Brass Tack #6 - Give them an interesting quote or two.

Quotes are recommended for press releases, if only to humanise them and prevent them from being little more than promotional announcements.

The trouble with many quotes is that they actually enhance that impression. The most popular opening phrase for a quote in a press release seems to be ‘I am delighted…’, as in

Managing Director, Kelly Jones says, ‘I am delighted that we have achieved our target to double our sales of fitted kitchens…’;

or

Concert organiser, Seth Simpson says, ‘I am delighted that we have persuaded the king of Delta Blues to perform at the Skinners Arms…’

It would appear that delight is a widespread feeling shared by spokespeople of organisations everywhere. The world is a delightful place!

Quotes in press releases offer the opportunity to journalists to give the impression that they have actually researched the story and spoken to someone in your organisation. It’s an illusion that is easily shattered, especially if the same quotation appears like a soundbite in every media outlet.

When including a quotation in your press release, think of these two things.

1. You are putting words in someone else’s mouth. Even if you did ask your MD to give you a quote to include in the press release, they will probably respond with ‘say something along the lines of so-and-so – I’ll leave it up to you’. This is fine but leaves open the possibility that they appear to make a public statement that can harm their reputation or even get them sued. So if someone invites you to come up with the public statement that they would have said if they’d only given it some thought, get their OK before the release goes out.

2. Quotes are meant to be transcripts of spoken words (even if they are actually made up). So do at least try to write them as if they were spontaneous, spoken statements rather than extensions of management-speak wrapped up in quotation marks. Would your spokesperson really scintillate as a conversationalist with phrases like, ‘This new policy is a manifestation of our commitment to remain at the cutting edge…’?

The University of Central Lancashire offers some useful advice to journalists on phrasing and setting out quotes. It’s equally valid for a PR seeking to convince journalists that here’s is a story worth running.

Filed under:
media relations       press quotes      press release      journalists     University of Central Lancashire

Brass Tack #5 - Tell the story simply

‘The news’ may present itself as a reliable and factual account of what is happening out there in the ‘real world’. However, news items tend to be short pieces of information that are easy to consume and understand and it is clearly impossible for such an item to reproduce ‘reality’ with all its complexities, contexts and interpretative nuances.

Therefore, what the news actually does is to tell isolated, fragmented stories of events that have happened / are happening and then leaves it to its readers, viewers and listeners to make sense of it, discuss it or ignore it.

This means that if you want your story to become news, you must find a simple way of telling it. To achieve this, one piece of advice that is most frequently given is to ensure that the story provides answers to the five W questions: What’s happening? Who’s involved? Where? When? and Why? (Other accounts also slip in an H for How?)

In theory, this means it is possible to tell the story in one or two sentences:

What happened?) A toddler was rescued from a well (Who?) by a passing dog walker (Where?) in the grounds of Hockley Hall
(When?) last night (Why?) after a game of hide-and-seek
went drastically wrong.

Clearly, in this example, more details are needed to ‘flesh out’ the story from these ‘bare bones’ – but that’s how news stories work. While a detective story writer might leave it to the last page before revealing ‘whodunnit’, a journalist often starts with the punch line and then fills out the story with detail, context, background, quotes, with each paragraph providing more and more redundant information. If you don’t believe me, ask Walter Cronkite.

This isn’t because journalists are backward-thinking people. It’s to make life easy for sub-editors who may want to reduce a 200-word story to 175 words to fit the space on the page. Rather than re-write the story, all they have to do is lop off the last couple of paragraphs and the story will still make sense.

There’s a further practical benefit for a press release that can get the 5Ws across in the first sentence or two before ‘filling out’ the story: it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to impress the editor that here’s a story worth covering.

A good press release works in much the same way as a good CV. It shouldn’t be more than two sides of A4 and if it fails to impress in the top half of the first side, the rest of it won’t get read.

Filed under:
media relations       news narrative      press release     Walter Cronkite      journalists

Brass Tack #4 - Leave clever headlines to the experts.

Newspaper sub-editors (at least some of them) are very good at writing eye-catching, cutely phrased headlines. We may think of some headlines as excruciating but they are part of the fabric of popular culture.

Headlines are a little like kitsch. At one level they are all awful but look closer and you can distinguish 'good-awful' from 'god-awful'. Sub-editors aspire to the former and do so with the knowledge of their readership and house style of their publication.

