What to do when a journo won’t take your calls…

So, imagine the scene…

You’ve sent your shiny, perfectly-formed, stunningly-interesting press release to all your target Press. Not a single irrelevant media contact has been emailed. You have absolute confidence in the power of the story contained within your PR correspondence.

And then?

Nothing, nadda, zilch. Three days pass and not a single, salutory email or phone call from any of the contacted editors.

What next?

Don’t fret, panic or take it personally.

I receive 250 emails per day from company prs, in-house marketers and PR Agencies dealing on behalf of clients across the UK. And roughly 10% of them are worth reading. As in, worth taking a closer look because they are actually, fundamentally newsworthy and may interest my readerships. No sales pitches, PR spin, irrelevant waffle, just good old-fashioned News.

So, are you being honest with yourself?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is the press release just a poorly-worded sales effort?

2. Is it really relevant to the target readership?

3. Is it about current or upcoming News in the business, or a re-hashed story from 3 months ago?

4. Is the accompanying image of appropriate quality for the publication or online portal?

5. Is the editorial well-written, punchy and without waffle – does it succinctly tell the story?

6. Have I given the press release to a third party to check before emailing it to the Press?

If you can pass the above questions, and still no contact from the Press, be patient. Be persistent. Keep sending the right PR, in the right format, at the right time, and within our deadlines. We’ll get to it eventually.

Oh – and never, ever, ever ring us to see if we’ve recieved it. You’ll often find an expletive offends.

Bristol Media firm commits commercial suicide…

…or, at least, according to a contact of mine, in Bristol at the moment a publishing house is just about to.

Heard through the grapevine of a Bristol-based business magazine publishing house today which has made redundant its editorial department. Nothing new there, we’ve seen hundreds of UK journalists made redundant in the last six months.

But here’s the kicker.

The magazines are still, allegedly, to be published. Each and every month. But who, you may ask, is going to provide the content for the two monthly 94-page, sector-leading, business to business magazines? According to my contact, the Managing Director is doing it. A highly-trained…salesman, no less. The competing magazines must be rubbing their hands with glee today.

Yep, this publishing firm – in the middle of the Media Gem of the South West that is Bristol, with its increasing commercial community, excellent workforce availability and proximity to the business hubs of London, Birmingham and Manchester – is going to lose its full-time editorial staff and write the copy for its publications. In-house. By the very own MD’s hands. Without any training or journalistic knowledge. Using press releases only. No exclusives. No researched features. Oh dear.

Myself and my contact have placed a sweepstake – he reckons the firm will go down in six months. I estimate three. Your guess?

A Golden Era for Journalism?

Good debate raised today from this article, concerning the so-called Golden Era of journalism in which we apparently find ourselves, according to Adrianna Huffington. It is, on balance, a Golden Era for news consumers, as she points out, rather than the editorial staff across newsrooms globally who are seeing their resources, salaries and in some cases livelihoods, slashed.

Whilst I agree that its never been easier for news consumers to find their editorial – with the plethora of online and offline sources opening up weekly – the pressures being placed on journalists in both traditional newsrooms and online hubs is increasing – not least because of the apparent inability for advertising sales staff to cope with reduced interest from advertisers in newspapers and magazines. Hundreds of thousands of journalists made redundant, their fates sealed by ineffective sales guys…or so it seems.

I am a huge advocate of the ‘take charge, stop moaning and make the changes’ approach.

Yes, of course, it is hard to retain this attitude when your Boss tells you you’re being given the chop, the fact remains that editorial must work harder with advertising departments to find, secure and increase revenue streams. Producing great content simply is not enough anymore, as we’ve seen.

How to more fully integrate editorial and advertising functions remains the biggest crux in a content-based organisation, and unless the senior managers start to realise they are two different functions in the business, we’re all screwed. Back to basics!

Passionate blogging vs. professional reportage: where next?

Interesting article here today.

The various differences between bloggers and journalists are outlined in a clear, effective and rounded way. I agree with the huge impact of blogging with passion, versus the professional training and inputs instead given as a journo.

But, to be fair, I believe alot of quality journalism in the UK is also written with great passion too. There is a place in our contemporary media landscape for both to co-exist.

Possibly the most interesting development for me, as a print journalist-trained Editor who also blogs, has been to observe the switch to blogging by the media. Just look at the newspaper presences online to see evidence of this.

Ultimately in the News market, as in all other market, the customer demand drives products and services. If the media don’t respond to reader demands for content in more accessible ways, the readership migrates elsewhere. Why else, do you think, that so many regionals have shut up shop? Because their outdated business models cannot sustain them.

The evolving media models over the next 18 months will either preserve certain publications, or consign them to the editorial graveyard in the sky…I, for one, hope the larger UK newspaper publishers wake up and start treating their newsrooms as a vitally-important resource, rather than a financial liability.

Maybe the bloggers will win the demand for content in the end. But where will the journos go?

