they rely on local organizations to help them develop content. They are all about reportorial journalism – the who, what, when, where, why of what’s happening in their town. They rely on press releases and PR people to help them find out what’s interesting and important. They are the 75 percent of journalists who say that receiving high-quality, targeted emailed press releases is helpful! And they don’t want “New! Whiter, brighter toothpaste!” press releases, they want to know about local students who complete a peer education program at an area nonprofit, or about a new program of study being added at a local college.

As much as industry outsiders (and the PR industry itself) love to bash on PR and declare that press releases are dead, it’s simply not true when it comes to local public relations. I see so many readMedia clients send solid, relevant, newsworthy press releases every day to local media, and these releases get picked up and their information ends up in front of their target audience. Shel Holtz said it best: “The role of media relations professionals is to inform journalists of their organizations’ news.”

You can talk about revolutions or evolutions or solutions for public relations in the digital age, and trump up fancy PR campaigns from big brands and continue to chase down national media hits. But let’s not forget that a lot of basic, fundamental media relations tactics are still very effective at the local level. If you’re a local organization, isn’t that where you want to be successful?

How to pitch Op-Eds to USA Today

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I’ve spent this week in Washington, DC at the PRSA Counselors to Higher Education Senior Summit, talking with current readMedia clients and learning about the issues higher ed communicators face. The sessions yesterday were held at the headquarters of USA Today in McLean, Va., and included a panel discussion with three USA Today editors.

I snagged this quick video during the Q&A session, after a participant asked about how to pitch Op-Ed pieces:

There are some great reminders for PR folks: know the outlet you’re pitching and how they operate, be relevant and provocative, and remember that a story idea that doesn’t get picked up the first time around can often be repurposed or repackaged later on.

The social media release is not a PR panacea

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In the first few weeks of my new job at readMedia, I’ve been learning tons about the role press releases play in our clients’ local media relations strategies. Although many PR and media bloggers have decried the death of the press release in favor of new tactics like the social media release, from what I’ve seen so far those claims are quite premature.

All the discussion about social media releases seems to come from the perspective of big brands launching new products and trying to get feature coverage. It was no different when I was reading Putting the Public Back in Public Relations. From Chapter 8:

Most news releases are driven by product development, which can cause an inward and narrowly focused view from life inside the company.

But thousands of PR and communications professionals just don’t work in this kind of environment. Many of them work for organizations whose activities form the basis of bread-and-butter local news stories: non-profits, schools, governments, small businesses. (A recent Pew Research Center study found that three-quarters of local news is triggered by government and schools.) The PR strategy at these organizations isn’t focused on trying to get consumers or B2B customers to buy their product and thus aren’t putting out the kind of releases that PPBPR (rightfully) lambastes:

Company X Launches World’s First, Industry-Leading, Innovative Thingamabob That Will Change Our Lives for the Better

The news these organizations are making is the kind of news that likely used to be covered by a local newspaper or TV beat reporter: the results of a state agency investigation or the growth of a local college. But as newsroom resources dwindle, local journalists are relying more on well-crafted press releases to alert them to and help them tell stories. And we all know that often press releases are given a quick copy edit (or not) and reprinted, sometimes in their entirety, as news.

Where the SMR falls short

What the social media release encourages is “atomizing” content into bite-sized pieces so that bloggers and journalists can reassemble it. This may work for a journalist at Fortune or a blogger at Engadget who wants to dig into a trend or review a product, but a city desk reporter at a local daily or the publisher of a suburban weekly often just wants solid, relevant content they can quickly post or publish. They don’t want to have to piece together a story from bullet points, quotes, images and video.

I’m not knocking the concept of a social media release, entirely. I hold great respect for Todd Defren and Shel Holtz and others in the PR profession who’ve developed and worked to refine the concept. I absolutely think many components of SMRs are vital for PR pros to adopt: making sure releases are posted online for purposes of public viewing, search indexing and social network sharing; enhancing stories with multimedia content when appropriate and available; and providing links to additional resources are all important ways to augment a story.

But I just don’t think an SMR is the best approach for every organization – especially locally-focused ones. A lot of the hype about the SMR seems to be built around using it as a tool for news like product or campaign launches (like the Crayon/Coca-Cola example cited in PPBPR). That’s a very narrow slice of PR.

While the SMR isn’t necessarily supposed to be a replacement for traditional releases, there’s still a lot of argument about which is better and which will “win out.” The SMR may eventually become the superior choice for communicating certain types of news, but I still think it has a long way to go before unseating the traditional press release (enhanced for the digital age, of course) as a source of local news content.

The basketball court of public opinion

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I don’t follow college basketball (people, I went to Georgia!) so I missed this story when it broke over the weekend. I heard the tail end of an ESPN radio show in the car that alluded to a dust-up between the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball coach, Jim Calhoun, and freelance reporter Ken Krayeske. The topic was Calhoun’s $1.6 million salary as a state employee. Check it out:

Most of the callers on the radio show were defending Calhoun. One caller stated that while he didn’t have a problem with Calhoun’s salary, he had a huge problem with the arrogant and insolent way that he addressed the question. I’m guessing this may not be the first time those two adjectives have been used to describe Calhoun.

Krayeske is apparently a bit of a rabbel-rouser and his “freelance journalism” has gotten him in trouble in the past. To be fair to Calhoun, I don’t think the press conference was an appropriate place to ambush him. But to tell a reporter to shut-up and call him stupid? Hello? That even trumps OSU’s Mike Gundy (“I’m a MAN! I’m 40!”).

Organizations have a responsibility to media train anyone who might step in front of a camera and represent them. For universities with big-time athletic programs, that means coaches and sometimes their star players. I don’t know if UConn has put Calhoun through media training. I’d like to think that with as high-profile a basketball program as the school has, it would have done so. But Calhoun was clearly ruffled and reacted in about the worst way possible. He was rude and insulting. He started throwing out numbers to back up his point, and they didn’t quite add up. He and the university are now going to have to backtrack, apologize, and commence serious damage control.

Media training can’t be a one-time event: people get better, more comfortable, and more able to think on their feet by practicing over and over again. The more comfortable they are, the calmer they’ll remain when the tough questions come out or the awkward situations arise. Put them in front of a camera a few times a year and toss mock interview questions at them. Watch it back with them and critique their answers. Anticipate tricky questions that might come up in certain situations and equip the person with some points to remember so they don’t get flustered. And repeat.

Calhoun should have stayed calm. He should have let the reporter know that he was there to talk about the team’s performance in the game that had just been played and not his salary or contract. He could have offered to sit down with the reporter at a later time in a more appropriate venue and discussed the topic.

This is basic blocking and tackling, guys. Or whatever you basketball fans call it.

More coverage from:
The Hartford Courant’s Jeff Jacobs
The Hartford Courant’s Colin McEnroe