In the Eye of the Reporter

Reporters hold the key to communicating to the masses.  PR professionals can only go so far before they have to give up the regions to the reporters and hope they decided to broadcast their event.  That is why it is so important as a PR rep to keep a good relation with your media outlets and know how to catch their eye and keep their interest. 

Being a PR a major at GCSU I have learned how pitch to newspapers and radios, but not so much television stations.  The reason for this being the remote location of Milledgeville being stuck somewhat in between Atlanta and Macon.  The closest news station that people are able to turn into is at least 30 minutes away.  In other words in order to get a 'published' on a station your pitch has to be top-of-the-charts newsworthy.  Because most of the events I have worked with so far have not called for news stations and reports to cover, I have had little to no experience when pitching and dealing with tv reports.  Considering this type of media is one that I hope to be working with in the future I am very much interested in learning more about the 'edicate' when communicating with them.

Last week I was looking over my 'tweets' when I noticed one of the PR professionals I follow posted this article about the do's and dont's when it comes to pitching to tv reporters.  The article is called How to pitch to a Busy TV reporter; she found it on Ragan's PR Daily on ragon.com.  In the article a TV reporter is interviewed and asked what she does and does not take when it comes to pitches from PR reps.  I thought it was interesting that the article was written from a reporters perspective.  

The most usefully tips I got from the article was to make a catchy and short subject line.  In life they tell you to prepare a 30-sec. elevator speech because that might be all the time you have when pitching yourself to a future employer.  This concept of short and sweet carries over into public relations.  Reports do not have the time to sit and read a long email or listen to a two-minute voicemail.  And if you are lucky enough get whatever you are pitching a slot on the air, they only have tw0-minutes to develop and explain the story to the viewers.  Keeping this in mind, it is important to remember to keep everything short, catchy and clean.  

Another important point from the article is to make sure the story you are pitching is newsworthy in the first place.  Somethings are just not meant to be on the news or are not that interesting to keep the attention of the viewers.  It is important to keep a good relation with reporters and one way to ruin that relationship is to send them a 'dud'  story.  

There are many more important points in this article.  I recommend reading it and taking in this valuable information.  It be the difference one day in being the saved email vs the deleted one in a reporters inbox.