PR from a Journalist’s View

This is a guest post from Gerry Kiernan, a Bright One volunteer with eight years experience working at the BBC – namely the Radio Times. She has also worked as Deputy Editor of the BBC’s Ariel online and as a content producer on the BBC’s intranet. She now freelances and blogs about arts and culture at www.poptartlondon.com

“Having just started volunteering at Bright One on the Social Enterprise Mark campaign, I’d like to share some thoughts on my experience of PR in the hope that it will provide some useful tips for publicists to communicate better with journalists. I think there’s a lot we can learn from looking at things from each other’s perspectives.

As a journalist on a national magazine, publicists were always trying to get hold of me. But I was most likely to respond to approaches from those who…

• Called or emailed to tell me (succinctly!) the outline of a story, why our readers would be interested, as well as the section of the magazine they thought it might suit.

• If they also mentioned one or more unusual angles to the story then they’d be ahead of the game

The main mistakes PRs made when approaching me were:

• Not knowing anything about the magazine or the readership. Just because a client thinks it would be great to get a story in x magazine/newspaper/website, it doesn’t mean a journalist will think it’s something their readers would enjoy.
• If a journalist says the story isn’t suitable believe them, and move on. There’s nothing worse than being hassled daily by someone flogging a story that would not suit the publication.
• Mass-mailing a press release that leaves questions unanswered. Be prepared to answer the six questions any good journo would ask – who, what, when, where, why, how? If a PR doesn’t have these basic facts at their fingertips, then I’m less likely to trust them and their story.

That said, if you do have a great story but just can’t seem to get journalists interested, don’t give up straight away..

• Try to tailor the story to your target publication by pulling out an aspect that would interest their readers. Bear in mind that sometimes an ace story might still not suit every publication. For instance NME readers wouldn’t give a damn about Bill Gates learning the guitar for a solo gig even though your client might think otherwise. However, if a journalist says the story is great but there isn’t enough room in the magazine or newspaper, it’s definitely worth keeping in contact.
• When stories drop out at the last minute, journalists are often casting around in desperation for a replacement to fill the page. And you just might happen to email or call at the right moment to save the day.

Finally I’d advise PRs to be creative. I think social media is definitely changing the relationship between journalists and PRs. Publicists have less control, certainly in the celebrity world, over what their clients post on Twitter and Facebook, unless their accounts are being closely managed or ghost-written. Journalists scan social media for stories or case studies, thereby cutting out publicists. Conversely, having been involved in a PR campaign using social media at Bright One, I’ve now seen how valuable social media can be for getting messages out in different ways from blogs to Facebook. I’d like to think that social media is an added extra for both PRs and journalists to make use of. And if the two camps befriend each other through it and swap information, so much the better.”