Churning out press releases just for the sake of it is is probably not working. Reconsider what is newsworthy and see if you can take positive steps to produce something more likely to get published.
Back in 2008 I had perhaps the scariest moment of my life. At about 1.00am I heard a low rumbling noise followed by my house shaking, thumping and creaking for about 30 seconds as the UK’s biggest earthquake for over 20 years reached Peterborough.
I had no idea what had happened. All kinds of things raced through my mind. A plane crash? A lorry driving by? Burglars? Then I looked out the window and saw a helicopter overhead. Had it got too close to my house?
Within a couple of minutes the radio gave me the answer: people from across the UK were calling or texting in to say they had felt the earthquake too. This put my mind at rest and it was back to normality.
For a few hours the following morning the news programmes were full of earthquake reports. Until some protesters opposing the expansion of Heathrow airport climbed onto the roof of the Houses of Parliament. Suddenly this filled the airwaves, including a live interview via mobile phone with one of the rooftop activists.
That’s how fast the news agenda changes. It used to be said that today’s news is tomorrow’s chip wrapper. Now things change even faster and news can become old news in seconds.
So, what is news anyway?
For anyone involved in marketing and PR, the challenge to grab a slice of the news agenda has never been higher. Even the majority of us involved in the relatively humble world of sending press releases and editorial articles to the trade press are still facing strong competition to get column inches.
This doesn’t mean we have to come up with amazing news and stunts like climbing parliament buildings. But it does mean we have to ask ourselves whether the readers of the publication or website we want to reach will be interested in our ‘news’.
It’s so easy to get drawn into churning out press releases without sitting back and thinking ‘how can we make this as newsworthy as possible?’.
You launch a new blog. It would be easy to write a press release about this. But is it newsworthy? Not really.
But if you had guest blog posts from some leading figures in your field, it might be newsworthy. Or perhaps you could put up a deliberately controversial post to get some media interest. Suddenly a humdrum story becomes much more attractive to journalists – but you have to be the driver of that.
In a world full of earthquakes and runways, a little thought and a lot of hard work is often needed to make sure we get some space for our messages. Marketers who get caught up in meeting targets for the number of press releases they issue could sometimes focus more on content rather than quantity and achieve better results in the process.
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