They will apply various rhetorical devices, such as puns (‘Cat burglar commits the purrfect crime’; ‘Ice cream firm earns lots of lolly’), alliteration (‘Birmingham Balti business is booming’, ‘Silver surfers score success’), assonance (‘Ladies lay waste to garden fete’), references to well-known catch-phrases (‘Bish bash bosh – make more dosh’) and other linguistic techniques to ensure the message jumps from the page to engage their readers' interest.

That’s what sub-editors are trained to do. All you need to do is provide then with a blank canvas to work on - a simple headline that makes it abundantly clear what the story is about, e.g. ‘Pupils raise funds for school swimming pool’, and leave it to the subs to come up with ‘Students splash out’.

Filed under:
media relations       headlines      press release     rhetoric      journalists

Brass Tack #3 - Press releases are still popular with journalists...

...at least, well-written and well-presented press releases that make their lives easier. No-one knows the exact number, but the destiny of something like nine out of ten press releases is shredder-fodder. Journalists receive so many that only the best will get considered.

Bear in mind that busy journalists have short attention spans. If your press release fails to convey its potential for a good news story within the first few lines, the chances are that the journalist will not read further. There just isn't time. And there are too many other press releases clamouring for attention.

It’s therefore surprising how many badly written, poorly presented press releases that don’t have an interesting story to tell are still sent to newsrooms. Reduce your chances of rejection by presenting your story in a simple and well-organised press release that contains all of the following information:

• who you are
• the date of the story
• the date (and if necessary, the time) that the story may be available to the public. Most stories are for ‘immediate’ release, although a story could be ‘embargoed’, i.e. you request the news organisation not to publish it until a certain date and time. Most journalists respect embargo requests.
• a headline (but look out for Brass Tack #4)
• the story itself (I'll make further comments on this in Brass Tack #5)
• full contact details to enable them to follow up your story and ask you questions (Brass Tack #13 will say more on this)
• additional and background information not necessarily for publication but will be useful for the journalist to understand your story better (Brass Tack #18 will say more on this)

The Aimhigher Practitioner website provides a good set of guidelines on press releases. So does Taurus Public Relations.


Filed under:
media relations      news release       press release      journalists

Brass Tack #2 - Give them a hook on which to hang the story.

This is the news angle – the way into the story – and it should be clear from the first line of your press release or the first thing you say on the phone to the newsroom.

‘The annual XYZ Blues Festival is happening next weekend’ is a parish notice. But start by saying ‘Veteran Louisiana guitarist, Wild Boy Williams visits the UK for the first time in 50 years to appear at the XYZ Blues Festival…’ and the story starts to get interesting. The journalist is more likely to be hooked and reeled in.

There are plenty of hooks to choose from. Here are a few:

• Achieving a world first
• Appointing a new senior manager
• Serving the thousandth/millionth customer
• Announcing record-breaking profits
• Creating more jobs
• Introducing a greener initiative
• Hosting a visit by a celebrity
• Inventing a problem-solving product
• Praising the achievement of an employee
• Sponsoring a worthy cause
• Bringing something new and unique to the community

Click here for some more ideas.

Filed under:
media relations     news angle     journalists

Brass Tack #1 - Give them a story, not a plug.

Journalists don’t like to feel their purpose in life is to give you free advertising. They produce news and news needs to inform the world of something new, exciting, different, surprising, meaningful and relevant to its readers, viewers and listeners.

Therefore, the information you give them must have news value.‘We’re opening a holiday caravan park’ is a plug. ‘We’re challenging Jeremy Clarkson to spend a weekend in one of our caravans’ is news. (And Jeremy Clarkson accepting the challenge would be headline news!)

Much has been written by journalists and academics on the topic of news value. Many have tried to analyse it. Others say that it can’t be defined but you know it when you see it. Here’s a very basic, bottom-line definition. If you want people to know about it, it’s probably a plug. But if people find it interesting, it’s got news value.

Filed under:
media relations     news values     journalists

How to influence editors and bring joy to journalists.

Here’s a statement that has almost reached the status of glib catchphrase: ‘Advertising is what you say about yourself. PR is what others say about you’.

It’s an adage that’s meant to emphasise the role of PR as boosting reputation. But it’s often misinterpreted as ‘PR = free advertising’.

