PRactical Relations

You write a great media release and the newspaper journalist you’re pitching the story to decides to use it. You celebrate and feel very chuffed with yourself, excitedly tell your colleagues and possibly even call up your client. The next morning you rush out to the shop and get your copy of the newspaper and enthusiastically page through to find your article. You reach the end and realise that you must’ve missed it in your haste, so you page through again…and again…

Suddenly the shattering realisation hits that your wonderful article simply wasn’t printed.

For those of you nodding and remembering the excitement and disappointment of your early PR days, you know that there are various factors that affect the longevity of your media release - irrespective of whether the journalist liked it or not. But for the benefit of those who still climb the emotional roller-coaster with every daily newspaper, here are just a few things to keep in mind.

• The news editor controls what stories the journalists work on. It’s fine to pitch your idea to a journalist directly (news editors are in any case pretty busy people), but just understand that it needs to get the nod from the news editor too before the journalist invests any more time in the article.
• In the case of Die Burger’s newsroom, your story needs to survive six daily meetings where the placement of each and every article gets discussed.
• Once the article leaves the journalist’s desktop, it will pass through about nine other people before finally going to print. If any one of these people find fault with something in your article, it will quickly get edited or simply get cut altogether.
• Important breaking news or hard news will always replace the softer news stories. If you’ve pitched your newly-formulated-fool-proof-muffin-mix minutes before the onset of a national crisis, hard luck. Of course, if you’ve pitched your idea after the journalists start scrambling to cover the big news, then perhaps you should consider a more appropriate career.

Don’t ask me why the odd press release (in its exact original form) finds its way through to the printed paper from time to time. Count yourself lucky when this happens, very, very lucky.

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