From Journalist to PR Man - All 5 Parts In One Article
Over the past week or so quite a few people have message me to say how useful it would be if I were to put my five “From Journalist to PR Man” article into just one post - so here goes…
PART 1
Many people visiting this site might be aware of the fact that I changed my job after 44 years as a journalist… It’ been an interesting adjustment - and this is the first in a series of articles I am writing as Editorial Director at RAW Food & Drink PR…
If we ignore the period when nothing happened because of the pandemic lockdown, I have now been a PR man for six months - which is no big deal, unless it’s measured against more than four decades when I worked as a journalist. Then it becomes a bit more of a story, because everyone knows that some dyed-in-the-wool journo’s regard the move to PR as a step across to the dark-side.
I was one of those cynical old hacks - and here’s one reason why…
After I added the title Food Editor to my overall job title of Editor-at-Large at the Western Morning News where I worked for 20 years, my computer’s inbox swelled to more than 400 PR related emails a day. That was far too many - it meant I had to spend ages each morning pressing delete, delete, delete - spending no more than a second or two scanning each.
There were, however, some names which would cause me to hesitate. Not many. Perhaps just half-a-dozen out of the 400. These were the public relations people who knew me and the titles for which I worked - the ones who took the trouble to know what would interest me, and why.
A well-known regional editor mentioned this slew of PR generated “garbage” in his column only recently, describing it as “utterly maddening”. Back in the day, I’d have used stronger terms than that.
After the 400th “hope you are well” or “hope you had a great weekend” I’d be tearing my hair out. Especially knowing there’d be another 400 the next day, and another 400 the day after that…
But let’s get back to the half-dozen or so names which stood out in my daily diet of emails - the PRs who’d make me sit up and take notice…
I used to think: “If they can do it, why can’t the rest of them? How hard can it be? You have a journalist here who has worked for years at a big regional daily - one which happens to have one of the wealthiest readerships of any newspaper in the UK. If these PRs would like to have their clients’ stories loud and proud in front of that demographic, surely it isn’t too much to ask that they know the style of the paper and the interests of the particular journalist whose attention they are trying to attract?”
And then I’d think: “Why don’t they realise that a little homework would take them out of every journalist’s delete, delete, delete road to nowhere? Presumably their agencies are being paid good money - can they really get away with it by simply saying they sent out press releases to 100s of journalists? Surely, the value of the service they offer lies in the actual results?”
Such were the thoughts of an experienced journalist on the receiving end. I didn’t really know how the public relations business worked, nor did I care.
My concerns were along the lines of…
Will this interest my readers?
If it ticks our boxes, how easy will it be for me to produce good copy from the material I’m being fed?
Are the images suitable - not just product shots?
Indeed, are there any images?
Are there good usable quotes that will be relevant to our readership?
Are there some easy to follow facts and figures?
And because I was mainly a feature writer, often producing big double page spreads, I’d also be thinking… Okay, I am interested in this, but it’s going to mean getting in the car to go and interview someone, or see or experience something.
How easy is the PR going to make that for me?
Will they move heaven and earth to fit with my schedule, or am I going to have to mess around jumping through their hoops?
Will I enjoy it or will I be bored? Because if I get bored, it’s certain that the eventual copy will bore the arses off the readers.
And so on…
Remember: this was one of, say, just half a dozen PR emails out of 400. So then, if I was interested, there would be a quick phone-call or an email back to the PR. Only they provided all the right answers to the above would it begin to be a possible story that might actually see the light of day.
If not, then it would join the many thousands of others in an invisible bin. The great unseen iceberg of PR material under the surface…
All those stories - so important to countless businesses and organisations which would love to see them aired in front of a larger public - that lurk and die in the murky underwater depths of the public relations ocean.
Frozen out, invisible, forgotten…
This was part of the story of my relationship with the public relations industry during 44 years in journalism (mainly newspapers, some magazines, radio and TV)… Writing here, I speak for myself, but I think you would hear the same sort of thing from most experienced journalists in many areas of the media.