Obviously, if a journalist is convinced that your product is the greatest invention since gravity and is willing to tell the world, you have achieved an important public relations objective. The problem with news producers, however, is that they see their role as producing the news, not promoting products.

This means that if you want journalists on your side, you have to keep them happy. And newshounds are never happier than having a good juicy story to sink their teeth into.

The ideal outcome of working with the news media is for the journalist to get a great story starring you as the hero, not the villain. If you are promoting a product, launching an event or even putting across your side of the argument when someone has a grievance against you, you can vastly improve your chances of achieving this win-win situation.

Over the next few posts, I’ll be setting out twenty brass-tack principles for media relations. Follow these and journalists will appreciate the effort. Ignore them and your story will probably not make it past the shredder.

Filed under:
media relations     advertising     publicity    journalists

The great CSR con

The Economist recently reviewed Robert Reich’s book Supercapitalism in which he argues that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a ‘dangerous diversion that is undermining democracy’. The gist of Reich’s argument is that corporations will claim to be socially responsible for actions that are of benefit to their ‘bottom line’ and that, ultimately, profits will always win over altruism as a motivation for anything they do.

To illustrate – as long as people are happy to consume Golden Munchie Burgers, the company that produces them will continue to wipe out areas of rainforest the size of Warwickshire on a weekly basis to produce grazing land for methane-producing cattle in order to ensure a steady supply of beef (and other derivatives).

But as soon as consumers get wind of the impact that Golden Munchie Global Corp are having on the environment, they might not be so keen to keep munching. Indeed they might even regard the act of boycotting Golden Munchie Burger Bars as a personal stand towards helping the environment. When this point is reached – and Golden Munchie find themselves selling fewer burgers – this is the time to start convincing the consumer that the company really does care about the environment.

This is achieved by having a visible and credible CSR policy in place so that consumers can continue to munch without guilt – or even believe that in some way they are helping the environment by buying more Golden Munchie Burgers.

So why is this undermining democracy? According to the article, Reich gives two reasons.

Firstly, if the public thinks that corporations are being socially responsible, they will put less pressure on governments to do something about issues of social concern - the environment, health, wealth, education or whatever cause needs to be addressed. There will be less perceived need by voters for radical political action.

Secondly, the concept of CSR encourages politicians themselves to ‘score points’ by criticising socially irresponsible corporations, rather than take action, i.e. pass laws, to force corporations to toe the line.

Rather than present CSR as a form of enlightened self-interest – or, in a Kantian sense, an act of public duty – this argument points to CSR as an ideological sleight-of-hand. By giving the appearance of acting in the interests of society, corporations are able to justify the free-market conditions in which they operate and avoid political intervention that might get in the way of maximising profits.

This is an interesting twist on Milton Friedman’s original argument that the only social responsibility that business has is to increase profits. Friedman’s influence on Thatcher - and all that followed, and continues to follow in today’s political environment! – suggests that the free market economy is still number one in the list of solutions to all the world’s problems. And if the free market depends on the continued willingness by consumers with a conscience to munch burgers, then CSR is clearly the way forward.

Filed under:
CSR     The Economist     Robert Reich     environment    democracy    Milton Friedman    free market

Two reasons to smile…

I wasn’t sure at first whether to waste cyberspace drawing attention to this recent Daily Mail item on ‘trendy Mickey Mouse degrees’, which inevitably includes reference to Media Studies. I’ve already commented on media paranoia about courses that put them under a microscope and on individuals who trot out the usual stereotypes about Media Studies.

However I had to smile at the photo caption ‘More students are receiving first class degrees under the Labour government’. Could it really be that voting Labour makes your kids brighter? This reflects a similar view of causality as Boris Johnson’s famous claim that 'voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3'.

More cause to smile was an email I received today from a senior manager of one of Britain’s top television companies about three UCE Media Studies students who have been on work placement in different departments of that company. I quote: ‘each manager was extremely impressed and reported that they would have no hesitation in employing them right now’.

Media Studies students impress media bosses. Hmm - now there's a headline for the Daily Mail.

Filed under:
Daily Mail     Media Studies     UCE     Boris Johnson

Up-front media relations

Clarence Mitchell is the new PR representative for the embattled McCann family. Having worked with them closely as head of media monitoring for the Cabinet Office, the former BBC reporter announced to assembled journalists in the McCann’s home village of Rothley that he was giving up his role as a civil servant to work full-time for the couple.

