Understanding the media

Selling in a press release

Writing the press release is just the first bit! You must not assume that sending out a bulk email to all your contacts will guarantee you coverage. You should follow up releases with calls, prioritising the most important outlets. Often the person who is covering the story will not have seen your release and will ask you to resend. If you send a press release to a generic ‘newsroom’ email address, it’s likely to get lost in the masses of releases received – on average, a regional newspaper’s general newsroom address will get more than 300 press releases per day.

It’s ideal if you have a named contact who you think would be interested in what you have to say. It’s fine to ring up first to ask who the news editor or producer of a particular radio show is.

If you don’t have anyone specific in mind, call the newsdesk first of all and run the story past someone there. Be as brief as possible, but make sure you get across what makes the story interesting to and relevant for their readers/listeners.

Don’t worry if you get cut short or the journalist doesn’t sound interested – they’re often just frantically busy! Email through the press release after your conversation, and try to get the name of the person you spoke to.

Make sure you know what you are going to say before you ring up. The people you’ll be speaking to will often be very busy and you need to be able cut through and get their attention quickly. You will need to be persistent and confident (and have a thick skin!) – but remember to be polite and respect the fact that people may be on deadline. It often helps to have the two or three most important points written down in front of you before you make any calls. A  good site for finding general contact numbers for local media is www.mediauk.com.

For a daily paper or radio show, it’s best to call a couple of days beforehand, following up the day before you want the piece to appear to check whether the release has been read and if it is of interest. For weeklies, call the week before. Make sure you know when the press day is for a weekly paper, and don’t call them then!

Try to avoid calling from mid-afternoon onwards, as most (daily print) journalists will then be on deadline and unreceptive to new stories. Many media outlets also have a planning meeting mid-morning, when they discuss and decide what will be featured over the next day or week – it’s a good idea to get in earlier than that so your story can be part of the planning meeting. For radio, don’t call for five minutes either side of the hour, when the news team will be doing their news bulletins.

A pitching spreadsheet or table can be a useful tool for selling in. You can list the outlets you are targeting, the journalist, their contact details, and an update of the status of the pitch (have you spoken to them, will they run it, do you need to call back?). This can be particularly useful if you are pitching to a lot of outlets, and to keep track of who you’ve spoken to and when, so you can look out for coverage and develop a bank of good contacts to go back to next time.

Listings operate slightly differently – most operate on a three-week deadline so make sure your details go out three weeks before your event. In most cases an email with all the relevant details spelt out clearly, accurately and in full will be fine, and you shouldn’t need to chase it up. Do be vigilant about details they’ve asked for and provide ALL of them, or you may not be listed – e.g. venue telephone number, ticket price, postcode and so on.

Related links

• Organising a photocall
• Writing a press release
• Developing your publicity plan
• Back to 'World Change starts here' toolkit