Doing media relations - remember your audience

by Jacco Zwetsloot

Rules 1-5 of communication are all the same: remember your audience, and hold them in your mind’s eye as you craft your message.

Public relations work is not just about writing copy for corporations to put in their press releases or in their digital newsrooms. Broadly speaking, PR usually also includes the work of “media relations.”??

While public relations is helping to craft a client’s message for a broad audience, from as narrow as the readers of a corporate newsletter to as broad as the population of an entire country, media relations is helping a client reach a very small audience, sometimes just one person - a single specific journalist. This should tell you a few things.?

The first is that a good journalist is looking for information, not a fully written story to copy and paste into the media outlet they work for. The results of a recent poll by Public Relations Today that we shared on LinkedIn on June 7 showed what it is that journalists actually want from public relations people (henceforth “flacks”). A range of options was given and correspondents were allowed to choose multiple answers. Just over three quarters said they wanted to receive “news announcements and press releases.” Nowhere in the list of 9 specific responses was there “an article pre-written for me that I can submit for publication with only my byline added.”?

But sometimes PR companies, journalists and clients forget this. It happens from time to time that a journalist is caught reproducing a press release in whole or in part as if it were their own writing. Sometimes PR companies and/or clients will refuse to cooperate with a journalist unless they essentially agree to run a story exactly as the client wants it written. That’s embarrassing, and the cause is either a failure or an abuse of media relations.?

When doing media relations, it’s the job of a PR firm to provide useful information to journalists and stand back and see how they use it. If the client comes out looking good in the context of a truthful article that is well-written, then everyone’s a winner. If, on the other hand, the article contains far more brickbats than bouquets, hopefully the journalist tips off the flack before publication so that crisis management steps can be prepared in advance. In the same survey, when asked what flacks can do to make their job easier, journalists answered “understand my target audience, and what they find relevant.”

That brings the discussion back to audiences again. The flack must remember that their direct audience is the reporter, but the secondary audience beyond that is that reporter’s readership/viewership. That makes things more complex but also more interesting.