As the supertanker of public opinion appears to be slowly turning to the idea that Kate and Gerry McCann might in some hapless way be responsible for the death of their daughter Madeleine, Mitchell’s announcement conveyed two strong messages:

1) He is wholly convinced of their innocence, to the extent that he has given up his job to support them, and
2) The media should remain focused on the need to find Madeleine, who he believes is still alive, and not to get distracted by speculation about her parents

Almost from the beginning of this sad story, commentators have noted the McCann’s own skills in media relations and their campaign to keep this as a high profile case in the news agenda. The formal announcement of a new media spokesman presents an interesting contrast to the usual tendency to keep the ‘PR process’ hidden from the public.

The strategic thinking here is that it is better to be up-front about having a PR spokesman (and one who is himself relatively ‘high profile’), than to be accused of attempting to influence the media agenda through behind-the-scenes manipulation or spin.

From a PR perspective, the thin silver lining in this dark and cloudy affair is that the story reinforces an association in the mind of the public of PR with honesty. The essence of the McCanns’ case is that they have nothing to hide – including the fact that they are using PR techniques to get their message across.

Filed under:
Clarence Mitchell     Madeleine McCann     media relations

A meme for the middle aged

Here's an example of what you might call an Internet meme that landed in my inbox recently. It appealed to the Grumpy Old Man that shares residence with my inner child!

Thought I'd pass it on to you. According to Darren Barefoot, that's what you do with memes.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a van - loose - was always great fun.

We drank water from the garden hosepipe and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendos, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We played with worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out any eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Local teams had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

The author continues with a plea to keep the meme going.

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?

Filed under:
meme     Internet meme     Darren Barefoot     blogging     viral

How to earn the trust of viewers...

Let’s add this to the resources – a transcript of Jeremy Paxman’s speech to the Annual International Television Festival.

You’d expect him to ask incisive questions – that’s his job. And he does, this time directing them to his own profession. They are not the sort of questions that he should have to ask more than once. For example:

‘Is there something rotten in the state of television, some systemic sickness, that renders it inherently dishonest?’

'What is television for?'

The questions hang in the air. Who should answer them? Step forward Channel 4 Chief, Andy Duncan who claimed two years ago that we can trust television. In the wake of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s criticism of television, his speech included the interesting claim that:

Big Brother winners are all role models in their way … because in the final analysis viewers choose people whose values they identify with and admire.

That’s a bit like Rupert Murdoch’s claim in an earlier MacTaggart Lecture that public service equals meeting market demand:

Anybody who, within the law of the land, provides a service which the public wants at a price it can afford is providing a public service.*

What does ITV Head, Michael Grade think? I’ve already referred to his recent speech to the Royal Television Society on precisely this question of honest television. He reminded delegates of their responsibility to maintain the trust of viewers, precisely because of the medium’s potential to betray that trust:

Television is an intimate, narrative medium. Its programmes - both fact and fiction - tell stories that inform and shape people’s knowledge and their views of the world around them.

How about BBC Director General, Mark Thompson? He is now requiring every programme maker to take part in training sessions on trust. He countered suggestions that this is an over-reaction in last Friday’s Guardian but also made a distinction between trusting the news and trusting the hype:

we find ourselves wrestling with the aftermath, not of an intricate piece of investigative journalism, but of a competition the first prize of which was a hoodie last worn by Sharon Osbourne's dog. Not of a serious editorial error in the actual BBC programme about the Queen - but of an error in a publicity tape.

What is at stake here is not public trust in a particular broadcasting organisation, but in television itself as a product and a professional practice – and not just TV journalism but all forms of television. Without wishing to repeat my argument that television is inherently an illusion and artificial construction of reality, it does pain me to admit that there may be some merit in Rupert Murdoch’s slightly rhetorical point:

For 50 years British television has operated on the assumption that the people could not be trusted to watch what they wanted to watch, so that it had to be controlled by like-minded people who knew what was good for us.*

Perhaps the best way for broadcasters to win back public trust is to trust the public.

But I would add this as a rider. Murdoch sees the free market as the mechanism to achieve this, rather than a ‘narrow élite, which controls British television’. Unfortunately this argument confuses popularity with quality, i.e. if ratings are high the programme must be good! Yeah right.

