I was recently invited to attend a seminar organised by CharityComms called “Connect With The Media”, where I was asked to be part of a panel of journalists answering questions from an audience made up of charity communications professionals.
I started off by asking the delegates to define ‘news’. I felt this was a useful starting point because, although it sounds easy, what is it in essence? For me it has three key ingredients: It’s new, it’s compelling (or affects a lot of people) and it happened inside the news cycle of the publication you are pitching.
Later, delegates were invited to pitch stories to us and we (the journalists) were asked to pick holes in the pitches and tell the audience how they could be improved. I took to the task with gusto.
At least one pitch opened with the words: “It’s XXXX awareness-week so….” I have to confess I groaned audibly when I heard the opening of the pitch but I was polite enough to hear it out to the end.
This, I told those assembled, is the problem: every day, every week, every month and even every year has at least one (and more commonly four) of these ‘tags’ attached to it. The result is a morass, rendering these ‘tags’ less than meaningless to most news reporters.
The delegates were a little shocked at this bit of advice, perhaps even offended. But I felt a dose of tough love to tell them why they’re going in the wrong direction was more useful in the long run than telling them they were onto a winner with this sort of pitch.
If your story is new enough, compelling enough and recent enough, telling journalists you are doing it because of the date is not only gilding the lily, it may end up sinking your pitch.
Why? Because I will never go to my news editor and start by telling them that it’s XXXX awareness-week so we should do a story on – insert cause here. He would only give me the same look I gave the delegates – one that says: don’t waste my time with this.
I jested with the audience that maybe they should have a “give journalists a break and don’t tell us what day it is” day, but I fear the joke fell on deaf ears.
I had some friends over for lunch on Easter Sunday (Jesus Awareness Week, anyone?) and one of them is a committed charity PR professional. She was horrified by the advice I gave to the seminar and set about a robust defence of these tags. It’s not all about getting a story in the paper, she argued – they are a valuable fundraising tool when it comes to reaching the public as well.
Okay, that may be true, and I confess I have no experience of fundraising and whether having a ‘day’ or a ‘month’ helps with it, but if you are going to pitch a story to journalists, I would suggest it is better to have a strong story and then include the ‘awareness-raising’ bit at the end when we’re already interested.