In the past two decades there has been a paradigm shift in PR industry and we are seeing that today as the media fraternity and the PR professionals collaborate and work closely to speak truth and build credibility for brands. Gone are days when many corporates had a good hold of the media and were able to douse a negative story. Today in the technology led digital world a sharp and intelligent journalist has his own methods to check and validate news and paint the true picture to the general public. There are times when they don’t even go through the PR agency channel to get more meat for their story. And this where PR agencies must build their relationship with the journalist and help them in getting all relevant information to make a story worthing reading and interesting.
Every PR consultant and agency in this country as a team which leads the media. Here the primary role of the media team is to go on regular media rounds and build media relations. While media relations in today’s scenario have become a passe’ but to have good contacts and strong relations will always help you especially when you are fighting a crisis. But my sincere advice is that media relations should think beyond the normal by just maintaining relations and greeting the journalist. They need to add value when they talk to the journalist which will then excite the journalist to look forward for some valuable inputs and insight while writing a story. So how can one achieve this to strengthen that bond with journalist and work as partners.
- You first need to build trust with the journalist.
- Provide valuable resources and information from time to time which should be useful and relevant. No carpet bombing.
- Stay in touch with certain frequency.
- Help in connecting the leadership team of your client with the journalist and have coffee meetings which will motivate the journalist, which you can then leverage it in the future.
- You can also invite the journalist to your organisation to delivery some useful sessions which will help the PR professionals in the organisation to understand the challenges of journalist.
- Treat the journalist with utmost respect and always value his time.
- Look innovatively and think out of box to grab the attention of the journalist. Bring in some nice creative angle to your story.
- Make your pitches crisp and sharp so that Journalist is able to grab the content and idea quickly. Journalist is always short of time.
All of us know that PR has evolved both from the PR professionals and journalist point of view. And both are adapting to the new way of handling PR and countering the challenges of the digital world where social media has been the frontrunner for news to go live very fast. Under these circumstances the PR agencies should move one step forward and hold the hands of journalist and help them in the best possible manner to fill all loopholes to have a seamless relationship to come out with a good story for the journalist which may or may not help the brand. As unlike advertising where we have the control the same does not apply to PR but somewhere the client expectations have to be met through the story by meeting the overall parameters defined for the PR campaign.
Public relations professionals and reporters have a very symbiotic relationship. Similar to any other relationship it requires mutual respect, communication and trust. It is the element of trust is what helps the agency to strengthen the bonding with journalist community. There are no principles that has been strictly defined or written to know how to build your relationship with your journalist friends. But each agency has their own internal training program which guides the media specialist and the PR professionals to maintain a very healthy relationship with the media world which will benefit the agency, client and the journalist.
