By Nicki Bourlioufas
Reporters and editors these days aren’t all what they used to be. You’ve probably noticed that news is becoming more generic despite the proliferation of publishers, news websites and other content providers purporting to publish ‘news’.
Indeed, despite the burgeoning number of social media and online news outlets, the same information regularly appears across websites. There’s more volume, but less original material, often triggered by a press release or publicity announcement or even a celebrity tour or book launch. You know when your favourite actor is on the front cover of a news magazine or all over online – he’s got a movie to promote. And many editors and reporters lap up the material. Reporters copy and paste and so, news becomes more generic. Sometimes there is no news, it’s all spin.
Indeed, some reporters have become lazy. Rather than source original material, some are used to receiving media releases in their inboxes and copying information verbatim from PR or marketing material and representing that information as news, rather than investigating the facts first.
On top of this is the proclivity by many journalists and editors to ‘match’ the competition. Too often this means that reporters and editors publish the same information that is on a competitors’ websites without actually asking whether it’s newsworthy. So there is a real sameness to much of what is represented as news.
This is, of course, a great opportunity for those of us who work in public relations who have previously worked in the media ourselves. We know what will catch the eyes of editors and reporters. I can create news by seizing on little-known facts and asking questions that other reporters don’t think to ask.
By sculpting a news story in a media release with newsworthy information, I can then take the next step and set the news agenda. It’s all a matter of writing a media release like a news story with a catchy headline and newsworthy information.
So the PR’s expertise, or at least my own, comes through in two key ways. Firstly, writing like a reporter. Secondly, gathering, interpreting and publishing newsworthy information that I verify as much as possible from third party sources, even as I quote my clients.
So if you are shopping around for a PR professional, it’s worth doing the due diligence and asking if their background is in the media. If it is, you might be getting more bang for your buck than you’d expect. No degree in PR or communications can replace the training received in a newsroom which a PR consultant trained in a newsroom can give you.