Getting it in print: mass media hints for the masses 

by Alicia Patterson

Alicia Patterson is a PR professional with over nine years of professional writing experience working in the areas of media relations, health promotion and local government. Beginning her career as a newspaper journalist offered her the inside view of what media really wants to report. She is a member of the PRIA and holds post-graduate qualifications in Public Relations. There is no such thing as a "news story" and there are no sure-fire ways to get something in print (or on air) as a public-relations professional. 

You can follow all the right rules in the text books: Write model media releases, take into account deadlines of media outlets, know whom to contact; there are hundreds of books, seminars and short courses that can help you do this. Knowing all this is not the most important thing to know – even though it helps.  

It’s not always easy to get something published even if you’re paid full-time and on staff as a journalist or reporter at a media outlet. Newsrooms are very competitive places. There are careers to be made and egos to protect.

In between newsroom competition and politics – both internal and between newsroom staff and their story subjects (the celebrities of politics, crime, entertainment, sport and disaster) – public relations professionals are in there too. Competing for time and space. Arguing the toss for this angle or that one on any particular story.
 
It’s nothing new that journalists and reporters regard PR people with suspicion (at best) and outright hostility (at worst). But there it is. No matter which way you look at it, they are peas in the pod – along with the celebrities and stories they chase and manufacture. Studies show that public relations people generate somewhere between 30 and 70 percent of your news. Some people would argue that the percentage is higher.

Approval and Attention
The point of all this is that ‘the media’ is made up of highly idiosyncratic people, just like anyone else. We like to complain about the media like we like to complain about politicians. But we get the politicians we deserve, and we get the media we deserve. They both try to give us what we want; they both want our approval and our attention.

And therein lies the closest thing we can get to a ‘key’ to the media.

A pretty smart guy by the name of Simon Chapman, who’s big in the Australian anti-smoking lobby and a seasoned media player, gave a seminar at the 1997 International Cancer Conference in Melbourne on using the mass media to get a message across. The premise he submitted may not have been original, but he explained it well: There is no such thing as a ‘news’ story, only ‘olds.’

He demonstrated this by putting forward the entire list of ‘news’ categories in existence, with the exception of the straight ‘purely informational’ or factual story (for example: "The week-long Bendigo Festival begins on Saturday 12 June in the Bendigo Showgrounds. Entry $15.").
 
The categories were as follows: 

• David and Goliath: The little person takes on the big guns and wins. Against the odds, good hearts and persistence will prevail. During election campaigns, candidates on both sides try to make the public identify them with David. 

• Danger in the familiar: Stories about faulty electric blankets or kindly old uncles who turn out to be paedophiles. 

• Loss of innocence: Naïve or trusting individual is ripped off or betrayed by a shonky travel agent; a woman whose husband led a double life with another three kids and household interstate. Note: ‘shonky’ is a word used by Australians meaning corrupt, similar to the widely recognised saying ‘not quite kosher.'

• Jeckyl and Hyde: Kindly public figure with evil or tawdry private life, usually about well- known people. 

• Bungling bureaucracy: Tax department computers crash at tax return time delaying refunds; babies accidentally swapped at birth by hospital staff. 

• Fall from grace: Often the best-loved stories, exposing those who were apparently beyond criticism as just human after all; usually precipitated by an affair or financial transgression. 

• Nature as good, industry as evil: Big multi-national company marches into peaceful country town, builds a factory and belches pollution all day, every day, causing health problems and loss of income for local farmers. 

• The whistleblower: Industry insider who tells all about unethical practices or blows apart walls of secrecy; for example, Watergate. 
   
  These categories are nothing more than clichés, and members of the media will hotly deny that they in are in the business of clichés. However, as a member of the reading, viewing public, and as public relations practitioners who need to be mindful of the needs of that public, we like clichés. They affirm our beliefs. They make us feel safe in a changing world, just as they always have.

Key Point
The key point is that no matter how times change, we are still people who generally want and love the same things, are frightened by the same things and angered by the same things. It is rare indeed to find information that is so ‘new’ that no one has a frame of reference for it, or that totally undermines or confounds all that we understand. And if we did, we would work very, very hard to find that frame of reference. 

War, hatred, great love stories, elections, Christmas sales and money shortages… none of these are new. We just like to think they are because it makes us feel better or more special than our ancestors.

Check your nightly news or your daily paper – especially check your public affairs programs on commercial television. You will find these eight ‘news’ stories time and time again, and a few of the ninth mentioned above.

These are the stories we want to hear. These are the stories that journalists and reporters and editors are pounding the pavement and phoning around town all day for. These are the stories to fill the papers and the news bulletins every day, every week.
 
Your stories are these stories. No matter how small the event or the wedding ceremony or the local government political scene in your town, or how little the burglar got away with, or how small the sewage plant being built in the next suburb is, they fit these basic outlines.

They become ‘big’ stories when they are broadcast through the media. Then they become larger than life and we think of them as somehow more special that the stories we have. But they aren’t. There are millions of stories every day in your region alone and a commercial television news bulletin can only pick one or two of any ‘type’ as it strives to develop a ‘balanced’ (and entertaining?) news bulletin for viewers. A health story, a political story, a business story, a couple of commercial breaks, sports news, weather, and the credits roll.

If you want to get something in print, remember what they’re looking for, write accordingly and remember that the closer your story appears to a ‘news’ story the more it will appeal to those journalists, reporters and editors jockeying for time, space and position in the newsrooms.

   -- AP
    © 1998 Alicia Patterson

Public Relations Associate Editor Vicky Elpers is a lecturer in professional writing, writing for public relations, editing and communications. She is a freelance public relations and communications consultant with experience in health promotion and corporate communications. Vicky, an American living in Australia, is a member of the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) and holds postgraduate qualifications in the fields of communications/ PR and education.
Vicky Elpers welcomes readers' questions. Feel free to email any questions directly to Ms. Elpers at velpers@mail.austasia.net.