Blog: Navigating the changing media landscape

As PR professionals, a day would not go by without someone in our team speaking to a member of the media – including weekends. 

With most of our team having worked in the media for at least a decade or two before moving into PR, we offer our clients advice on how different media outlets work, what makes a good story and how best to secure relevant coverage for our clients. 

We always do our best to facilitate media coverage, including providing them with a concise pitch (though I must admit that I’m not always as concise as I could be), outlining what makes the client’s story compelling and often providing them with photos, video content or even audio if they don’t have the resources available to attend on the day.

However, we can’t control the media – it’s up to the editors to decide what they think news is, based on what’s happening on the day and the merits of what we’re pitching. 

The media environment changes every day and often every hour. The coverage a well-crafted media pitch achieves one day or even at a particular time of the day can be very different to the next, and this is purely because media may have more pressing stories and need to prioritise. 

This is particularly true when there’s increasing pressure on newsrooms to do more with fewer resources. This means we must adapt (often in real time) to get results for our clients. 

For us, that can mean ensuring we have compelling visual content, understanding the nature of the story and its public appeal or newsworthiness, considering how widely people will relate to the issue, and assessing how easy it might be for media to cover depending on resources.

It’s also understanding the value of industry publications – when a client can benefit from reaching a wider network of business peers who will see the value in their story or achievement. It’s reaching the people who matter the most to them, rather than just the widest audience.

As much as we’d love to have every story feature on every TV news bulletin, it’s rarely going to happen. However, having that media experience and having built relationships over decades, we can honestly advise our clients effectively, and with media relationships in the right places we aim to provide the best possible opportunity to share their messages. 

The true value of PR is not often in the number of hits a story can achieve, but in targeting the right audiences, and the relationships we can help build with our client and the media, along with their stakeholders.   

Verity Edwards

Hughes | Consultant