As you may be able to see, my dealings with PRs were almost entirely navigated on auto-pilot. And the default reaction of the auto-pilot was to hit the delete button.
In the rare instances when I was sufficiently impressed by a story that I would want to take over the controls, it would tend to be just a momentary thing (a 30-second scan of an email, for instance) unless - to continue the pilot analogy - there was a very interesting landing to be made up ahead.
I now live and work in a world which, to my mind, is made up of interesting landings. I am certainly not in this public relations business to hit the auto-pilot switch and let a robot send 100s of emails out in the hopes one of them may stick.
The goal is to reach a destination - a page-lead in a daily newspaper, a double page feature spread in a magazine, etc… And this means I must work backwards from that goal.
How do we get there?
What work should we be doing right now to make it happen?
It’s obvious we must thoroughly research the client’s story from the beginning - and then let’s take a 365 degree look around to see what the prevailing weather and all the other traffic may be doing.
Sorry, I’m flogging this pilot analogy to death, I know. But I wanted to highlight the auto-pilot syndrome because it is something which hard-pressed journalists and editors are relying on more and more to get them through the workload, now that newsrooms etc have shrunk away to almost nothing.
I haven’t even begun to describe how I ended up working with RAW Food & Drink PR yet, or why (one reason, of course, was that Hayley Reynolds of RAW was one of those PRs whose name would always make me stop and take notice).
Nor have I started to mention the amazing things we’ve been doing over the past month or so since the coronavirus lockdown began to be relaxed…
On top of the world - and still telling other people’s stories
PART 2
So, I’ve talked about making The Big Jump - or Crossing to The Dark Side - which is how many describe the regular journey that is made by journalists who decide to pursue a career in public relations.
It’s pretty much a one-way street. I know dozens of journalists who’ve made the move - but don’t think I know a single person who’s made the career change in the other direction.
There are many reasons for this, but of course the rapid and relentless shrinkage of the world of journalism is the most obvious.
When I was made redundant last autumn the man who handed me my papers said: “You must have known this was coming. It is really sad - we still want you writing for the newspaper - the trick will be to find someone else who can pay you to write for us.”
Being a bit slow on the uptake, I wondered what he meant. At first I thought he was talking about one of the huge charitable organisations for whom I’d done countless journalistic favours down the years. So I contacted a salaried PR I’d worked with closely on numerous occasions - indeed, I had even written a letter of support which had helped her land the lucrative job she was in…
But once my email arrived the ladder of potential help was pulled up with surprising abruptness.
It seemed she wanted me nowhere near her large organisation. I was shocked, we’d always worked so well together and she never failed to gush over me at every touch and journalistic turn. When I told media friends about this rebuttal they said: “Why are you surprised? She knows that you are far better qualified to do her job than she is. She won’t let you within a million miles of the place.”
Which was the moment I learned that having a long and pretty generous track record of doing journalistic favours doesn’t add up to a hill of beans. When you are the person who writes massive spreads for big daily papers, you are a very dear friend indeed - when you are made redundant, you are a nobody.
The thing about holding down a job like my old posting for a very long time is that you begin taking for granted the relevance and the importance of what you do. People say journalists are vain - indeed, I am vain - but I can honestly say that in 20 years of effectively being senior feature writer at the South West’s main daily newspaper, I never indulged in any self-congratulatory thoughts of self-importance.
It never really occurred to me that I could make a massive difference to, say, a local firm or organisation if I wrote about their services or products.
If I am being honest, it was for me always more a case of: will I enjoy writing about this? Is it going to be fun for me? Or is it going to be complex and difficult and a pain in the arse?
Feature writers have the luxury of being able to think in this way, whereas news reporters do not. The news is simply the news, no matter how jolly or unpleasant - you cannot say: “I don’t fancy writing about that grizzly murder today. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen on our patch.”
