7 things journalists wish PR pros knew about pitching By Becky Gaylord

As a former journalist, who now handles PR for clients, I know what it looks like from both sides. I sympathize with the gripes I hear from public relations folks. But I empathize with the journalists who moan about flack fails.

Though they might not admit it, most journalists actually like solid, professional PR people. The others pretty much drive scribes crazy. Here are seven of secrets that these solid PR pros know:

1. Get to know the media folks you’ll need before you need them.

If you wait until you need to reach a journalist before initiating any contact with that person, it’s already too late. Relationships are everything. Your call will be returned and your email answered much more quickly if it’s not a cold pitch.

2. Respect media deadlines

Publication deadlines are only part of the picture. Be a sleuth (but not a stalker). Notice the rhythm of the day for the media people you need to reach most often. Scan for the timing of their posts and updates on social media sites for clues. Or send a short message and ask when they want to be contacted. Do they want only emails, not calls? Write down these preferences and honor them as best you can.

3. Provide information promptly without interrogating.

PR people used to ask me, regularly, “How are you going to ‘use’ the information?” Or, “What’s your angle?” The solid PR pros don’t do this. They get back, with the information requested, as soon as possible. That helpfulness garners goodwill. Cross-examining media about their intensions never does.

4. Don’t push, beg, or threaten.

I wish I could say this doesn’t happen, but it does. Pros just don’t go there.

5. Stay with the media you need to reach

This doesn’t take an advanced degree, but it does require persistence. Set up a Google Alert or a Topsy Alert for the names of journalists you need to track most closely. Know their beat, their topics, and what they’ve covered recently. This is what archives are for, if you need to get caught up in a hurry. If you pitch without doing this, it’s obvious to them and embarrassing for you.

6. Make sure the “news” you’re pitching is truly newsworthy.

And be prepare to state why, compellingly. If it is newsworthy, pitch freely. Journalists will want to know about it. But if it’s not, use another channel to spread the message. Bugging media with a pitch that’s promotional or not news to them (see N. 5) likely means a chilly reception the next time you call, regardless of that idea’s worth.

7. Know you will win some and lose some

Unless you are doing PR for a presidential candidate or for Facebook, you’re going to have to vie for shrinking space, fewer staff members handling the news, and major stories that always risk pushing aside smaller-tier pieces. Don’t take it personally. Pros don’t. But they do learn from their mistakes.

Becky Gaylord worked as a reporter for more than 15 years in Washington, D.C.; Sydney, Australia; and Cleveland, Ohio for major publications including The New York Times, Salon.com, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and was associate editor of the Plain Dealer’s Editorial Page before she launched the consulting practice, Gaylord LLC. The company helps clients improve their external relations and communication and increase their influence and impact.

Ex-journalist dispels myths about PR pros By Gil Rudawsky

It’s been three years since the newspaper I worked for unceremoniously shut down after pumping out news for 150 years.

Since then, I’ve redirected my skills to help reinvent myself in the world of public relations. Along the way, many myths I’d believed about PR have been disproved.

Here’s a list of some misconceptions that I, along with many of my fellow journalists, have had about PR professionals:

PR pros don’t work hard. In jumping to the PR world, I’ve seen firsthand how hard my colleagues work for clients. The idea of clocking out is just that, a nice idea. I’ve done PR work from the side of a road in Spain, in a classroom hallway at my son’s back-to-school night, and outside a restaurant on a date with my wife to celebrate our anniversary. The work never stops. At least in the newsroom, there was a lull after deadline.

There are no deadlines in PR. Deadlines rule journalists’ lives. They also rule the world of PR. In a crisis, kiss your family and any plans goodbye—it’s a steady stream of deadlines to create strategy, respond to the media, monitor social media and recap everything for the client.

There’s no stress. The same issues that keep a reporter up at night—a changing media landscape, declining business, unreasonable expectations—make for sleepless nights in the PR world, too. Our profession, like journalists’, relies on finding ways to get our clients’ stories to the right audiences. There’s an added layer of stress: Showing our clients that what we do is valuable and requires expertise and experience.

PR people don’t know how to write. It’s not unusual for me to write several thousand words a day, from press releases, to white papers, to strategy documents, to crisis plans. And it requires more insight and creativity than simply documenting what happened at a city council meeting. Plus, there’s not a team of copy editors to review everything. We have to be our own reporter, editor, copy editor, and headline writer. Sometimes we have to be our own publisher.

