Media relations is dead, long live media relations

469558195

Media relations is a core assignment and talent for most public relations pros. It’s what I cut my teeth at when I switched over from journalism 20+ years ago. It’s a lot of what we built The Hodges Partnership on when we started the firm 12 years ago.

But the practice of media relations has changed dramatically over those 12 years. What used to be an exercise in list creation and blast emailing is now a more targeted, research-driven approach to find the right reporter/editor/producer with the right information at the right time.

A MediaMap (remember MediaMap?), Cision or Vocus description used to be enough information for you to get by. Now you must dig deeper looking for Twitter profiles, LinkedIn descriptions and how many kids they have, to make the right connection.

And even when you think you have the right pitch for the right journalist, you are competing with those who haven’t done their research and are bombarding the reporter with literally hundreds of emails a day. This is best illustrated by Zach Schonfeld’s first-person story in Newsweek where he actually opened and responded to every PR email he received… for a week.

Zack, you’re a saint.

So in thinking of the latest in the series of Hodges Starters morning events, we thought the current-day practice of media relations, and how to do it the right way, would be valuable.

Steve Cummings and Sean Ryan, both of whom have been doing this for a long time and have seen the changes, will lead the conversation. They spend most of their time dealing with national media and are successful breaking through the PR clutter to get great coverage for clients.

Sign up by clicking here and seeing all the info and the stuff we need you to fill out.

And before you congratulate us for holding this event, I will share that our motives aren’t that pure. Every bad email we can stop you from sending makes it easier for reporters to see pitches from us.

Jon Newman

In 2002 Jon cofounded The Hodges Partnership and has helped to grow it into one of the country’s largest public relations firms (based on O’Dwyer’s annual rankings). Jon has taught communications as an adjunct professor at VCU, speaks regularly at conferences and meetings and blogs and tweets about public relations and marketing issues.

Read more by Jon

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign up to receive our blog posts by email