But as a feature writer you can say: “I’ve got 400 emails from company PRs wanting me to write about different products or services. So I not only can pick and choose - I have to. Which is why this bunch is for the bin, while this one will interest and delight our readers. And, as it happens, it looks like it will be jolly good fun for me to do.”
So there I was last autumn, jobless after 44 years in journalism. I’d never been on the dole - I had done other work, like loading lemon trucks in Greece while young and fancy-free and living in a gorgeous cottage just six feet from the Mediterranean sea. But even then I had earned most of my meagre living from freelance journalism.
But now what was a 60-something hack supposed to do in an age when newspaper journalism was shrinking to almost invisible levels and regional radio and TV were following pretty much the same path?
As it happened I had been invited to address an audience in Cornwall at a conference that had been set up to discuss modern media. I phoned and explained to the organisers they would alas not be playing host to the Editor at Large of the Western Morning News, because he no longer had that job. To my surprise, though, they still wanted me to attend - and they put me up in a lovely hotel overlooking a big beautiful Atlantic beach.
I was one of a panel of four, answering questions from an audience of 60 or more, most of whom were involved in some way with public relations. And to my continued surprise, it was the redundant Hesp who was being asked most of the questions from the floor - probably because I was the only one with an in-depth knowledge of the regional press which, of course, was the most important publicity channel for smaller local organisations and companies.
Afterwards, two things happened. A couple of dozen people from the audience came over to ask what I was planning to do with my future. Then, the next morning, the owner of the big plush hotel had a chat over coffee - and he astonished me when he said: “I’m not surprised they all wanted to talk with you. You have built up quite a name in the region over 20 years - you are one of the West Country journalists people trust.”
My email inbox was busy for weeks afterwards and I had numerous invitations to luncheons and various other forms offering an “informal chat”.
And that is when I thought…. Right, I have a skill-set and a wide breadth of experience - and, it seems, a name. I shall go out there and offer my services.
But where? The only logical answer to which was: let’s start at the top. I asked myself: who runs the most dynamic and efficient public relations company in the South West region where I live and where I’m known? I need one that shares my interests and thinks like I do…
I cast my mind back over all the millions of emails which had entered my inbox over those 20 years at the WMN…
Who had always managed to interest me with their stories?
Who had always responded with great speed and agility when I had given their suggestion or project even a light glimmer of a green light?
Who had been the most efficient when I asked for images or certain arrangements to be made?
Who had been pleasant and fun to work with?
I could count the public relations companies which ticked these boxes on one hand.
But the first person I chose to talk to was Hayley Reynolds of RAW Food & Drink.
Me helping to give a talk about public relations at a Cornish event last year
PART 3
It has taken me 2000 words and two articles to describe how an old newspaper journalist made the jump to public relations. You could argue that this is not the best argument for succinct writing and communication, but I thought there would be media folk out there who might be interested in such a transformation, seeing it took me 44 long years to achieve.
Now it’s time for me to talk about a few elements of the tool-kit I brought across to my new job as Editorial Director of RAW Food & Drink PR. And I’d like to think that, to have lasted so long in journalism, I must have had at least a basic set of skills to go with those tools…
Or perhaps it’s just one skill: story-telling.
Which is no small matter. Throughout his wonderful books (such as Sapiens, A Brief History of Mankind), Yuval Noah Harari emphasises time and again that we could also be known as the Ape Who Told Stories - because according to him and many others, it’s the really big deal… The one that allowed us to dominate the planet.
We spend our lives in stories.
We listen to the news on radio or TV and it’s just a series of stories. Most things we hear about or see are not actually happening in front of us right now (or very rarely). Even when it comes to the ubiquitous Covid-19 which is currently shaping all our lives, we are for the most part removed from it. Terrible when it strikes a family or an individual, of course, but where I live the number of people infected with the coronavirus at present is registering at under six per every 100,000.
