Making Your Mark With Journalists

For most wannabe spin-doctors, establishing good relationships with editors and journalists will not involve alcoholic lunches, expensive Christmas presents and other freebies. The list of publications relevant to your products and services could run into dozens – maybe hundreds. You may only actually meet a handful of journalists face to face; the editorial staff of many industrial and trade mags consists of the editor, and maybe a half share in a PA. Good heavens! They could be even busier than you are! You may speak to some of them on the phone occasionally, but much of your contact with the press will be at a distance.

By the way, gentlemen, a timely warning for the more macho among you. Lots of journalists and editors are women. Journalism is a profession in which men and women really do compete as equals – check the by-lines in any newspaper. So if someone called Caroline or Tamara phones to check something in one of your recent press releases, don’t make the fatal mistake of treating her as if she’s the Editor’s Little Helper. She could well he the editor...And we hope that all women journos will forgive us if, in these pages, we use the word ‘he’ as shorthand for ‘he/she’ when referring to members of the Fourth Estate.

Life On Planet Journo

Face to face or at arm’s length, your PR success or otherwise will rely heavily upon:

your understanding of how the press works
knowing what journalists/editors want (and don’t want!)
how to present it to them in ways that make their lives as easy as possible.

Here are some pointers.

Give Themstories

You probably judge your own business success by the level of sales or profit you or your company achieves. Journalists look at life differently. Editors may take a keen interest in their magazine’s circulation figures, but the average journalist’s career revolves around stories. There’s an old but true saying that a journalist is only as good as his last front-page story. ‘What the hell’s the story? is a frustrated cry all too often heard from an editor – and usually just before he consigns a press release to the bin.

Once you understand this elementary fact about journalists, it becomes obvious that you will make friends with them not by giving them lunches, but by giving them stories. And a good story gives you an edge in the useability stakes, because some of the stuff that arrives on editors’ desks is so awful that it can only be and usually is! – described as ‘crap copy’ (there, now you’ve learned another term of the trade).

Example: A three-page single-spaced ‘news release’ setting out your chairman’s views on the current state of the world economy (yes. it does happen!). Sending out the release may do great things for your chairman’s ego. In practice it will be a total waste of time, paper and postage, make you look a rank amateur, and hit every editorial waste-bin in Fleet Street. Why? Because unless your company is a highly successful zillion-dollar multinational, who gives a damn what your chairman thinks about the world economy? That’s right it’s not a story, and a true PR professional would have known that. You may score Brownie points with your chairman, but it’s black marks all round from all those editors whose time you have wasted.

We discuss what makes good news stories, and how to tell them, in Chapter 5, but just one more point about stories at this stage. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you haven’t got any stories to tell. You have.

Once you’ve got this need for stories firmly fixed in your mind, you will (hopefully) start looking at everything your company does in terms of news stories. A high-value or interesting customer order, the development of a new and clever widget, the appointment of a new customer-facing executive or distributor, a move into new premises, showing at a trade exhibition – they’re all potential news stories. And if you still claim that your organisation hasn’t got any, maybe you should ask yourself why you are working for a bunch of no-hopers that sits there doing nothing.