WHAT MAKES NEWS?
by Eric Schwartzman
Ever wonder how public relations professionals capture and keep the media's attention? Day in and day out, these 10 simple rules are what makes news. See for yourself.
In the beginning, there were printing presses and radio waves. Today, there are media empires with old and new media holdings. The industrial revolution gave way to publishing and broadcasting much like the information technology revolution gave way to The Slate, Matt Drudge and new media. Few deny the power and influence of the media.
If you know a little about the news media business, chances are you respect and sometimes even resent its sphere of influence over the public. And while the business of syndication is a little more complex, most publishers, broadcasters and cable news media outlets earn their keep through advertising, the business of selling space or time inside their products.
Advertisers pay by CPM, a unit of measurement that equals a thousand pairs of eyeballs. If a particular brand of media pleases the public, it is rewarded with ratings, greater circulation or more visits, which means more CPMs to sell. And since advertisers are always looking for effective and efficient ways to reach their targets, there’s the business of media.
Since the media must get their advertisers in front of a broad or qualified group, if the audience isn’t satisfied, ratings fall and inventory evaporates. So the news media must satisfy viewers with a steady stream of news that attracts the largest audience.
With that in mind, ask yourself what you expect from the news, then ask yourself why your company, product or service is newsworthy. Why is your story of interest to the public or trade? How will it help the media capture or satisfy their audience share? If you understand what makes news from this standpoint, you'll understand the media business.
Media relations involves communicating a story to the news media. And the story you tell must help the media satisfy their audience, so they can deliver market share to their advertisers. So what makes a news story good? When you finally get down to the nitty-gritty, you’ll find ten basic story drivers that, in some form combined, make news. No doubt, great ambiguity hides behind each one of these drivers, as the media spins them to and fro to build audience share, and publicists work to frontload the timeliest ones into their media relations initiative in the fewest words possible.
But first, the story behind my list of story drivers has a story of its own. It is a story about preparedness. The list was given to me at Rogers & Cowan, the largest entertainment public relations agency in the world, by a senior counselor who used it as part of a media-training program he organized for business and government leaders. I added the explanations, and in the interest of simplicity, have left one or two stones unturned.
1. Prominence: Involves exclusivity or celebrities
Exclusivity was pop star Madonna’s best friend and worst enemy in December 2000, when the tabloids and top-tier global news agencies exhausted a razor thin story about her wedding to Guy Ritchie sans photos or facts. Celebrities were also the equity legendary television producer Al Masini borrowed to fuel his syndicated
television programming hits “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “Entertainment Tonight” and “Star Search.” Still, even though exclusivity and/or the right celebrity can drive a story, it works best when there’s a reason for their involvement, besides just blatant media antics. PR Week voted Leonardo DiCaprio’s interview with President Clinton on Global Warming in March as one of the ten worst publicity stunts of 2000, perhaps to spite the editors of Brill’s Content, who put DiCaprio’s publicist on their annual 2000 “Influence List” for the deed.
2. Conflict: Big guy vs. little guy news
The bigger the guy, the higher the stakes, the bigger the story – but conflict is much more than just that. Conflict is the essence of drama and one of the keys to an interesting story. In the case of a labor strike, a conflict might be mainstream news interest culminating in a media opportunity. In the case of a product round-up story, conflict becomes the competing products reviewed, so mentioning your direct competitors by name (and perhaps even their stock symbol) to the media could allow you maximize your reach over the newswires.
3. Proximity: It’s happening in the media’s backyard
Localizing your story geographically is a basic rule of thumb in media relations. Emphasizing the importance of a story to a place and ordering the facts for local journalists has won many a media placement. Since local news media outlets focus on news that occurs within their geographical area, localizing a story can make it more relevant and newsworthy. So while a less than $5 million round of financing by a San Francisco based company still may not make the San Jose Mercury News, other Bay Area media are still better bets than the Chicago Tribune.
In no area of media relations is proximity more transparent than when it applies to publicizing syndicated television programs, since the same weekly program or daily strip clears different markets at different times. Thanks to the Internet, the mother of all invention, and database technology, this type of administrative arbitrage can be automated so a small team can handle a national effort.
In the area of Internet media relations, where press materials are distributed directly to the appropriate journalists via e-mail, your database of journalists becomes a very important tool, because you can query it by city, state or market. If you’re up on stuff, releasing news nationally in seconds is nothing more than a keystroke, and at my firm that’s exactly what it is.
But proximity also applies to how you get started. When you first begin publicizing a company, product or service, you’ve got to play the halls off the Jersey turnpike before you make it in Times Square. What that means is you have to get your act together before you take it on the road, especially since no one likes getting off on the wrong foot with the media. In other words, any company embarking on their first analyst tour would be wise to start in Denver and finish in Boston.
4. Impact: How many people the news affects
By this definition, the more people the news affects, the bigger the story. And while there are always exceptions (like Column One of the Los Angeles Times), most news agencies frontline whatever story has the greatest impact, putting companies hungry for front-page news in a difficult spot. The challenge is to seek out and discover how your company, product or service impacts a group, like the public, investors, broadcasters or even the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Since everyone claims to be the industry “leader” in their press releases, numbers, for those willing to release them, objectify the impact of your story.
