Your Online Newsroom: How to Give Reporters a Tip
It’s difficult to envision a journalist working today who doesn’t consistently visit “official” organization sites. Furthermore, it’s difficult to envision exactly how much those sites have worked on journalists’ lives.
Rather than calling an organization for additional data and sitting tight days for their press pack to show up, correspondents can now get the data they need in minutes with a couple of snaps of a mouse.
The over two passages are self-evident – so self-evident, you could think, that they’re scarcely worth focusing on. Yet, a fast look at corporate and not-for-profit sites uncovers that many organizations and philanthropies are botching a once in a lifetime chance to sell their accounts.
Most sites are great about posting their most recent news and official statements. Correspondents come to the site, see what’s now been declared, get what they need and leave.
Yet, a couple of exceptionally shrewd sites are likewise utilizing those visits to sow seeds for future stories with journalists. They “delicate pitch” them on broad subjects or patterns – not explicit stories, but rather novel points – from which columnists can recount a bigger story.
The Urban Land Institute, a Washington, DC based not-for-profit spend significant time in land use issues, does this especially well.
In their on the web “News” segment, the gathering keeps a “Leads, Tips, and Ideas” record for journalists. They view every correspondent’s visit as a chance to urge them to compose in excess of a solitary tale about their gathering.
For instance, ULI as of late recommended in its “Tips” area that correspondents cover land use issues according to the point of view of Generation Y, that 73 million man block of Americans brought into the world somewhere in the range of 1979 and 1994. That youthful age is driving lodging and amusement designers to change their techniques to oblige Gen Y’s cravings. Subsequently, engineers who comprehend their necessities are flourishing; the individuals who don’t are in danger.
“These tips are an extraordinary method for raising our perceivability with the media,” said Trisha Riggs, ULI’s Director of Communications. “The Generation Y tip has brought about exactly a few reports.”
Ms. Riggs trusts these tips will bring about reports, however says another design is to attract the media to their site routinely and advise them that they’re accessible to help.
As well as posting the news tips on the web, Riggs says, “We send them out to correspondents somewhere around once like clockwork by email.” Those messages additionally frequently bring about expanded inclusion.
How might you foster tips? Request that your staff inform you when they compose another paper, serve on a board or give a discourse. You’ll probably catch wind of an arising pattern, danger, or convincing reality that would be fascinating to a columnist.
These tips have one extra advantage. Your organization’s issues are frequently “significant,” however don’t have that additional something that drives them into the universe of the “newsworthy.” But tips make a decent source for significant stories, even those that miss the mark on prompt newsworthy component. They may not necessarily bring about a major element story, yet they might be incorporated as a little piece of a story a columnist is now dealing with.
Give correspondents ordinary tips and they’ll have a valid justification to be a recurrent guest to your site. Furthermore, the more they are familiar you, the more stories they’ll expound on you.