HITTING THE HEADLINES: 4 REASONS YOU’RE NOT GETTING COVERAGE (AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM)

It’s fair to say that gaining media exposure and news coverage for your brand is getting harder than almost ever before. Waves of layoffs across the entire industry have been a theme of the past 12 months across the nation's media, with even the biggest publishers making significant changes to their news teams and structures. The UK’s largest news publisher, Reach, laid off nearly 500 staff, closed websites and combined print and online teams. Worldwide content machine Buzzfeed shut down its news operations after starting to publish articles completely written by AI.

With fewer journalists on staff and more stories than ever before, it’s much easier to get lost in the noise - so making sure you nail your content right out of the door is now absolutely crucial. We’ve got together our top 4 tips on how to cut through the flak and get your story into the media you need;

1. The Right Content
The single most common issue that prevents your news from being published is your content mix. A news story needs to be just that - news. While you might want to shout from the rooftops about the improvement in your sales figures or your brand new product, you need to ask yourself: Is this really news to the world or is it just news to us?

HOW TO SOLVE IT: Craft, Craft, Craft. Don’t just write that your sales are up - think about why a journalist will care. Whether you’re talking about your fantastic growth or the latest thing to market, write like you’re the reader and put yourself in the journalists place to make sure that your content is exactly what they will want to
publish.

2. Print Ready
With fewer journalists required to create more content, it’s no surprise that their time is precious. The amount of time that journalists have to review, redraft and publish pieces has fallen to just minutes, meaning that any pieces of content that need more than a couple of tweaks are likely to sit in the ‘unused’ pile forever.

HOW TO SOLVE IT: Think like a newswriter. Craft your content to line up with what a journalist will need to publish immediately, including headlines, no grammatical errors and an appropriate structure for the type of article you’re writing.

3. Timing
Similarly to getting your content print-ready, making sure that you get your timing right is also crucial to success. Even if you have the best press release the world has ever seen, if you’re issuing it at the wrong time then it’s probably dropping into the bottomless pit of emails that journalists just don’t have the time to open - so think carefully before hitting the send button.

HOW TO SOLVE IT: The best times to send over your press releases are usually weekday mornings between Tuesday-Thursday for most media titles who’s news desks operate predominantly Monday-Friday. It’s also helpful to learn your schedules for titles you’re trying to reach. For example, if you’re aiming for a page lead on a Monday morning in a major national newspaper, sending your content out to the Sunday team for a Sunday-for-Monday insertion is your best chance, so speak to your contacts and learn when is best for them.

4. Rich Content
Rich content is a journalist's best friend. One of the biggest issues that can stop a story in its tracks is a lack of quality visual content to accompany a story. Journalists are no stranger to a stock image, but even when they are appropriate, most don’t have the time to scour the internet for the right picture for your story.

HOW TO SOLVE IT: Make sure you have a bank of content ready to go that you can share with your journalists when they need it. High resolution images, video content, infographics, statistical tables - the more extra content you can give to your journalists, the more they have to work with when they’re selling the story to the
editor. Landing a good story isn’t just about creating a good piece of content, or selling at the right time - you need to make sure that you’re combining your good copy with good rich content, selling at the right time and hitting the right tone.

Get everything spot on and you’ll be swimming in coverage - so what are you waiting for?