The increasing importance of freelance journalists to media relations efforts

First off, a big thank you to Judy Turk who heads up VCU’s School of Mass Communications.  She included our blog post about the visit over there in her latest blog post and school newsletter.

After my last post on the future of newspapers, Stacey Brucia, our “Employee #1,” and I were discussing the future of media relations and we noticed two interesting trends. 

First, she mentioned to me about the increasing number of freelance journalists who were reaching out to her in her work for Snagajob.com (client plug here:  The numbers one online source for hourly and part-time jobs).  There freelancers weren’t writing stories for local weeklies but for national outlets like Reader’s Digest, Money and Seventeen among others.  She also mentioned that none of these folks are listed in our very expensive online media database.

Second, we also talked about how newspapers, in order to survive, are entering into “content-sharing agreements.”  In many cases there are the sworn enemies of the past (see Washington Post and Baltimore Sun), now sharing news in order to reach an economies of scale.  Sort of like the Mets and Yankees having Derek Jeter play short and David Wright play third on the same team because the two teams ran out of money.

These two trends provide both challenges and opportunities for media relations pros.  On the challenge side, given the economy of the day, freelancer journalists are becoming even more important and creating your own list of them and establishing relationships with them are critical to ongoing success.  As traditional media shrinks it will reach out more and more to freelancers to do the work.  A good list of freelance journos, who they work for, etc. may one day eclipse the need for at least a portion of that expensive database.  They also will work for more than one media outlet at a time so they are relationships that will keep on giving.

Speaking of the gift that keeps on giving, those new content-sharing arrangement may become the wire services of the future.  We are already seeing increased migration of regular news stories.  What used to only run in one paper, now runs in a half dozen.

The bottom line is there are less staffers so while there are less people to pitch, if your pitch is successful the story has a chance to be in more outlets.

Just some interesting observations on the traditional media relations side.  Who said traditional PR is dead…I think it is just evolving with the times along with its social marketing cousin.