Top 10 ways to win media attention

Here’s a starting point: if I had to define the Top 10 things to remember in delivering good PR to the media, they would be:

1. Remember it is the story that counts, not the ego

2. The editor is not your pal, he is a media professional looking for editorial of interest to a discerning and fussy readership

3. Your PR will be competing with many other stories and news items hourly

4. Make sure you have something different, interesting and unique to offer

5. Get to know your target publications and media thoroughly before you make any direct PR-based contact

6. If your PR gets knocked back the first time, deal with it. Be persistent and take a different angle next time

7. Make sure you supply outstanding images with all PR submitted

8. Remember that there are different rules of media engagement for online vs. offline media

9. PR yourself widely, across as many sources, publications, forums, blogs, tweets as possible

10. Get ready to deliver consistent, month-after-month PR. One-off hits usually under-deliver

Flagship magazines falling like flu victims

As the future of Earth’s population seems in peril this week, so the world of publishing mirrors the trials and tribulations here today in another fight for survival. Flagship business magazine Portfolio is facing the chop, less than two years after a £68 million global launch.

The glossy publication, with a respectable readership figure of more than 410,000 has been unable to fight off the swarming mass of rival titles such as Forbes, Fortune and Business Week in the States. A sad day for business-to-business publishing indeed.

Questions will undoubtedly be raised as to the future fortunes of Wired UK, launched by the same publisher last month. Wondering, here, whether any offline publications will survive the ravages of online devleopments over the next decade…marching ahead with all the virulence of the current flu virus.

You toss the coin, I’m calling Heads for the internet I think.

Failing media machine? The Internet won’t save you!

Interesting story here regarding a Finnish newspaper which has seen revenues falling since they ditched the printed version and published solely online.

It reminds us that readers go for strong content as the main reason they engage with a publication. And a hugely-relevant point is made in the story: a reader may be with the online product for one and a half minutes, compared to an hour and a half spend with the printed version. Tells us something about brand loyalty in modern readerships, perhaps?

If the seemingly-doomed media machine is entering the equivalent of a publishing Ice Age, it looks as if the Internet may not necessarily represent the Dawn of a new online Sun, after all…

I would favour a mix of online and offline: perhaps in the format of a regularly-updated, funky, modern, usable online version, with print-on-demand versions for subscribers still keen to physically handle the publication.

Twitter re-defines newsroom practice

Well, according to this story, it could well be the case.

According to journalism.co.uk, a new service called Breaking Tweets looks set to re-define the news-gathering landscape for newsrooms. The power of Twitter has been well-documented in the last 12 months, and the inevitable push for constantly updated content via Twitter has had a huge impact already on the way the Media collates and issues news.

Whether online editors will welcome this source of distribution remains a moot point, of course, but the power of the consumer is going to push for more interactivity with the Twitter platform, as American audiences will attest.

If the latest, up-to-date, accurate and timely information is winging its way to readerships via professionally researched, written and evaluated journalism, it can only be a good thing.

If just another example of poorly-conceived citizen journalism, the wringing of hands in newsrooms will cover the UK!

We’ll see. You toss a coin, I call heads for the journos…

How to successfully pitch an Editor

We’ve seen some seriously-awful examples in the last 6 months of how not to pitch the press.

So, here’s a top 10 list of the proper way to do it:

1. Read the publication – cover to cover, online and offline and get to know the style, content, tone and issues discussed

2. Make sure your content is emailed to the relevant editorial contact well before the deadline you’re pitching

3. Only speak to an Editor if you are pitching an exclusive idea to them

4. Never, ever, ever ring an Editor to ask if they received a press release and if it is of interest

5. Submit all images at 300dpi resolution – works well for both newspapers and magazines

6. Offer to provide regular content columns and commentaries if the Editor is receptive to this form of editorial

7. Don’t contact an Editor on deadline day

8. Prove you understand media relations basics by submitting exactly what is required, on time, without fuss

9. Put yourself in the Editor’s shoes – consider their readership at all times, not your PR and commercial aims

10. Remember that your pitch is one of hundreds an Editor receives – have something unusual, unique, interesting to add.

Media hamsters running round the same wheel it appears…

Interesting to see this story from the bowels of Northcliffe today, regarding the launch of www.southwestbusiness.co.uk in both offline and online versions.

In true Northcliffe strategy, the exsiting offline journalists will pull together the daily and online News from their regular news-gathering, whilst the magazine will cater for features and regional analysis. Well, that’s the theory.

I recall back in the late 90s when I was part of an editorial team receiving the redundancy axe from the Bristol Evening Post, and being told that our department was being reduced in a ‘cost-saving exercise’ from the number-crunchers in London. We were deliveirng a mix of online and offline editorial then, too.

The thing which surprised me most at the time was the speed with which editorial staff were dispatched on the allegedly-unprofitable thisis.co.uk range of regional sites – even though there were only a skeleton staff of journalists and well-performing ad sales guys working on the projects across the regions at the time.

And now, in their wisdom, the Northcliffe Management are trying pretty much exactly the same business model, some 10 years later, except over-working already over-worked regional journos trying to juggle offline and online news-gathering roles. If I were a newspaper journo being given additional online balls to juggle, I would be decidely unimpressed today. Good luck Andy Merrell!

What will the result be? If the Management utilise their usual people-skills, we can expect to see a rash of further editorial cuts in approximatley 12 weeks. Tighten your belts and get your CVs out there editors! The bell is tolling.

I remain confused as to how it can be expected for a traditional, old-school business model to work for a contemporary online and offline newspaper mix? Am I missing something?!

Surely, it’s time to wake up and deliver relevant solutions for the thousands of media folk living and working in the midst of totally ineffective and out-dated Management delivery models.