Legacy media: Reports of its demise are exaggerated

Spreading the word about #corporate strategy, capability and achievements is all about crafting beautiful and supposedly engaging #content (particularly #video ) for our socials and website. Right? Well, perhaps for some, but not if what you seek is bulk audience.

Of course, it all depends whether your content is of broad interest and whether your #storytellers know how to sell a story, but assuming you have a fundamentally good #story and you have people who know how to pitch it, legacy #media and its #digital grandchildren can dwarf the audience-reach obtainable in the real world on #socialmedia .

Better still, if your brand achieves a decent run in mainstream media, it provides you with genuine news content to share on socials. And because this content is branded ‘real news’, it tends to perform better than your original content.

So, if broad brand awareness is what you want, then it’s hard to ignore the numbers delivered by mainstream media. Even a national run on TEN News, the cellar dwellers of #tvnews ratings, will deliver an audience in the region of 200,000. That’s nothing to sneeze at compared to a few thousand views on social. The trick is to know how to engage with mainstream and make your story easier for news outlets to cover.

Media engagement is no longer achieved by sending out a media release and crossing your fingers. Focusing on TV news, the easier you can make it for them to run the story, the greater your chances, assuming the subject is a good story in the first place.

In preparation to pitch your story to TV, you need much more than a text-heavy release. Organise a professional video compile of relevant overlay and other assets to make a news outlet’s job easier. If all they need to do is shoot a couple of interviews and a piece to camera, there’s every chance your story, if strong enough, will get a run. But it doesn’t end there. You also need to work the phones in advance of release to gauge interest and potentially negotiate an exclusive run on one network. Once again though, it depends on how good the story is and how good you are at honing the right angle.

If you get the approach right and the story appears on TV, radio, physical papers and online, you can achieve a potential audience in the many millions. How often do mere mortal organisations achieve that with social? Very rarely unless you’re a mega brand or sporting club with a million followers and even then you need the support of mainstream media.

So, for PR purposes, reports of the death of #mainstreammedia have been greatly overstated. Sure, the audience is ageing, but anecdotally there are lots of people who never watch a TV news bulletin who end up consuming that content somewhere online.

It could be that legacy media has reached the bottom of its audience slump as the networks’ video-on-demand platforms build audience and more importantly, make money. The networks need to focus on making their news content more accessible via their VOD platforms and they can do this by making individual stories available and not just entire bulletins.?

They also need to work on the quality of their #journalism and eliminate silly superfluous writing, but if they get the next few years right, mainstream media may be on its way back from the brink.