Journalists know that everyone has an agenda — especially PR clients. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t hire PR consultants. To paraphrase the late, great New York Times columnist Russell Baker: Being a reporter often means being lied to.
Unfortunately, PR people are also lied to by clients. PR people should be cautious and not believe everything a client tells them is the absolute truth. Accepting everything a client says, without verifying facts and using the information in press releases or pitches is a sure way get a bad rap with journalists when untruths are uncovered.
The Best PR People Think like Reporters
The best PR people think like reporters. When reporters join a PR firm they should not discard the rules of good journalism.
That means:
- When crafting a PR program or preparing a press release never include information from a single source, whether it’s from a search engine, a periodical or even a client. Take the time to verify all factual information.
- If you’re in the media placement department, never accept a statement as being the whole truth from an account handler, who’s often desperate to get a hit for the client. Verify their information.
- If you’re in the media placement department, also refuse to pitch any story that you feel is weak or flawed.
- Never lie to a reporter.
- Cable political shows on Fox and MSNBC are tailored to a specific audience. In our business, the audiences we have to impress are our clients and the media. That means every statement in a press release has to be accurate so no corrections are needed.
- However, honest errors in press releases or during client media interviews do occur. When they do, notify the journalists immediately.
- Typos and other grammatical errors often mean your pitch will be discarded without being given consideration. Send absolutely clean pitches.
Cookie-Cutter Approaches
A major problem in our business, in my opinion, is that undergraduate communications’ schools teach cookie-cutter public relations, the result in many cases is cookie-cutter-like graduates, resulting in cookie-cutter-like public relations approaches to the media.
This advice, hopefully, will free you from the cookie-cutter mold and advance your career. Caveat: The danger of doing so is that your immediate supervisor might still believe that dinosaurs roam the PR World and try to crush you.
To get noticed by management and journalists, disregard the tired and hackneyed PR tenets written by the great-grandfathers of PR and think outside the box, especially when it comes to pitching a story and crafting programs.
How to Craft a Creative Pitch
Writing and thinking creatively instead of composing hum drum, boring and routine lead sentences gains journalists’ attention. The aim is to keep them reading.
Very important: Disregard the advice to keep a pitch to a couple of lines “because assignment editors don’t have the time to read longer ones.” That’s a tenet that is repeated in communications’ schools and PR agencies by the do-it-by-the-book club. Nonsense. How anyone can tell the value of a story from a couple of lines is beyond me.
Write pitches with compelling leads like feature articles so editors can see the possibilities of stories. The exception is when there is legitimate breaking news, a rare occurrence in PR. Sometimes the pitches are only three paragraphs; other times six or seven paragraphs are needed to tell the story.
Write what it takes to tell the story. Because my pitches have interesting leads and tell the story, I’ve never been told by a journalist that my pitch was too long. The content of the pitch, not its length, determines coverage — unless you’re pitching a well-known celebrity. In that case, one line will do. Unfortunately for people in our business, journalists do not consider corporate CEOs as celebrities.
Be Different to Catch Attention
Except in the rare occasion when PR firms have “hard news,” pitches and releases should be crafted in a creative style to catch the attention of editors. Try to emulate feature writers and columnists from major daily print publications. Use them as text books and study how the best writers attempt to differentiate themselves with stylistic flare. Doing so will help your pitch stand out from the mountain of releases.
People in our business have to find a way to let upper management know that they have special skills that separate them from the pack, even if it means going against agency PR norms and annoying colleagues. Never rely on people who supervise you to tell management that you’re better than they are. This can be done without pushing your supervisor in front of a train. Find a way to do so without killing anyone.
I set myself apart by ignoring accepted agency PR norms and by developing my own style of outside-of-the-box approaches. That meant challenging what I considered the standard PR 101 advice of so-called specialists. In media relations – especially now when it’s so hard to obtain placements — being a maverick can produce better results than run-of-the-mill approaches that fail far more than they succeed.
My not-by-the-book approach caught the attention of higher-ups – simply because it produced better results. One tactic that editors greatly appreciate is to provide several different ways a story can be covered, which obviously means disregarding the “keep it short” pitch rule.
Advice for Youngsters Breaking into PR
Newcomers to PR should play by the corporate rules until they learn the road map to advancement. Then they must find ways to distinguish themselves from the cookie-cutter masses or risk spending a career trying to convince reporters that a pencil from Brand A is better than one from Brand B.
My first job in public relations was with a small political PR firm (today it would be called a boutique), where I worked on local, statewide and presidential campaigns. The experience was invaluable. Working on political campaigns provides PR lessons that can’t be learned elsewhere.
I’d advise anyone planning to enter the profession to secure a position as a PR volunteer on a political campaign. First-time candidates for local positions often lack the resources to hire an experienced staff and probably will welcome help. Do it throughout your high school and college career so that during each subsequent campaign you will be given more responsibility.
The experience will differentiate your resume from others and provide you with talking points during an agency interview. Explain to the interviewer that working on political campaigns provided a post-graduate PR education whose curriculum included courses not taught in communications’ schools.
Give examples of how the lessons learned can be applied to non-political accounts. Stress that the experience will help you succeed on any account to which you are assigned, because you now have much more than book or intern learning.
Very important: Find out the top management people at agencies that interest you. Write to them directly to explain why your political experience would be helpful on accounts. And ask for an interview.
Don’t rely solely on letters of recommendations from teachers at communications’ schools and head hunters. Be proactive. Public relations is an aggressive business. Be aggressive in your job search, but always be polite. One final bit of advice: When an account is in trouble, volunteer to help the account team, even if it’s not in your group. When I set up my own freelance operation, 90 percent of my business initially came from former colleagues whom I had helped. I suggest you do the same. It will undoubtedly pay off in the future.
Arthur Solomon, a former journalist, was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, and was responsible for restructuring, managing and playing key roles in significant national and international sports and non-sports programs. He now is a frequent contributor to public relations publications, consults on public relations projects and is on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at arthursolomon4pr@juno.com or artsolomon4pr@optimum.net.