In the business of news, quantity is more important than quality. But asking how a company’s news impacts popular culture may be a mystery, even to the proprietors themselves. Quantitative success stories about your company, product or service benchmark, in no uncertain terms, affects the degree of impact the story has on culture, industry or The Street, depending on its proximity. Numbers add impartiality to the story, transforming a press release into a research study by quantifying, much like USA Today’s “Snapshot” charts, which attempt to demystify the news with simple math.
5. Timeliness: The news is breaking right now
Never before has the timeliness of your story been more important than in today’s 24-hour news climate, with outlets rushing to be the first to press, as they did to their own discredit throughout our recent election, to announce the presidency. Like pizza delivery, timeliness in media is key. And because whoever breaks the story first is seen as the most credible news outlet, some might argue a competitive news environment spawns more accurate news coverage.
But even though easing regulations, which paved the way for CBS/Viacom merger and the Time Warner/AOL deal, led to massive consolidation in the media business, a competitive media marketplace still races to be first to introduce news to the public.
Under increasing pressure from more new choices to consumers than ever, outlets fighting to justify their CPMs to advertisers play out in the form of bitter news rivalries. In newspapers, it’s the New York Times against the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times battling the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle opposing the San Jose Mercury News to be first.
To use timeliness as an effective story driver, you must work backwards from media lead times and their distribution frequency. For example, if your Internet music service is announcing a deal with Yahoo!, you may decide to advance the news under embargo to billboard and Electronic Media first, and wait until Friday to give it to the Daily Variety, so everyone can run it on the following Monday. This way nobody has a chance to scoop their competitor, and timeliness drives the story to as many readers as possible.
6. Surprise: A departure from the norm
What constitutes a departure from the norm is a subjective question, and usually when subjectivity is involved, the story can get mired in hype. The argument for hype is, unless you can imagine it, you’ll never make it so. The argument against it is what led to the NASDAQ correction of the summer of 2000.
Surprise is the tale of the unexpected, of the strange but true, which have always astonished and amazed the public, hungry to get the scoop on the unanticipated news of the day. In business news, surprises can be happy or sad, usually depending on the numbers. This is where quality is more important than quantity.
7. Something New: Unprecedented occurrences
Like a departure from the norm, claming no previous example shouldn’t involve slight of hand. Since watershed news is a staple news product, it might be all too tempting to reach, sometimes too far, for unprecedented status. Whenever you make this claim, you are putting your reputation with the news media at stake against its accuracy, which brings us back to the subject of preparedness.
In fact, news is intellectual property. Proprietary information distributed for economic gain. So it must be, by definition, something novel or non-obvious, which begs the question, “How much information are you prepared to release?” But even with everyone else partnering in so-called business webs and openly exchanging sensitive information with their trading partners, there are probably a few things about your business you don’t want anyone to know. It’s not unlikely information technology could make public precisely those supply-chain wrinkles you don’t want to reveal.
If you’re in the service business, releasing unprecedented news may require a special kind of diplomacy, since it’s often driven by your clients’ success and tips-off your competitors as to how you set your table.
8. Trends: What will be tomorrow’s news?
While both make news, a trend indicates the way things tend to go, and trendy is the latest fad. So when IBM named Harriet P. Pearson as the company’s first chief privacy officer in November 2000 to guide IBM’s privacy policies and strengthen their consumer privacy protection efforts, the company got the attention of the national news media by demonstrating a proactive stance toward an emerging trend.
Spotting relevant news trends and disclosing them to the media, is a lot of fun, because it begs the question, “What if?” Trends are the guts of feature stories, which are handled differently than breaking news by the media. Feature stories are usually more driven by trends than the news of the day, since they take longer to develop and trends are timely longer than the news of the day.
9. Something Useful: Affects peoples lives
The public is always interested in finding out about something new and useful. When something useful brings dramatic change to people’s lives, and sometimes even when it doesn’t, the media takes note. In fact, people love the latest gizmos and gadgets so much, there are consumer and trade publications dedicated to reporting news and events on almost every brand of technology available. These outlets thrive on news about something useful, and many have their own new products section.
10. Experts: Professionals in their fields
In order for your expertise to be useful to the media, you must be able to articulate what you know, which may not be so easy if you deploy information technology systems to help manufacturers match their production capacity against actual market demand. And while it takes time and effort to simplify any story, to be considered an expert in anything by the media, you must also be an expert communicator.
Leigh Steinberg, the real “Jerry McGuire,” is an expert negotiator. When I handled his account, one of our objectives was to introduce and reinforce his position in popular culture as a thought leader on the art of negotiation. So when the NBA locked out their players, I was able to get him quoted in USA Today’s headline coverage, even though most of his clients are quarterbacks. But we skipped the fluff and communicated effectively with reporters on deadline.
It’s no accident certain individuals are experts, and others are not. Aside from the fact they’re both loaded, Bill Gates and Donald Trump look and sound great on Larry King Live because they have taken the time to organize their thoughts and rehearse their schpiels. And since time is a scarce commodity when you’re a thought leader, it is imperative the news you release be intelligent, accurate and jargon free.
After you’ve examined your story from the news media’s perspective and strengthened your drivers, it becomes apparent that understanding what makes news is a bit like understanding limited attention spans. The public has limited attention for news, and so the media has a limited attention span for press releases, and as a result, both filter and ignore most of the information they receive. The key to making news is offering valuable information in exchange for someone’s attention.
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Perhaps Mark Twain said it best when he wrote:
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself. . . Anybody can have ideas – the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
--Letter to Emeline Beach, 2/10/1868