After four months of lockdown and everything else, I actually do not personally know anyone locally who’s had the virus. And yet it is everywhere because it is - by far - the biggest story in town. And day after day, week after week it continues to be. We are all entirely bound up in the Covid story because the great majority of us believe in it and fear it, even if we havn’et seen it.
Away from real-life stories, we watch soap-operas, movies and the like because they provide us with the kind of narratives we seem to need. And, of course, we read. Novels, books, newspapers and magazines, whatever…
Our addiction to stories is obvious - what’s not quite so apparent is the way in which we as individuals are constantly spinning our own tales, no matter how ephemeral or irrelevant they might see to be.
“I’m in the supermarket…”
How many times have we heard that being shouted into a phone? It’s a really boring narrative - you can hardly work out why people need to convey such information - but the person is still painting a word-picture to describe their very basic story to someone who isn’t there.
There are paleo-anthropologists who believe that it was the first simple word-pictures— and the understanding thereof - which began making all the difference when it came to early homo-sapiens moving up the domination ladder.
Modern chimpanzees have simple calls which can be understood by their fellows. A bark that means “Lion!” will see the whole family group leg-it up the nearest tree. But a warning call is not really the rudimentary word-picture we’re talking about…
If you can say: “There’s a herd of wildebeest in the next valley - you guys go down to the narrow bit and we’ll chase ‘em towards you…”
Well, that sounds like a plan.
One that does require a huge leap in intellectual ability. You need the sounds or phrases to say it - AND you need a strange abstract part of the brain which can understand the sounds and then somehow visualise a series of pictures relating to the information received.
An imagination. That unique invisible thing which can see the valley, the wildebeest, the narrow section and play-out the eventual slaughter, and almost taste the resultant barbecue full of delicious meat.
And do all this without a single atom of any of it being present in the here and now.
That is when this strange ability becomes huge. It’s why paleo-anthropologists believe homo-sapiens came to have supremacy over the Neanderthal’s, who were larger and stronger physically, and who had bigger brains…
There are even those who believe the sudden development of imagination was caused through some sort of autism occurring in a single individual. They argue that the ability to imagine or visualise wasn’t exactly an obvious requirement demanded by evolution. And this theory is underlined by the fact that no other species on the planet can pull off the imagination trick.
Homo sapiens have been relying heavily on the ability to imagine ever since.
Which brings us right up to modern times - and it brings me to a moment many years ago when I was a young cub-reporter and I heard an advertising guru say the words: “Don’t sell the sausage - sell the sizzle!”
How right he was. In pure terms, a cold uncooked sausage is a pale pink tube made from animal’s stomach lining, filled with chopped bits of meat and fat and elements of a cereal product. Not really a thing to make you drool.
But imagine hearing and smelling the savoury sizzle as the dense, toothsome, juicy sausage turns golden brown and delicious in a pan… Imagining such a thing is enough to make most meat-eaters drool and say: “I think I’ll buy a pack of Westaway’s finest so we can have sausages tonight…”
What that old advertising guru was really saying was: tell the right story - and tell it well.
It surprised me as a journalist how often people would contact the paper with the wrong story. Here’s an example…
A wildlife charity once emailed me news of an amazing success. They’d managed to turn things around across a badly dilapidated chunk of natural environment, so that a rare brown butterfly was once again beginning to flourish on the site. The email contained a photo of a rather dull looking butterfly and a completely unusable image of its tiny eggs on a leaf.
Like most people, I love butterflies - so I was thinking: okay, maybe I can make this into a bit of a story - a couple hundred words at most and possibly the image of the fritillary, which ain’t the most beautiful butterfly in the world.
Then I noticed a figure in the “editor’s notes” part of the email. One that astounded me. Apparently the cost of this environmental initiative was £600,000. It’s still a vast amount now, but it was an absolute fortune back then.
Six-hundred-thousand-quid to save a little brown butterfly?
I rang the charity and was told it was all part of a larger project which, for the most part, was being paid for by a big regional water company. All part of something called “upstream-thinking”.
