Category: Media training

Finding journalists sounds easy. Earlier in this series of blog entries, we looked at how big it was as a profession and realised that there were over 100,000 of them in the UK alone. Unfortunately, we also took some time to look at how ludicrous some of the pitches they receive can be.

The trick, as we established in that linked blog entry, is how to ensure you find the right journalist. First,we’d urge you not to go too scattergun. There are plenty of online services offering help finding journalists because they have a list of thousands or whatever. They will take your press release or another piece of collateral, stick it into a mass mailer and send it to literally thousands of people.

Here’s the big secret. Most of those people will indeed be journalists or some sort of media outlet. They will be able to publicise you if your release catches their attention. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to do so. The big problem is that professionals can spot these mass market things from quite a distance. They’re generally distinguished by having an “unsubscribe” button to be GDPR compliant and this tells journalists that everybody has the same story already. That makes it a great deal less appealing.

This is why we always recommend a targeted approach. Less is more, and other clichés and yes of course we know that should be “fewer” is more.

So how do you find these people and what do you approach them with?

Journalists are chatty

Ideally, a journalist should be a good listener. They should ask a question that leads to a discussion and glean insights from the speaker.

Phooey. Anyone who has met our lead trainer Guy will be well aware that a number of them can’t wait to tell you all about themselves. Fortunately, you can use this to your advantage. Follow them on Twitter and better still, check their profiles on Linkedin. This is where they will have set out their stalls professionally and the switched-on ones will make their interests and the publications for which they write more than clear.

 

Also join the groups they’re likely to look at. This doesn’t mean searching for journalism groups, which are frequently packed out with people looking for the numbers for various press offices (people think journalists have researchers to find these things out for them, do they heck) and links to articles they’ve just published.

Interest groups

We recommend instead that you join groups into which you can add something useful. If you’re in manufacturing, look for manufacturing groups. If you’re in IT, join an IT group Nine times out of ten the best journalists will have joined already. Start answering questions and helping people, put the odd post up yourself; eventually it’s likely that journalists will start to approach you as a contact.

Look also at other social media. At the time of writing, Twitter has recently been acquired by Elon Musk and a lot of people are predicting its imminent demise. Our rule is that if something has been imminent for more than a month there’s a good chance it’s not going away even if its character is likely to change. Facebook can also be useful and the jury is out on Mastodon.

We’ve deliberately stuck with the more text-based networks. Many people are heavily engaged on Instagram but it’s a little trickier to engage when someone’s communication is primarily through images. Essentially, assess where your ideal journalist is likely to hang out and address that network.

Caveat: finding journalists doesn’t mean threatening them

There’s a theory among some press spokespeople and business owners that the best way to attract a journalist’s attention is to inform them you’re an advertiser and will withdraw your spending if they don’t write about you. To which we’d say no, no and for the third time, no.

Of course, there are some smaller blogs and publications that only cover the people who advertise them and if that’s a financial model that works, fine. Equally, there are opportunities for companies with deeper pockets to sponsor publications and supplements, maybe even in the national press. The readers tend to spot this after a while, though. They carry less weight than pure, earned press coverage and you’re better off in the sections people will take seriously.

It’s also true that some journalists will thoroughly enjoy winding the advertising team up by ignoring any entreaties from would-be advertisers carrying money. Commentators are mostly proud of their independence; threaten it or try to suggest it’s compromised and they are likely to walk away.

Finding journalists – which ones?

Some readers might be feeling as if they’ve been given a satnav and no direction. Here is where you find journalists. What journalists? How do you know who they are?

This is where you have to do some homework. There is no point in wanting press coverage if you’re not going to check the press out. Members of the press will be alert to people who haven’t read, watched or listened to the media they are approaching. Here are a coupleof things that have happened during lead trainer Guy‘s career:

• Working on a Guardian supplement for small and micro businesses. Guy sent a note out to get help and information on technology for small traders. One PR person sent him a pitch for a financial institution’s share trading platform. Guy said he meant small traders as in small businesses that traded things. The spokesperson wrote back and said, “These are small traders, unless you’re looking for something for Fred and his market stall!” Micro businesses like market stalls were exactly the sort of target he had in mind.
• In the same supplement, people would approach Guy with suggestions for the people page. “We are a small business and have a new director, it’s newsworthy”, they said. In nine years of publishing the small business supplement, there never was a “people page”. The people pitching clearly hadn’t looked – or had persuaded themselves there was such a page.

Your first job, if you want to target a publication, is to look at the publication itself. Check the masthead, the credits section where you’ll find the editor, the features editor, the news editor, all those people. Find them on LinkedIn.

Finding journalists then sending something

Let’s say you now know who you need to approach. You want to send them something, information, for example. You’ve located them, their email is on the masthead. So what do you do next?