PR pros couldn’t make it as journalists. The line between a journalist and a PR person is very close in terms of skills. I’ve seen both worlds, and I know firsthand that many of my PR colleagues would make top-notch journalists. They know how to tell a story, ask the right questions, and can be uncompromising with their standards. They also have to have the tact to offer strategies without coming off as know-it-alls, and they stand up to clients when necessary.

PR is just spin. To the contrary, PR at its core is about getting newsworthy information to audiences, and working with the media to get the facts right and creating some balance where there is none.

Gil Rudawsky is a former reporter and editor with 20 years of communications experience. He heads up the crisis communication/issues management practice at GroundFloor Media in Denver. Read his blog or contact him at grudawsky@groundfloormedia.com.

Internal and External Comms: Let the Walls Come Tumbling Down

This has been written by William Trout, director of internal communications at BBVA Compass and taken from Linked In Group – Corporate Communications posted by Alejandro Formanchuk

The artificial division between internal and external communications is crumbling. With the emergence of flatter organizations where knowledge and relationships speak as loudly as rank, and where the ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ lives of employees are increasingly blurred, communications hierarchies designed to segment or stovepipe information are losing their relevance. More than ever, employees are taking control of the channels and communicating not just with their superiors and their immediate colleagues, but with peers, friends and strangers down the hall, in the next city and across the world. The smart companies—the ones most likely to engage, empower and energize employees and companies in support of the company mission and brand—have taken note and are providing platforms to support the conversation.

“Providing platforms” in this context means more than incorporating social media into the company communications plan, it means embracing and responding to the seismic changes taking place within the communications space itself, including the ubiquity and power of technology, the desire for community and a recognition that a successful brand must be built from the inside out.

Technology

The genie has been let out of the bottle, if he was ever there in the first place. Email allows any internal message to be launched into public view with the tap of a ‘send’ button. The lesson here is simple: don’t prepare or circulate anything for internal use that you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing outside the firewall.

The inverse is also true: Technology means that employees can no more be shielded from company news reports (ever heard of Google alerts?) unpalatable to top brass than they can be shut off from information floating around the water cooler. And technology itself is of limited use when it comes to regulating the online activities of employees. That nifty filter put in place to block employees from accessing Facebook and other social media sites? It may keep the lawyers happy, but it doesn’t stop employees from accessing these sites through their (often as not company-owned) PDA’s and smart phones, which in turn can be used to blast information outside the company.

Community

But technology isn’t even the central issue. The opportunities and challenges presented by portable hardware simply underscore the cultural shifts taking place in the workplace and in society in general, and the failure of most organizations to meet them. These shifts can be summed up in terms of employees’ desire for community in an increasingly atomized world and the parallel pursuit of authenticity and meaning in work, a search largely undiluted by the effects of our most recent recession.

Jaded audiences—employees among them—are looking for sources they trust. These audiences long ago became immune to advertising, which now functions as an expensive tool with which to build a brand, and are skeptical of the news reports fed by public relations practitioners. They are seeking guidance from like-minded people they trust (virtual communities or ‘tribes’, in the parlance) which can be physical (word of mouth) or more likely, virtual (a LinkedIn group, for example). Increasingly, these virtual groups exist as proxies for the physical communities— family, friends, customer, the car-repair guy—that have long served companies as a source of customers and or potential employees.

Positioning

Positioning a company internally more often than not amounts to cursory efforts to sell a company’s brand promise (often modified for the employee audience) to employees. Traditionally, this function was left to the HR department, which often as not responded with a dreary listing of benefits and ‘employee-friendly’ policies.

Now, thanks to the gusher of information and tools at their disposal, employees can fill that vacuum and to an increasing degree, define that brand promise themselves. This requires demonstrable “proof points”: if a company defines itself as an innovator, it better not have decade-old computer systems. But the most important step for our newly emancipated employees is to take the reins of social media and other communications channels to create a culture (for example, team-focused, curious, service-oriented, optimistic) that reflects their own work spirit. To a great degree, it matters less what that culture is that that they can express it.

Savvy companies realize that employees are their best ambassadors, not an embarrassment to be hidden behind a brick wall. In this environment, companies are wise to direct increased resources (human, financial and otherwise) to their communications functions, so as to better educate and empower employees. This means building a robust, interactive communications platform led by innovative and holistic thinkers able to put social media and other 21st century channels to use in today’s communications landscape, a landscape that’s not artificially divided into traditional internal and external categories, but that is truly dynamic and integrated.