It was the first time I’d heard the phrase, so I decided to go to the middle of nowhere and see what it was all about, taking photographer Richard Austin with me. We were duly shown some butterfly eggs and Richard was hugely unimpressed.
“Six-hundred-thousand-quid!” he kept muttering.
So our hosts hurriedly began to shown us other things which proved that nature was returning to what looked to us to be a fairly drab and barren landscape.
The background was that two World Wars had convinced a series of governments that Britain needed the ability to feed itself, so farmers were being paid grants to plough up marginal land in a bid to increase the nation’s agricultural productivity. In this particular location the farmers had to crack a hard upper shell of clay or culm land with extra large ploughs and then blitz every inch every year with industrial fertilisers if they had any chance of seeng a return.
Over the years, all this work, money and effort had resulted in nothing more than a bit of beef grazing and the odd field of cereal. It had always been a case of fighting nature - but at a huge cost to the environment. And, as it happened, an unseen financial cost. Because there was so much artificial fertiliser in the landscape, it was oozing down into one of the region’s biggest drinking-water reservoirs and causing poisonous algal blooms to occur every summer.
To make the contents of the reservoir safe to drink, the water company had to employ “end of pipe cleaning” - a process which is cripplingly expensive and environmentally unsound.
So the big story was that “upstream thinking” (ie paying farmers not to farm and returning the landscape to its natural condition) was helping to keep the water clean and therefore reducing many £millions each year spent on end-of-pipe cleaning, which in turn was a saving that could be passed on to customers - ie to our readers.
While the return of a little known butterfly to an obscure part of the landscape was a wonderful symbol and a headline - it wasn’t the story.
That came out in a font-page head-line which said something like: “Region’s Water Bills Cut by Cleaner Landscape”.
So, a front page lead… And instead of just 200 words and a thumbnail sized photo inside the paper, we carried an entire double page spread full of facts, figures, panels filled with bullet-points and five photographs. Indeed, that one story gave rise to two major series called The Contested Landscape, for which we won major awards.
The butterfly-effect was actually a win-win-win story. A rare creature was saved - an entire landscape was cleaned up and made nature-friendly - and our readers’ water bills were being reduced.
In the next article I’ll write about another win-win situation which helped one tourist destination shout from the rooftops about local food, promote local walks and highlight just about everything else good about the island.
And I’ll be doing that because guiding stories - engineering stories - telling stories in exactly the right way, can be a massive boon when you’ve a genuine message to convey.
Been involved with the world of food and drink through my journalistic work for years - good fun it is too!
PART 4
I’ve written about the importance of establishing the right story to tell - and the power of putting together a number of elements which help to galvanise and reinforce that story.
This is highly relevant to public relations work because often the single story which a client, business, organisation, etc wishes to tell the world about may not have the strength to make head-lines in the greater scheme of things.
That is when an element of lateral thinking can be required in a journalistic attempt to tell a much bigger, better, story.
Let’s take a simple easy-to-follow and totally fictional example…
The client, Joe Blogg’s Ices, has developed a new lollipop and he wants the PR team to tell the world about it… It’s one of those old-fashioned “mivvi” style ice creams on a stick - the middle is made of thick creamy vanilla and there’s an outer coating which is blueberry flavoured.
Maybe a few elements of trade press will be interested in a story entitled “Joe Bloggs Launches new Lolly”. But, naturally, he wants the wider world to know about his brilliant new product.
As a journalist I’d ask Joe for the whole story. What made him think of the idea? Where do the blueberries come from? Is there something unusual or unique about the sourcing of any of the ingredients? How about the cream in the middle? Is that purchased in bulk or is there something interesting to be said about how it’s produced or where it comes from?
If the answer is something like: “No, we buy all ingredients in bulk from an industrial supplier…” then you are pretty much stumped (and a small or niche ice-cream manufacturer would be mad to do that anyway, because they’d be taking on the big-boys in a buy-ingredients-cheap-and-flog-em-fast game they could never hope to win).