There are different approaches and you need to keep an eye on what works. You also need to consider what feels comfortable to you personally. The easiest thing, you’d think, is to send a quick email. My company is doing X, we think it’s important because Y, would you like a chat? That can work sometimes.

The more traditional approach is the press release, which consists of:

1. Snappy and meaningful (not “clever”) headline
2. Subtitle expanding on why the headline is important
3. Intro paragraph with who, what, when, where, why
4. More detail in following short paragraphs but make sure the journalist gets the gist if they only glance through the first paragraph
5. Contact details, who to ask for pictures and further quotes

The error some people make is to follow up with a call either too quickly or too late. Journalists are unlikely to welcome followup calls even when they’re well-timed but we have seen:

• People leaving it two weeks before calling and following up – possibly because a client is breathing down their neck.
• People hitting “send” and then calling within two minutes. Genuinely, this has happened to us.

Calling with something to say

It can be frustrating when you send your release out and nobody appears interested. Some journalists will offer feedback on what they felt went wrong. Very few of them are pleased with a call that just says “I wanted to check you got my press release” although a few people still put those calls in.

If you’re convinced your announcement was newsworthy then it can be worth a followup call but first, be prepared for a rebuff; second, try to avoid asking whether the release arrived. “Yes” and a hangup is a possibility. “Did it bounce back?” tells you that they think you know whether the release got through and they’re not going to engage. There is a way to avoid these outcomes.

Suppose you send a release out about this inexpensive new smartphone you’ve made because you are convinced people are spending too much money. Your call might go: hello, that press release I sent about the Cheapophone, we’ve now struck a deal with X mobile phone network to sell it.” Or “We now have a customer who’s adopted them for her business and she’s willing to talk.” Or “We’ve just heard a major technology analyst has rated us in the top quadrant” or something.

It could be anything but try never to be as bland as “did you get my press release?” It’s too easy to terminate the call.

Something we focus on during our workshops is media drawbacks. Of course, we are pro media and in an earlier blog entry we outlined why talking to the media can be a really good idea.

It’s just that it won’t serve you well if you grab every opportunity that crops up. It might be that having multiple opportunities sounds like a pipe dream for the moment but if you start to gain a bit of profile they can arrive quite quickly.

Here are some reasons not to engage that you might want to consider.

• The opportunity isn’t right or you can’t stand the publication that’s approached you. It happens. It’s 1985, you’re a female entrepreneur whose business is doing really well and the Sun wants to run a profile on you but you’re aware that this paper sells itself on the strength of topless women on page 3. You’d rather not take part.
• It’s 1997. Your business has grown and is doing well. The Guardian wants to speak to you but it’s so rabidly left wing and really doesn’t match your values.

In both of these cases the benefits are likely to outweigh media drawbacks. The first is no longer an issue as that particular feature is in the dustbin of publishing history but people still have issues with the Sun and other papers like it. Be careful. If you’re promoting your business your choice of outlet should ideally be about the readership rather than your own preferences. Likewise the second. If the right people are reading the Guardian it matters less what you think and more what you can get out of it. There are other things that can go wrong, however.

Media drawbacks and your time

The first is undoubtedly the problem of managing your time. When lead trainer Guy worked on IT trade publication MicroScope in the late eighties and early nineties there were a few marketing executives he knew he could go to for a comment on just about everything. They’d always take the call and always come up with something insightful.

He once met one of the readers who actually bought their supplies from one of his regular commentators. He said, “Oh yes, I know XX, he’s always great to talk to” – and XX’s customer came back with “I know, that’ll be why he’s never got enough time to return his bloody customers’ calls.”

There could be all sorts of reasons for not returning a difficult customer’s call. We sympathise. However, one possible reason is that XX had unintentionally focused too much of his time on working for the press rather than doing his actual job. If you don’t think you will have enough time to do your press engagements justice then you’re likely to do them badly or to start eating into time that should be spent otherwise. If it’s affordable this can be a sign that you need to expand your team. It can be quite a step, if you’re in the “growth” stage, to start taking people on whose value doesn’t feed directly into the bottom line.

Misquotes, misattributions, rephrases

Equally serious is when someone gets a quote wrong or attributes it to the wrong person. Sometimes companies like people to do that. When Guy (him again) was working on MicroScope all those years ago someone sent a press release with a contact person for followup questions. He called, took some notes and wrote the story. Before it reached publication the phone went again: it was the interviewee’s boss. The boss wanted the quotes attributed to him rather than the person to whom Guy had spoken.

There was no question of changing the content and they were puzzled when the editorial team wouldn’t co-operate. The thing was, Guy hadn’t spoken to the director in question and it was not the editorial team’s role to pretend he had. Some 30 years later he still wonders whether they appreciated the point.

Other times something is wrongly attributed or plain wrong.

