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How Can Your Firm Get Quality Editorial
September 2007
How a journalist deals with a news story or feature on your company can directly affect how you are viewed in the marketplace. But there are ways you can influence the outcome.
The first golden rule is that you need to treat your target journalists like clients. The key is to focus on their needs and understand the challenges they face, the pressures they are under and to see what you can do to help them, from the point of view of your expertise and the perspective you can offer from your particular vantage point in the marketplace.
You need good preparation ahead of any meeting. Gather together background information on the journalist, such as job title, role within the editorial team, preference for news or features, favourite topics and particular hobby horses, career history, how long they have been at the title/ in the sector and details of the title they work for – in particular, audience profile and circulation details.
Once you have a good understanding of the journalist and the title they are employed by, and once you have a precise fix on the profile of the title’s readers, you can set to work thinking about relevant topics and think-pieces you could provide from your area of expertise that could add value to the editorial already contained in or earmarked for the magazine.
With all this planning in advance, it is important not to neglect “establishing a rapport” because this is still crucial in developing good relationships with the media. This is where it can help to have your PR adviser attend the meeting with you. With a good PR person taking care of the agenda and making sure all your key messages and hot topics are covered at some point in the conversation, you are free to focus on building a natural rapport with the journalist. At the end of your meeting, if your PR adviser is particularly thorough, they may choose to do a quick run-through of the various topics and ideas discussed and see which the journalist thinks may be worth pursuing as real editorial ideas.
Discussion topics that were “nice to have” but which have no real prospect of follow through in the magazine can then be struck off the list, allowing you to hone in on a handful of ideas that could be turned into editorial on the page. You can then discuss with the journalist whether they have any particular timing in mind for the various ideas, for example perhaps they are thinking of a particular feature planned by the magazine that would provide a perfect home for one of the ideas/ / possibly another might fit
alongside another article that the journalist has already commissioned from someone else.
Does the journalist have a concrete idea for any of the topics discussed, in terms of what they want (ie whether they need comment from you to feed into an article written by a journalist, or a “bylined” article, that is written entirely by you)? You will need to know how many words they want, if it is a bylined article, and when they want it ie their copy deadline.
After the meeting, your PR adviser should be able to draft a note, encapsulating the ideas the journalist is keen to take forward with all the attendant detail about dates and word counts. This can be circulated to all those attending the meeting – even the journalist, who will often use it as a reminder or as a basis for discussion with their editor or other colleagues. The note can then be used as a guide to follow-up with the journalist over the following weeks and months.
Carefully planning your interaction with your journalists in this way will increase the results on the page you achieve from meetings with journalists. Moreover, this controlled approach will focus the journalist’s attention – and yours – on your real areas of expertise, positioning you appropriately and intelligently on the right topics and in front of the right audience.
Source: The Recruiter
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