However, if Joe tells you that he buys from a single farmer on the flanks of Exmoor who grows all the blueberries inside the national park area - and that the cream comes from an award-winning local dairy - then you begin to have a chance of creating a story for a wider audience.
You might discover that the fruit farmer has a special area of sacrificial crops which he grows simply to feed wild birds in an attempt to keep them off his blueberries, and that he has certificates or whatever commending him for such actions from the RSPB.
Then you learn that the award-winning local dairy is actually spending large amounts of money getting its farmers to graze cows in flower and herb rich meadows which are brilliant for insects etc (as indeed is the case with RAW Food & Drink PR’s client, Trewithen Dairy in Cornwall).
So now you’re no longer discussing a product which is just a new lolly that the kids can enjoy on the beach. You are talking about an environmentally-friendly Rolls Royce on a stick.
This isn’t only a delicious lollipop made from the finest quality ingredients, it’s an eco-warrior.
People who buy this ice-cream are not only experiencing the very best quality Westcountry fruit and cream - they are helping birds, bees and the whole of the local environment.
You commission a good press photographer to capture images of Joe Bloggs up there among the blueberries with an RSPB warden - or perhaps he’ll be pictured enjoying one of his new ice-creams in a flower-filled meadow surrounded by happy cows.
Now you can start writing the win-win story - one that’s certainly capable of making the local and regional press, maybe even the nationals… This is a lolly that is going to make its creator lolly, if you’ll forgive the pun - because overnight it becomes a well-known ambassador for the Bloggs brand.
Some people might be cynical. But one thing I am finding exciting about working with RAW Food & Drink PR is that good stories are genuine stories. The tales which succeed, stand on their authenticity.
And actually this is where I am fortunate. RAW has in-house policies which ensure we only deal with clients who are genuine. You will never see us representing a manufacturer of junk food or drink.
Let me give you another example of a win-win situation. Years ago I was on a press trip to a certain holiday island in the sun. On the way over I read the local airline’s in-flight magazine which had a small article about the wonderful tomatoes grown on the island. I learned that, during the harvest season, they were turned into fabulous local product called “tomato jam”.
I’d been invited to experience a number of island walks - and I was pretty amazed to find that, after much hype, there was absolutely nothing in the way of official or way-marked routes. It was all very scenic and pleasant, but tourists either had to join an organised walk with a guide, or make their own way around with a basic map and plenty of guesswork.
Then, halfway through the week, I asked where I could buy some of the celebrated tomato jam. The two local guides looking after our press group had no idea.
The next day we went on a particularly lovely walk down through a deep rocky valley. All along the valley floor beneath the warm sun-baked cliffs were small farms growing the most amazing fist-sized tomatoes. We even passed a little shed where a hand-written sign advertised the celebrated but elusive tomato jam, but the place was empty and semi-derelict.
The valley issued out onto a rocky coast where, to our amazement, we found a series of ancient salt-pans carved in the soft limestone strata. One or two old ladies were still harvesting sea-salt (which I found amazing, seeing the salt-pans had been dug out by the Romans) and one was even selling little bags of the stuff from a bench beside the track.
Eventually our walk ended in a quaint fishing harbour where we had lunch on a terrace right next to the boats. Fabulous! Fresh local fish, beautifully cooked and served. I asked the restaurant owner if he had any of the famous tomato jam and he duly brought us out a bowl of the stuff. I promise, a teaspoon of the deep red paste served alongside the fish was absolutely delicious. Salty and sweet and filled with tomato umami…
At the end of the press trip we had lunch with the island’s minister of tourism. I happened to be seated next to her and she asked for my honest opinion following our week of exploration.
