A conversation about communications

MARK LYNDERSAY

WHEN THE Public Relations Association (PRATT) gathered last week to discuss Facing the Challenge of Earned Media in Modern PR, it might have been reasonable to expect a discussion of the challenges that PR professionals face in placing their statements and releases in an increasingly fractured and fragmented media landscape.

To be sure, there was some discussion that set out with those concerns as a destination, but what followed became more of a dissection of the challenges that traditional media faces in a communications age that favours immediacy and digital presence.

From the first question posed to the panel onward, it was clear that the new media landscape and its impact on traditional media weighed as heavily on the minds of PR practitioners as it does on journalists.

“What,” asked Nicole Duke-Westfield, president of PRATT, “has been the biggest change in the last five to ten years in media distribution?”

“The rise of digital media and the disruption that has ensued,” responded LoopTT’s Laura Dowrich-Phillips. “People no longer need the media to capture and share information on their own. People are now getting their news in real time, and now media must rally to bring filtering to it.”

“Our challenge,” added Golda Lee Bruce, deputy head of news at CNC3, “is not to report on what you are reporting, it is to bring value to what you are sharing.”

Earned media, according to Duke-Westfield, who moderated the evening’s discussion, are statements and press releases that are published and broadcast at the discretion of the media and are not paid-for column inches or broadcast minutes.

There were a few attempts to bring the discussion around to concrete issues arising from the new media landscape.

“Advertisers and PR people did not understand what digital was,” Dowrich-Phillip said of her experience with the Loop network of regional news websites. “Until Loop, digital was one arm of what was still traditional media. It took a while for people to understand that we weren’t going away. That we didn’t have a scheduled time for publication or broadcast. That once we have the information and we are good with it, it goes live.”

“You need to examine what your message is and who is your audience. Then you go to where they are,” advised Lee Bruce. “You need to understand how the media operates, when the deadlines are and how to mesh your message distribution with that reality.”

There was some spirited discussion about e-mails with PDF attachments (bad idea, as per here: http://ow.ly/YfLt30jx6Lz) and the advisability of sending captured media (video, audio) to newsrooms.

Best practice? Send the entire unedited video of the speech/event via digital download with notes on what times on the clip holds newsworthy/soundbite potential for faster scrubbing through the media. Double points for providing transcripts of those parts of the video or audio clip.

“I think practitioners should do an internship in newsrooms to understand the field in which they are working,” said Dominic Kalipersad, veteran journalist. “Understand the publication. Journalists are storytellers. When we get releases or information that need work, then that’s something I have to work through.

“Practitioners don’t seem to know the people they are sending the releases to. This is not a science, it is an inexact art and it’s about relationships.”

“People consume information differently online, so consider recasting the information differently,” said Dowrich-Phillips. “Try a listicle. Submit a video. Know the times when the news is slow and time difficult-to-place material when the media house is starved for content.”

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there