The Evolution of the Media Kit

If you're working in PR, Media Kits are still essential tools. In this article, I walk you through how media kits have evolved from offline to online, and what should be in there and some examples of vintage and good media kits.

First things first: a media kit is a document, sometimes several pages that contain information about your business, an event, a product launch or an executive, talent or professional introduction. Media Kits are mainly seen as a package of information for journalists and editors to write their story.

If you were to look inside a media kit seventy years ago, you would be opening a cardboard folder full of neatly typed paper pages that included a biography, fact sheet, and vital information, as well as, black and white or sometimes color photographs. While these old media kits are beautiful objects in their own right, a media kit in 2021 looks very different. 

Back in the day, it became best practice to pitch via email rather than at an old fashioned press conference or mail in media kit. It makes great TV, but in practice, most companies find it more efficient to pitch to individual editors and journalists. Plus, let's be honest - most companies won't be able to fill up a room with journalists after COV-19.

The Media is still a folder full of downloadable assets that supplement a story, which are now mostly photos, but can also include things like videos, and data. Media kits should make a journalist want to write a story about you- because you’ve given them so many quality assets, that they’d be crazy not to.

As recently as five years ago, media kits were attached to emails as a PDF when pitching to journalists, or kept in files that could be transferred services like Dropbox or WeTransfer. As you can imagine, this was not very user friendly: imagine being a journalist and receiving north of 400 press releases with PDFs a day. That means that you'll be opening your clunky PDF reader 400 times a day. Also, if you are the kind of person who loses sleep over a typo, material that can’t be updated is the stuff of nightmares. 

A (good) online media kit is enough to make Jazmine Sullivan burst into song. All your assets are neatly organized in clear boxes and an editor can grab the picture or information they are looking for, and get back to writing their story. A PDF, on the other hand, is not journalist-friendly. And journalists and editors, ultimately, are the audience you want to serve.

Unfortunately journalists rarely read them. We surveyed some local media agencies and they confirmed that they no longer read emails, and, in the unlikely event that they do, will not download an attachment.

In 2021, media kits are not only more efficient, but they serve a multitude of functions. Modern media kits are the exact resources that a journalist needs to write a story- given to them in an instant. Modern media kits can be stored on your company website or in social media.

Any PR professional worth their salt will be rolling with the times, and adapting to the platforms of choice to their relevant journalists/editors. The good thing about storing your media kit on your online is you can link to it from whatever platform you are chatting on- and it always goes to the same place. Same consistent narrative, same high quality, same assets. This makes you future-proof.