Know thy media…please?

PR is tough! And, it is one job we at SNEWS® can state unequivocally we would not want to undertake. To borrow a few lines from one of our SNEWS PR Awards articles from 2002, “A good PR contact is worth his or her weight in gold to a journalist, and, of course, to the company he or she represents. We media admire all the effort and energy that good PR communication requires, especially when you have to deal with so many whiny, self-centered, ‘I need it yesterday’ people like journalists -- yeah, we're talking about ourselves, the collective media. Of course, we just as quickly despise those who waste our time with worthless drivel and reams of meaningless paper or useless promotions.”

But just as a writer needs to know how to tailor an article to suit a particular magazine’s audience, subject matter or interests, the same holds true for PR: PR agents must know the media, its audiences and needs where they are pitching story ideas. It is not one-size-fits-all. Forgetting this leads to very bad experiences for the PR agent, the publication, and quite likely, the writer very often caught in the middle. And could also lead to less good press for a company.

Recently, the SNEWS team had a new freelancer take on a pretty basic short story, highlighting two to three new and innovative products that retailers might be interested in for the coming year. She was new, but the PR agent for one company she was dealing with was not. However that agent appears to have forgotten she was dealing with a trade magazine, not a consumer one. As a result, the story came in with one of the featured products actually being nearly five years old and not at all new. After a few back and forth communications with the writer, who was naturally frustrated that she might have wasted her time writing up a product that was clearly not new, we decided to contact the PR agent.

When we asked her why she pitched an older product to our writer when she was asked for fresh information – and she of course must know who we were and what we’d want anyway -- we enjoyed the following exchange:

1. Instead of apologizing, she decided her best tact would be to defend her position by telling us, “I'm certain the X Product falls under this requirement…” Let’s see… We request a new and innovative product and we are a trade magazine that seeks details and technical information. So, you decide that a five-year-old product fits our requirements of delivering information retailers might care about as new and innovative? We were truly perplexed trying to figure this out.
2. Then, she raised the ante by deciding we as media clearly don’t know what we ourselves wanted and that we obviously had no idea about other media outlets. So she decided to lecture us a bit by emailing, “To remind you, these are the X that were just featured in USA Today, which is one of the leading news publications in the country.” Gosh, golly, bumpkins that we are, guess she thought we’d never heard of USA Today. And as for using that plug by USA Today to justify why that product should be important to us and our readers, we refer you to our April 24, 2009, editorial in SNEWS -- SNEWS View: But the New York Times gave it a great review…

End result? We have cut the product from the article. We paid the writer for work she completed, but basically we paid her for work that won’t be published. So we wasted our time and money too. None of that is great for the writer, ourselves or the company. But the kicker is, we will now avoid dealing with this PR person as much as possible. She obviously doesn’t understand our needs, nor has she tried. And we’ll just be forced to go around her anytime we need any sort of information from the company that is accurate, believable, and appropriate for our audience. Now that just isn’t good PR for anyone.