Which was perhaps a mistake on her part… Because I’ll admit, I can go on a bit. But I told her that although I had fallen in love with the island, I was a bit disappointed by the lack of easy-to-follow walking routes. She looked puzzled, admitting that she had never embarked on a country hike in her life. So I explained that it was difficult for a foreign visitor to follow the myriad paths which covered the landscape. Tiny rocky paths which led down between the farms - some of which were public rights of way and many which weren’t. All of which made the terrain impossible for visiting hikers without a guide.
Then I told her about the simple colour blob way-mark system adopted by places like national parks in the UK which walkers could use to follow a route for miles.
And because I was on a roll, I also told her about the lack of tomato-jam buying opportunities. If the island airline could feature the stuff in a glossy in-flight magazine, surely it should be available for tourists to buy?
The tourism minister was now taking notes and she asked if I had any recommendations - adding, of course, that she had very little in the way of budgets. I suggested they hire a local sign-maker who could create some sort of tomato-shaped stamp which - with a bit of red outdoor paint applied - could be used to lay out a way-marked route on rocks, stiles or gateposts. Indeed, they could start with the route down the tomato valley we’d followed the previous day.
The tomato farmers who made the jam - along with the sea-salt harvesters whose raw material was also used in the product - could then be persuaded to set-up some kind of shack or shed along the way. They could use the place, collectively, to sell their wares - and the restaurateurs in the area would be encouraged to promote special menus featuring the the jam and the sea-salt. All with the easily-recognised red tomato mark.
An inexpensive colour brochure could be produced for distribution around the hotels and visitor centres - and repeated on the island’s visitor website. In short, the lovely, scenic and delicious Tomato Route would be included in all the promotional material and tourist literature sent out by the tourist board. The airline could even promote it in their flight magazine and visiting journalists would always be offered a hike along the route full of photo opportunities etc.
It was a win-win story in so many ways - easy to achieve, cheap and effective. And I understand the island did instigate the idea (only to see it fall asunder some time later when the particular minister moved on and funding was withdrawn).
I describe it here as an example of joined-up thinking.
We created a taste of it at RAW the other day when we invented the idea of the “perfect Devon gin and tonic”. We married Salcombe Gin’s first class product with Luscombe’s excellent tonic - then we obtained quotes from people like Food Drink Devon’s chair Barbara King stating how important it was for local companies to pull together, especially after the coronavirus lockdown…
Creative and collective joined-up thinking can equal a story worthy of head-lines - it can be as simple as that.
Hesp stands somewhere amidships on the wreck that was once a very different journalistic world
PART 5
Who was it in the PR industry who decided it would be a good and friendly idea to begin every email to journalists with something like: “I hope you are well?”
I remember a time when that didn’t happen - and I also know a great many journalists and editors who dearly wish it would cease.
The picture I’ve used to illustrate this article show two dancing hares - mythical beasts drawn by my old friend Tad Mandziej. It some how reminds me of the relationship between journalists and PRS. Fleeting, ethereal… The twain shall never really meet…
For people working in busy newsrooms the “hope you are well” syndrome is a habit that comes across as shallow and insincere. When I was in receipt of some 400 emails a days from public relations people, it was obvious that at least 350 of them didn’t know me from Adam - so why begin a missive with a personal touch? Why not concentrate on highlighting the simple merits of the story they wish to convey?
For all they knew I could have been some unpleasant Nazi wife-beater - in which case there was little chance they’d want to wish me well.
The vast majority had no idea of my personal circumstances. For example, when I underwent a major 12-hour operation to put right a bit of my heart that had been damaged by a bat virus (I am serious) on a press trip, I was very unwell indeed.
And yet the 400 emails a day kept rolling in with the words “I hope you are well.”
“No, I am bloody well not!” Is what I would have replied, had I been capable of making the effort.
And here’s another bugbear while I am banging the journalist’s PR whinge-drum... The fancier, the more sleek, the posher, the email pitch, the less likely it is ever to see the light of day. In a busy daily newspaper, at least.
