Hi all,
I’m now 8 weeks into my placement at a specialist healthcare PR agency in Sydney, and loving every minute.
Over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to distribute a media release to the medical media and follow it up by pitching the story to individual journalists and editors.
After spending the a considerable amount of time carefully drafting and editing the media materials and negotiating the tricky approvals process with the client, I was quite attached to the story, which was about the launch of a new educational haemophilia resource.
While I was quite happy pouring through media lists and sending the release, summary and accompanying image off to the media I was filled with terror at the thought of following it up with a phone call. After all, I was just a lowly intern and these were highly experienced journalists and editors.
My fear was compounded by all I had heard at uni about the importance of ‘getting it right’ with the media; that journalists already had a tendency to be dismissive of PR practitioners so it was absolutely essential to ‘wow’ them with your professionalism.
As I picked up the phone to make my first phone call to a journalist in New Zealand my palms were sweaty and my heart was racing – I felt really silly, because after all it is just a phone call, but I was so nervous.
To my surprise, the voice on the other end of the phone was very pleasant and quite interested in the story. And so it went with every journalist or editor I called. Even those who were not interested in running the story were perfectly polite. No-one was rude or angry that I had taken up their time by sending the story through.
Although I am talking purely about the medical media in this instance, I have come to the realisation those journalists, although important gatekeepers to our public relations activities, are just people. They will have good and bad days, good and bad moods and different personalities, but at the end of the day, if you treat them with courtesy, respect and professionalism they are likely to return it.
What a relief to discover that the big, bad, scary media isn’t so big, bad and scary after all! And what a thrill to see my story running in a number of GP, pharmacy and nursing publications this month!
3 comments:
Congratulations for getting your story run and thanks for sharing your insights on calling journalists. It was encouraging as I've only had to make a call once in a previous placement, but that experience put me off!
I had to call the editor to see if they had recieved a media release we sent through but as soon as I told them the point of my call, the lady on the other end slightly got angry and told me off :s. She started going on about how they get so many calls from people confirming media releases that it takes up their time and can get quite annoying. So i just quickly sayed ok and sorry and that has discouraged me forever!
But its nice to see maybe not all journalists are like that, fingers crossed my next experience is better!
Sorry, I have a quick question. Did you prepare something before you called the journalists?
Was there a particular way you introduced yourself or was it simply just a matter of saying who you were, that you were just checking if they had received the story and what they though of it?
If you could share your approach as to what you said to them that would be most hopeful!
As I'm still dreading having to make that call again and not sure of exactly what words should come out of my mouth!
I guess your insight proves that we all feel the same about our first experiences with the media (or perhaps our second experience too in the case of nathaly a!).
I have not yet had to deal with the media although I think it would be a great experience and look forward to my first experience.
I think it was great that your organisation let you do the whole process from drafting the media release to getting in contact with the journalists to follow up. I think this gave you the opportunity to really get to know each aspect of the story, making the story easier to pitch to the journalists.
In the organisation that I am doing my placement in they seem to do it two ways, the first is similar to yours in that they send the media release and follow it up with a phone call and the second is that they give specific journalists a phone call to pitch the story to them and then only if they are interested they send the media release through to them.
Congratulations on getting your story into multiple publications and best of luck with the rest of your placement.
Zoey
Post a Comment