Media: Getting your story reported

The P&P group at UCLan secured a double page spread in their student paper.

Joe Bardwell, student member of the Management Committee and former UCLan group organiser, says:

Student media is an amazing resource: it has the ability to reach your target audience, the students, like no other outlet. It’s not really a challenge to get something in the paper, particularly a student paper, they are looking for stories about students. People & Planet at most unis will be one of the most exciting things happening. Press release your events to local and student media - it’s free publicity!

How can you get your story reported? If you know how the media works, with a bit of practice you can be front page news!

Which media should you use?

Try as many of these as you feel up to but think about the audience you want to target and where you’ve seen similar stories before.

• Campus paper, newsletter and radio: probably the easiest and most useful for your group. The best way is to get to know someone in the editorial or news team, but if not you can just send them a press release. They’re usually short of news, and if you get them on side they can become key campaign allies.
• Local papers and radio: They love stories about young people doing interesting things, and especially photo opportunities, so it’s worth press releasing them.
• Alternative media: You can get your stories out to activist networks through all kinds of alternative publications. Two examples are the Indymedia, a website to which you can add your own news, and Schnews, a weekly activists newsletter in paper and email form.
• Press associations: The press association distribute news to media around the country, so if you can get them to include your story, you have instant access to a huge range of media. To do that, you simply send them a news release by email to copy@pa.press.net.
• National media: If you think your story’s good enough, why not release it to the national media? You can send your press release by email or fax. They hold stories on file, so even if you don´t make it in first time, they may look you up sometime in the future.

Don’t forget the P&P network: Let other groups know about what you’ve been doing and any successful actions or campaigns you’ve run by uploading your stories and pictures onto the P&P website at peopleandplanet.org/news/contribute/

Background work

You will need to do a little research and get together the following information for your target media:

• Editorial/news e-mail address (e-mail is the preferred method of receiving news for most media outlets now).
• Editorial/news phone & fax number.
• Deadline - find out when they need stories by, as there’s no point sending them news if it’s too late for them to use it!
• Name of the environment/politics/education/development correspondents. In the case of small local, or student outfits, these will probably be the news team. It’s also worth getting the details of the features editor so that you can try and get them to include a larger piece at some stage.

Now give them a call and introduce yourself. Explain a little about your group, what you do and why. Tell them you’re available for comment (assuming you are) on the issues you work on, and say you will send them press releases whenever your group does interesting things. You might want to offer to write articles on eco/social issues, or help them put together a feature.

Getting the story out

Now you’ve done the background work, it’s time to get the story out there. You’ll usually do this through a press release, an interview, a letter to the editor, or some combination of the three. To get news attention your story must be a current issue, or a current development of a long running issue. If you’re going for local coverage, it must also have a local angle.

Finding the right angle

To get coverage of a story it is important to present it attractively to the journalist. For local news this angle must have some obvious local significance or relevance. Any story that requires complex reader knowledge of financial, economic or political matters will have difficulty in gaining coverage.

Examples of good local-angle ‘headlines’ connected to international issues are:

• Students lobby local MP on AIDS.
• Local MP endorses students’ Ditch Dirty Development campaign.
• Local P&P group raises over £1000 in aid of Fairtrade campaign.
• Local factory involved in production of chemical weapons.

When writing these stories, the journalist will have to include some background information on the issue for the reader. As a result the general public learns about the issue directly through news stories. The amount of coverage a pressure group obtains will largely be determined by the quantity and quality of the stories it provides for the media.

The quality, as viewed by the journalist, is related to two things:

• Up-to-date: in most frequent publications news stories are about current events, not situations. The existence of a given situation - poverty, the unfairness of the international trade system - does not count as news. However, changes in a given situation or the revelation of new facts about a situation are often considered as news.
• Reader interest: for the commercial media the overwhelming priority is news that sell papers or attract viewers. Unfortunately, this does not always mean news of true importance.

Campaigners talk about finding a ‘hook’ - something to make a situation newsworthy and interesting. Good ‘hooks’ include: * events * anniversaries * national days * milestones * statistics * reports

Finding the right hook will be the most important part of your media strategy.

Press stunts

When planning an event, keep the needs of the media in mind. They look for events that are:

• Imaginative: try to brainstorm creative and original ideas with your group. One of the reasons for the drop in the coverage of marches and rallies is that the media have become bored with them. Your events should therefore aim to capture the attention of the media by being a bit different.
• Visual: by providing a great photo opportunity, your message will gain coverage by accompanying the image.
• Relevant: try to come up with some clear link between the event and the issue.

The range of newsworthy events is very broad, from meetings to demonstrations. Events are sometimes held with the sole intention of gaining coverage. Greenpeace, for example, favour draping large banners from conspicuous structures. Editors are increasingly reluctant to cooperate with these publicity stunts if they feel they are being ‘used’ and it is often better to hold a real event for the media to cover.