Both PR professionals and reporters will concur that developing meaningful connections with journalists differs greatly from dealing with them. Knowing who is significant to you and what subjects matter to journalists will help you to develop rapport with them.
Every day, some reporters get more than fifty proposals from various companies fighting for their interest. This implies that they just lack time to dedicate to news or subjects irrelevant for their profession, or worse, divert their attention from it. Their work is to unearth stories; so, they will be more likely to collaborate with people and companies that simplify that process.
Too frequently, PR turns into a game of tossing every news item or achievement a firm has at the symbolic wall in search of anything to stick on. However, this strategy not only opposes a company’s capacity to build enduring connections with reporters. It can eventually burn bridges—that is, qualify you for their “do not call” list.
Looking to build a network of reporters that closely knows your brand and offers, regularly contacts you about your forthcoming news and announcements, and looks to your executives for on-the-ground knowledge and expert analysis?
Determine the Correct Journalist for Your Sector
Companies entering media relations for the first time are sometimes shocked to realise that locating the appropriate reporters for their news typically takes much more time than actually contacting those reporters.
Go ahead and establish connections with journalists off the table without major front-end front-end effort into researching your company’s areas of interest, media outlets publishing content in those areas, and the reporters working for those publications.
Journalists are not interested in learning about news or issues outside of their field of coverage, much as most people are not interested in receiving hundreds of cold calls a day from someone marketing a good or service irrelevant to them.
Having a PR agency has one of the main advantages since it provides businesses with a whole team of media experts whose task is to examine the media environment and choose suitable reporters for their needs.
For those not in this position, start by determining which magazines the decision-makers in the businesses or industries you wish to target read in addition to your organisation and its executives. From there, compile a list of the reporters for those magazines whose pieces fit the news or story you intend to forward them.
Network, if at all feasible
While you can establish rapport with reporters over phone and email, in-person meetings will always propel you farther. Particularly when CEOs and spokesmen can participate for an in-person meeting over coffee or at an event, reporters may better capture their personality and engage in dialogue absent from a Zoom conference.
Even in remote-first settings, these are some of the finest strategies to build relationships with journalists.
Go to conferences, trade exhibitions, industry events.
The sheer number of rivals fighting for the same journalists’ attention as your brand makes events and tradeshows appear daunting. Since journalists only spend a limited amount of time at these events, businesses must schedule time ahead.
A few weeks before the event, reach out to media attendees to distribute any news and arrange in-person sit-downs with corporate officials. Usually, these events will have a list of media covering that they forward to sponsors and participants in advance. And if the time slots for reporters are already occupied, arrange a follow-up interview following the event.
Join Networking Groups Specifically Designed for Journalists
Usually more than not, reporters are eager to collaborate with firms directly and PR experts to help develop the stories they are already scheduled for.
One approach of accomplishing this is through journalist-specific networking forums whereby reporters may post about the material they are preparing and where they might require an additional viewpoint or two to assist flesh out the work. This offers businesses a great chance to directly go to the source and offer their professional analysis on subjects already of interest to reporters.
Make Use of Personal Transportation
Does your business operate out of a major city like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York City? Even if not, many business leaders frequently have to travel to these places for business (or entertainment) and can spend their time there developing rapport with reporters. Find out which reporters cover these areas, then sort through the ones that apply to your company. Have your PR team—or the executive—reach out to schedule a quick meet-and-greet over coffee or in an office.
Another smart tactic is inviting local reporters to any activities your business is planning that fit the media (and won’t reveal any work or information you aren’t yet ready to distribute). Like any media plan, the secret here is knowing who you are contacting and that they live close by.
Investigate & Get Ready
More study is required even if a comprehensive list of reporters has been developed and it is time to begin contacting them. Companies will have a far higher chance of getting their foot in the door with a particular journalist if they are closely familiar with what that journalist has lately showed an interest in—and maybe more crucially, what they are not interested in.
Often the key to developing enduring, significant relationships that businesses can review again and time again is incorporating this extra degree of care into every correspondence with journalists.
Go Over Their Previous Work
Apart from routinely reading articles by journalists, following them on social media helps one to learn about topics outside of their published works. Most reporters share relevant ideas and promote their material on Twitter. Learning about journalists’s background, schooling, and other subjects not covered in their professional biography may also be done on LinkedIn.
Although email and phone are two of the most often used channels of contact with reporters, interacting with their material on social media and other platforms can also initiate a good rapport with them.
Construct a gripping narrative.
Every communication with journalists should so centre storytelling since it is the essence of their work. Paint a picture of the possibility for a bigger audience to inspire people’s imaginations rather than presenting your business through the prism of features and functionalities that other businesses might be emphasising too.
As you assemble a gripping narrative, consider these questions: For consumers, what value does your good provide? How will it either simplify or improve life? How does it relate to the current dialogues your audience is participating in?
This kind of communication helps even the most routine business news to become a far more interesting narrative.
Customise Your Pitch to Correspondence Journalist Interests
Media pitches are not like mass email blasts delivering the same generic text to every recipient. Businesses who use this strategy sometimes have to spend more time following up on hundreds of proposals to get a single response. Companies will get a far better reaction to their outreach the first time around by spending this time customising each pitch to journalists on the front end.
Remember too that reporters do not spend their whole day reading emails in order to do this. Keep proposals simple and start the narrative straight forward to honour their time and deadlines. Should the lede be buried, the journalist most likely won’t read far enough to identify what it is.
Emphasise the Relevance and Originality of Your Story.
Pitches do not ask reporters to cover your story. They are a means of giving reporters insightful analysis and useful knowledge that highlights why your business especially qualified to present a narrative not seen elsewhere. Use the information gathered to determine what matters most to the journalist you are pitching to so that your media pitch directly reflects the reasons the writer ought to be interested in your story.
Write a striking subject line.
Think about how you decide what to read from among your email inbox on a Monday morning and what will be deleted immediately. Most likely, the email’s subject line led you to make that conclusion in a split second. Think now of the daily grind that reporters endure.
Before the email preview window on a computer or phone screen cuts off the remainder of the information, the subject line of an email provides somewhere between 5-7 words to tell your tale. Before choosing whether or not they will even open your pitch, much less read all the way through it, reporters will first see this.
Clear, succinct, and intriguing concepts of the tale that will run across in the pitch should be found in pitch topic lines. Are you interviewing the CEO of a big company? offering a first view of a fresh product? Declaring a funding round or a departure plan? publishing fresh studies? Tell that fast in the topic line.