Instead I would make this plea to the industry: trust the public, yes, but also please credit us with some intelligence!’

* ‘Freedom in Publishing’, James McTaggart Memorial Lecture, London: News Corporation Ltd., 1989, p.4

trust    Jeremy Paxman    McTaggart Lecture     Andy Duncan    Channel 4   
Big Brother    Rupert Murdoch    Michael Grade    ITV    Mark Thompson    BBC    public service broadcasting    broadcast journalism   

Could Channel 4 Give Your Mortgage Cancer?

The excellent Strive Notes blog was quicker off the mark than me, but I must alert Screaming Headline readers to this article in Monday's Guardian.

As preparations become more feverish for the new semester of teaching, among other things, a module called Journalism in Context, I found Peter Cole's article a potentially useful resource with its characterisation of the Express and the Mail and their reflection (reinforcement?) of the values of 'Middle England'.

Coincidentally, Caroline Wilson alerted me to another link which provides a fun distraction with its random generation of Daily Mail headlines - offering further insight into the values of Britain's second biggest selling daily.

Guardian    Daily Mail    Daily Express    middle England    Peter Cole   

Sorry - you didn't get through this time...

I’m catching up again. Since my last post, television’s use of premium phone lines has been high on the news agenda. Indeed the revelations have been rocking the nation since Richard and Judy’s Channel 4 show hit the headlines in February for its You Say We Pay scam.

Not only have Channel 4, GMTV and Five found themselves in trouble – corruption has been discovered deep in the core of public service broadcasting, providing a golden opportunity for organisations who are not fans of the BBC to make life awkward for Aunty.

In the righteous environment of radio phone-ins and newspaper comment columns, it is very difficult to sustain the argument that fakery is (and always has been) a fact of life in broadcasting. But it is. It’s the nature of the beast. That presenter might appear to be looking and smiling at you but she is actually reading an autocue. That undercover documentary might be uncovering extremist views allegedly expressed by preachers in a mosque, but it’s been edited.

Just as the Big Brother house has no function in life other than to be a setting for a TV show (demonstrating the concept of ‘reality television’ as an oxymoron), just as radio phone-in discussions themselves are astro-turfed by callers who fail to announce their allegiances to vested interests and lobby groups, so the phone-in competition constitutes an ephemeral, postmodern phenomenon, borne of the need of broadcasters to convince themselves that they have an audience but of little value to most audience members themselves.

I witnessed competition fakery myself back in the 70s. I was a guest on a music radio show whose part-time presenter only had an hour to set up his programme and check his mail to see if anyone had entered the previous week’s competition. It was a usually bit of promotion – the prize would be something like free tickets to a concert by some artist desperate to summon up an audience.

On this occasion, no-one had entered. But rather then explode the myth of broadcasting as one big happy communal activity with everyone giving the radio 100% attention, the presenter chose not to announce this impressive display of apathy. ‘Give me the name of a long road round here with lots of houses’, he asked me, off air. He then announced the winner of last week’s competition as a Mr Smith of that road (no door number, of course!).

I’d completely forgotten this incident until recently when the Blue Peter exposé hit the headlines – not the fake competitor but the news that the original Petra had died as a puppy and had been replaced by a look-alike. It brought home the illusory quality of television and radio as environments that provide perfect breeding grounds for mass deception. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d superglued the duck to the skateboard.

Of course, it becomes a more serious issue when people pay premium rates for phone-in competitions after the winners have already been decided. The only surprise for me when this started to dominate the news agenda was that there were any genuine winners at all. I’d always assumed that ‘Mrs Bloggs of Bletchley’ was a fictitious figure and that anyone who actually phoned a TV show in the middle of the night in the hope of winning £250 for recognising that France is a foreign country beginning with F deserves to be ripped off.

ITV boss, Michael Grade believes that viewers’ trust is the most precious commodity of television. As unlicensed digital broadcasting provides a platform for a ragbag of tastes and ideologies, integrity becomes even more vital for the bona fide broadcaster. A bit like religion, broadcasting only works if enough people have faith.

Richard and Judy    Channel 4    GMTV    Channel Five    BBC   
premium rate phone-in    Big Brother    astroturfing    Blue Peter     Michael Grade