Out of context

You’ll have seen many people saying they were quoted out of context. This can mean different things to different people but the best definition we’ve found is here, meaning someone has quoted only part of a sentence or at least not filled in the context to make it worthwhile. For example our main camera operator Paul might say “I could direct the next James Bond film if I had more experience of fiction and a Hollywood profile” (he’d still be pushing it but we’ll let that pass). If someone just quoted him saying “I could direct the next James Bond film” you can see how the meaning changes completely.

You have the right to complain if a journalist does this to you. What’s more difficult is when people say they were quoted out of context and they actually mean “I wish I hadn’t said that”. Try not to be that person! It can be worth having someone in the interview or on the call with you as a sanity checker. Never mind that the journalist resists – you don’t work for the journalist.

Rephrases

Sometimes a journalist will rewrite something into their own vernacular. This can be particularly useful when you’re speaking to a journalist from a different culture. When Guy launched his first social media book in 2009 (don’t even Google, it’s a decade and a half out of date) he received an invitation to go to Malaysia and speak at a conference. He did so and as part of the publicity a newspaper came and interviewed him. His quotes, when they came out, didn’t capture his voice at all. They were full of “wow” and “oh boy” – he was sounding a lot more like a Malaysian man than a Brit with jet lag.

However, it’s not worth getting hung up on those details. The substance was right. They even got his favourite gig right: they wanted some local colour so asked him which concert he’d enjoyed most. He said Paul McCartney and the reporter said “Wow”, no, really she did, “In the sixties with the Beatles?” Guy was a year old when they played their last gig but we’ll let that pass. The point is that these little rephrase didn’t damage the sense.

The danger is that if you’re incoherent, long and rambly or if you mumble, the journalist will have to compress what you said into a sentence. This is where you risk your quote turning into what they think you meant rather than what you actually said. Be careful to think before you speak and ensure you stop firmly rather than tail off wherever possible.

Plain wrong

The other risk is that a journalist will misunderstand and put something in that’s a load of old nonsense. Most often this will be based on a genuine misunderstanding. In her very earliest days as a journalist one of our colleagues asked a company for their turnover. They said £40,000 (that’s “sales” to international readers and for context this was 1989) so she reported it – but found they were unsurprisingly unimpressed when she didn’t make it clear that this was the monthly rather than annual figure.

Mishearings and misunderstandings are entirely possible. If possible, when you feel you’ve been misquoted or there is a misrepresentation due to a factual error, it’s worth getting someone else to put the call in or send the email. You might be feeling vulnerable or that your job is at risk. This could mean you are concerned your family home is in danger.

This in turn means you’re possibly the worst person to get involved. You’re angry and anxious. The vast majority of the time, the journalist or editor will want to remove any inaccuracies as quickly as possible, It can be much easier if someone else puts the request in.

It’s still worth it

These media drawbacks shouldn’t put you off but you need to be aware of them. There is a huge competitive edge to be gained from mindshare and branding when you talk to the media; customers thinking they want service or item A and your name popping into their head immediately will help you grow the business enormously. Just understand that things can go wrong. You can end up as a full-time media spokesperson when you have a company to run or you can use an external PR company (or both as you grow) – it’s always worth having some sort of expertise backing you up.

Media messaging is a bit of a dark art when it comes to interviews. The message we put into that opening sentence, for example, was “dark art”. It’s as if a media training company had a vested interest in making this stuff seem difficult.

A lot of our clients have difficulties with it, though, so it’s worth spending a little time on it. The truth is immutable, they say. They will just be honest about what’s going on, state their position or flog their story (whichever is the greater) and that will be it.

Which is interesting. It’s not going to work, though. The thing about media messaging is that it can vary according to which media you happen to be speaking with. That’s not a matter of being deliberately tricky, it’s simple realism.

Let’s take a simple example. Say you were a computer manufacturer and you’d done something revolutionary like released a new computer. (We can’t tell you how many times that was touted as something surprising when Guy worked for the trade press in the technology sector). Here are some possible scenarios and some relevant messaging.

The national press

You’re going for a big announcement here so you need the broad brush approach. Focusing as much on the brand as the technology, you’ll probably need to put messages out there as simply as possible to ensure people understand this is going to make their lives better. You can’t count on readers having in-depth technical knowledge so you’ll need to keep it relatively simple. Pick a few distinctive things about your computer, state them a few times and hope the journalist goes with what you want them to write. If you make it interesting enough and you haven’t done anything more interesting like robbed a bank. they’ll probably go with it.

The trade-only press

This is where Guy started out many years ago. He went in not knowing much about computers (it was the 1980s, only the obsessive knew anything about computers) but soon realised he didn’t have to. He wasn’t expected to be asking about the technology because the publication in which he’d got his first journalism job, called MicroScope, went to computer dealers only.