Hectic journo’s turning around a countless conveyor belt of stories for a daily newspaper or a busy news website do not want fancy emails full of gizmos, weird and wonderful fonts and imbedded images. They want plain text which they can easily cut and paste.
Not entirely cut and paste...
Not once in all my years as a journalist did I ever file a piece relayed to me by a PR as it was sent. I am sure some of the press releases would have been fine in their own way, but the stories we published had to be in our own style.
A newspaper (or any other written media) loses a great deal of its USP if it does not uphold this rule. A Unique Selling Proposition is one of THE ONLY weapons a great many organs of the media have left in their armoury - ignoring it will see that newspaper, magazine or whatever sink beneath the Internet tsunami sooner rather than later.
One of the main reasons people buy my old newspaper because they like its rather unique laid-back un-pushy style. It’s an elderly rural demographic which hates flash-in-the-pan sensationalism etc. To see that paper filled with un-rewritten press releases would lose that all-important USP - and would therefore lose readers.
So no… The cutting and pasting an entire press release would not be a wise thing to do. But taking out the quotes, the facts and figures, the bullet points etc, might well be a rapid and efficient way of getting a story into the paper with a new intro and outro added.
Which is why, during my latter years at the paper, I would advise regular PR contributors to supply me with a number of essential components. I called it “kit-form-journalism”.
Give me...
An overview - the story in a nutshell in a couple of paragraphs.
A couple of genuine reasons why the story is different, unusual, unique, newsworthy.
Two or three good quotes from core players or relevant experts or observers.
A set of reliable facts and figures - percentages can be good - numbers, statistics, facts, that give the story authenticity.
Do NOT give me...
Bullshit. I am good at dressing up a story - that’s why I have the job. Just supply me with the concrete blocks and I’ll build the rest.
Quotes that are superfluous and don’t need saying. I always ALWAYS cut out the line that says: “We are delighted/excited to be working with”, or “We are thrilled to have been given this contract”. We KNOW you are! The CEO of a company is hardly going to say: “We are really fed up that we’ve been given this £million opportunity...”
Photos embedded in the story. They are a pain to separate and are usually of inferior quality. I want jpegs as attachments. But don’t make them too big unless you’re filing them to a glossy magazine. Despite what old fashioned picture editors used to say, newsprint is of rubbish quality so an image say 5 mb to 8 mb will do.
Above all do not send hope-you-are-well messages UNLESS you know me, then personalise the up-top message and perhaps if you really feel the need, refer to the last time we met, my latest signed column, some other recent stories I’ve written or even my damned dog...
Of course, the exception to a great deal of the above is when you pitch a press release that you have written specifically with that one newspaper, magazine, website or whatever in mind. In which case you are probably - and ideally - going to be an ex-employee of that organisation or at least have worked with the editors numerous times before.
Obviously, this can be the strongest pitch of all. If you have a good track record with that publication, if you have spent years working for them and know exactly what makes both the editorial team and the readers tick, then why not bung them an entirely written story...
When there is an editorial team knocking out a busy paper that has just 3 per cent - yes, just 3% - the number of writing staff it used to employ, then you know those poor buggers will be working their butts off just to stand still.
A well-written piece presented in exactly the right style - preferably with images taken by a photographer who knows the publication well and who has worked for it many times before - can be the answer to a prayer for an overworked news or features editor.
You can imagine them saying: “Bang! Page lead done. Didn’t have to change a word. Just the right image for the piece - all I had to do was knock-out out a head-line…"
If you are in a position to supply such a piece, then you will probably know one of the editors well. In which case it’s worth a matey line or two at the top of the email explaining why you think the piece has legs (even if you are pushing a bit of a dead horse up a steep hill).
To me, all of the above sounds like an old fool stating the bleeding obvious. But obviously I am wrong about that because I continue to get a great many PR generated emails a day which are filled from top to bottom with the things that raise the blood-pressure of overworked journalists and editors.
Which is why I will continue to add to this series as when when thoughts or ideas on the relationship between journalists and PRs occur.
