Why you should read the news two (or three) times

Two of the most important skills you’ll ever learn in communications are understanding an audience and using this understanding in your communications with them.

When I read that sentence back, it seemed a little broad and unclear. After all, it seems to apply just as much to open mic night at your local comedy club (‘hey, did you hear the one about the press release?’*) as it does to writing or pitching.

But I think that’s fair: being able to communicate well is a useful skill in most walks of life.

And clearly, from a PR perspective, when we talk about the audience, it’s usually press. Or more accurately, it’s customers and prospects, through the lens of press. But I don’t want to neglect the pure comms folk, the public affairs teams, not to mention financial and crisis comms and so on – and it’s an equally important skill across most comms and PR disciplines. That said, I will focus on press for the purposes of this article because as much as I can dream, I’m a PR not a comedian.

Furthermore, it’s really easy to say ‘know your audience’, but in the fine words of Lawrence Fishburne, there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

So how do you understand the audience, when it comes to press?

First and foremost, use your data. Most agencies and many in-house folk will have databases that have information about readership. Similarly, many press outlets have ‘about’ pages.

But the most important data comes from the title itself.

One of the most important lessons I picked up from agency life was that there were at least three ways to read a press title. When I started out, it was easier because we’d get hard copies of IT Week (etc.) into the office. That’s one thing I will say for reading online – it does make it tougher to digest a publication, unless the app / website is incredibly well designed.

The first way to read a press title is knowledge acquisition: what’s being written, who’s being written about, what level of detail or expertise is expected for this article and how technical are we being, for example? This is all really useful stuff for a PR – it tells you a lot about the kind of content that a journalist from the title will expect, whether you can safely use jargon, and if you’re going to insult the team by not using jargon, for example (UK tech PR folk: imagine pitching to Chris Mellor and offering an introductory explainer on NAS vs SAN).

The second way is structural: what sections does a press site have? Does it feature opinion articles or case studies? Are there letters to the editor? How do the team’s content formats vary compared to competitors? What are the tonal differences and how should this affect your pitch? Take a quick look at Computer Weekly and the Register and you’ll instantly clock that they both cover news at an in-depth, highly skilled level – but there are some very important tonal differences.

Finally, the third way (but possibly not the last – please offer your words of wisdom) is temporally. As Jamie Foxx astutely notes in Michael Mann’s take on Miami Vice, ‘ships move, that's why they call them ships’ – and it’s the same for the news. The news moves. Being dismissed as ‘yesterday’s news’ is damning for any brand (unless it’s post-crisis) so it’s also important to understand where we are in the news cycle about any one thing, because this will also help your pitching. It’s no good pitching advice on tackling something that happened last week and had a very short-term impact.

Some discussions and topics are reasonably evergreen (security, although there’s obviously nuance and it’s a highly segmented space), some go and come back (the importance of COBOL programmers) and some have a finite lifespan.

It’s important to note that I’m not saying if a discussion isn’t right at the start, you can’t get involved – you absolutely can, but you need to move it along and add something new or unexpected. For example, what new data do we have on ‘this thing’? Which companies are actually doing this thing, and how? What happens next – what does this new thing open the doors to, or what are the risks??

And a personal confession: I think you can usually do knowledge acquisition (#1) and temporal understanding (#3) at the same time, but I always found it tough to do knowledge acquisition and structural understanding (#2) together because (I suspect) they use slightly different parts of the brain. It’s tough to structurally analyse a press outlet at the same time as actually reading and engaging with the articles.

Anyway, once you’ve done that, and perhaps more importantly, once that becomes a habit, you’ll be well on the way to knowing how to adapt your communications to the media outlet you’re pitching to. And the same discipline applies in a lot of walks of life – and maybe even comedy clubs … or so we can dream!

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*Why couldn’t it just let go / hope you’re well / did you even get my press release??

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