And computer dealers in the 1980s didn’t much care what a computer did. The good ones cared that it worked. No, they were more interested in where they could get stock, what percentage mark-up they should expect, whether they needed to qualify as dealers and whether there would be any joint marketing budget available from the manufacturer. Cynical? No, this is just targeted.  You just had to know what the reader needed and make sure you gave it to them. Messaging for this publication and its modern equivalents would need to be very financial.

The tech press

Confusingly, a lot of public relations people refer to the technology press as the Trade Press as well. So publications like Computing would be referred to as “trades” – to make it simpler we’re going to refer to them as the tech press.

The readers tend to be the highly technically literate. You can go in deeper. You may also want to explore how the technology fits into a large enterprise and whether there are any implications for the tech support people who might be in an organisation. Your messaging will therefore be a lot more complex than it might have been for the more basic national press interview and the tech press won’t give two hoots about margins the dealers are earning unless you have evidence that they are fleecing the buyers.

Tailoring your media messaging for the readers

The publications and the knowledge the journalists have are only one side of the thing. The other is understanding the readers. The journalist should understand who he or she is writing for of course; there are other ways you can make sure your messaging is right for them.

The lifestyler

Let’s stick with the computer example. Is the technology fashionable, does it carry status? The more style-conscious readers will want to hear about this, although if you’re not selling Apple then they might take some persuading that it’s a fashion item.

The hobbyist

This one speaks for itself. Are the readers the sort of people who will go around trying to make their own computer? Can yours be part of a larger system somehow? If your target publication has a lot of those readers you’ll want to play that message up above all others.

You can expand the pool as much as you like. As well as the hobbyist you might have the bargain hunter, the maverick (who’ll want to hear something about why your computer will want to make them look a bit of a rebel), the family person who’ll want to see how the system fits into their home – the list is as long as you want it to be.

It’s worth thinking all this through before going into an interview because going in with the same information for everybody is ultimately a bit insulting and leaves you with a very bland message. Think of a musician with a new album; if they gave the same details and information to the nationals as they did to a specialist guitar magazine, one of them would find it inappropriate and the interview would probably get spiked.

Next steps

The other major thing you need to decide is what you want the readers to do next. A decent clipping in a major publication is a fine thing and may well do something for you if your aim is solely for mindshare and branding. This isn’t going to work for everybody so it’s worth thinking about what you need the reader, the viewer, the listener to do next.

Speaking with purpose

For example if you’re in a growing business you might be looking for your next round of financing. This will mean targeting the sort of publication the investor community is going to read but then preparing messages about financial solidity, the reliability of your board and maybe something about growth in your market overall.

If you wanted people to be more aware of your brand then you’re likely to be putting more general messages out. These are likely to focus on what you might call thought leadership; you’ll be looking for insights to offer that establish you as experienced and knowledgable and you won’t be pushing the sales message particularly hard (let’s be completely transparent, if we’re getting this right then you’re reading an example of precisely that at the moment).

You might just want an increase in sales. To make the best of your chances you’d first target a publication that your market looks at before buying things and then prepare messages on value, time saved, professionalism, or whatever it is that motivates people to buy from you next time they’re in the market.

Try to remember an opportunity for an interview is one thing but there are other steps. The fact that you are an expert in your market and your business probably means you’ll know more than a journalist is going to be able to take in. You have the right – you might say the obligation – to select the parts that are going to make a coherent story.

The fictional example that makes the point

It’s actually been parodied brilliantly in the film, “Notting Hill”. Hugh Grant’s character needs to speak to Julia Roberts so he poses as a reporter from the nearest publication he spots. He claims to be from “Horse and Hound” magazine and asks whether there are any horses in the film. The answer is no so he asks about hounds. The riposte (apologies if you haven’t seen it) is that it’s set on a submarine.

Obviously, this is an exaggeration but it’s how you need to think if you’re a spokesperson for your business. Ask what this particular publication needs and what you want its readers to do next; frame your responses around that and you should stand a chance of getting some useful coverage.

Final thought: don’t mention messaging

One of the worst pitches our founder Guy ever had was when he was writing an article and had sent a plea for help and experts out. There were, as always, many excellent replies. One PR executive, however, sent a note saying “let me share our messaging with you”.

Messaging is a PR term that will basically alert the journalist to the fact that they’re getting something that isn’t spontaneous, it’s prepared and worked on. That might be fine in your view but the media outlets aren’t going to be all that excited about your telling us that we’re basically fitting into your plans. Let’s put it another way: if you were to approach a new client or prospect, would you tell them your offering will work because of the value it offers and the fit with their requirements or would you say “I’m delighted you got in touch because I need to hit my monthly sales target”? Which might also be true!

Tell us you have thoughts, tell us you have a spokesperson or tell us you have insights by all means – just keep the word “messaging” for internal use.

Do you need help with your messaging or interview technique? Our team can help – get in touch and we’ll talk.