Companies and their public relations representatives or agencies forget what reporters do for a living. The answer is simple: They tell stories.
However, a reporter’s idea of a story is most often considerably different than a company’s: Reporters want to tell stories that are compelling reads. Many stories issued by a company are compelling only to the company.
While the overall mantra of a public relations person may be to write a news release like a news story, they rarely do so. Often a news release may have a germ of news that could germinate to a “round-up” story in which the client or company is mentioned and quoted, but not that compelling a nugget to generate a “separate” on the company.
A “round-up” story can have a larger impact on a company’s visibility than a separate piece on the company. These stories generally comprise quotes by experts on the subject at hand and frequently these experts are more widely recognized. To tilt toward hyperbole, the Chief Executive Officer of a local company being quoted in the same story as a Fortune 50 company CEO is, in fact, a true media relations coup. And, Stern And Company effects this sort of achievement for its clients regularly.
There’s only so much space in the “news hole” and there’s what seems to be an infinite amount of competition for that “ink.”
Because Stern And Company puts itself in the reporter’s chair whenever we write a news release, we also consider whether the “general” news story alternative might be the better course for our clients. Like good reporters (and at Stern And Company, we were all reporters before entering the public relations field) we frame our stories before we start writing them. We ask ourselves:
- What’s the news? Stern And Company never buries it. We know how to write a lead. If a reporter (or editor) doesn’t know why our story’s news by the time they’ve read the first paragraph our news release (or proposal) will be dead on arrival and end up in the circular file.
- What do readers / viewers want to know? Stern And Company knows what a reporter’s want to read. Like reporters, we write first for the benefit of the reporter’s audience and the reporter’s agenda, then for that of our client’s. benefit. It’s our motto: “Serve the reporter’s agenda first.” And, if we can’t do that for a reporter with a particular public, we find a reporter who writes for the audience we want to reach.
- Why will they care? The basic questions of journalism are who, what, where, when and why. Stern And Company answers every one of those questions in its news releases. In fact, we try to preclude a reporter’s follow up questions by trying to present the answers in our news releases. We try never to issue a news release or make a story proposal that will draw the “So what” response.
