Trust won’t build itself!
Investing in reliable professional relationships will make you more effective in your work. When your contacts see you as someone who is reasonable and flexible, you gain credibility and trust. When those qualities are present in a communicator-journalist relationships, there’s more room to discuss context and nuance. This improves the quality and accuracy of news reporting.
Pitch perfect
What should you consider when pitching stories to a journalist? How can you tell if the story is newsworthy? Is there a way to add news value to my pitch?
Don’t be a bigfoot!
When a reporter proactively reaches out to do a good news story about your company or organization, media training must not be an overriding consideration.
Hello, Is anybody home?
Many organizations maintain websites with almost no effective contact information. What I mean by that is a phone number attached to a human who will answer it, or a personal email address where someone is accountable for reading messages. Instead, institutions supply catch-all email addresses such as, mediarelations@organization.ca or webmaster@organization.com. They often come with a cute little paragraph that informs people, “this in-box is checked several times a day”. In my experience, this phrase is interpreted as “never” or “a few times a week”.
Questions in advance? Unlikely.
When someone get a journalist’s questions in advance, they can’t help but dive in and write long, comprehensive answers that look good on paper but don’t sound great when spoken aloud. They memorize fact sheets and statistics. Communications officers may be asked to prepare a binder of background information! Over-preparation can extinguish the ability to sound natural.