THE PR MASTERCLASS

THE PR MASTERCLASS
HOW TO DEVELOP A PUBLIC RELATIONS
STRATEGY THAT WORKS!

ALEX SINGLETON
© 2014 Alex Singleton

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CONTENTS

Foreword vii
Preface xi

  1  Why Public Relations Campaigns Fail – and How to  

Make Them Succeed 1

  2  How to Develop a Story Idea that Is Newsworthy 23

  3  How to Build and Maintain an Effective List of  

Journalists 49

  4  How to Write an Attention-Grabbing Press Release 67

  5  Dealing with Incoming Media Enquiries 97

  6  How to Successfully Pitch a Letter 109

  7  Persuade the Public with Compelling  

Comment Articles 129

  8  The Secrets of Effective Television and Radio  

Appearances 147

  9  How to Choose an Agency or Consultant 159

10  Future Learning 173

About the Author 181

Acknowledgements 183
Index 185
FOREWORD
By Francis Ingham
Director General of the Public Relations Consultants Association
Visiting Professor in Public Relations at the University of Westminster

Crudely speaking, there are two types of books on PR, carrying

with them two types of uses. The first type is the pseudo-aca-
demic book, probably written by somebody with little or no
knowledge of PR. You’ve probably never heard of the author.
That book’s primary use is to light your fire, line your cat’s litter
tray or prop open a door. Good trees died in vain so that it might
live.

The second book is by somebody who actually understands

PR, because they work in it. That book has a completely different
use – it’s there to educate, guide and inform. It is a good thing.
You should read it.

I’m delighted to say that Alex Singleton’s book is most defi-

nitely in the latter category – which is why I’m delighted to be
writing its foreword.

Ours is a vibrant, growing industry. It informs and inspires

the majority of what you hear about from the media. And, in so
doing, it moulds choices, opinions and visions. Because of that
fact, it plays a fundamental role in shaping our world. Obviously,
that role can be for good or for ill. But its power is undeniable.
 viii | FOREWORD

Yet it is also an industry of contrasts. The majority of practi-

tioners in our industry are not members of professional bodies,
and probably aren’t eligible to be so. The code of conduct that
distinguishes PRCA members from the others, for example, is
valuable not least because of the contrast it draws between those
willing and able to subscribe to rules and sanctions – and those
who are neither willing nor able.

Our industry prides itself on professional skills and relation-

ship building, yet all too often fails to invest in either. For a trade
of such power, we spend remarkably little time focused on honing
the power we exercise. That needs to change.

Our industry all too often strives after the ephemeral and
intangible at the expense of the important. Its biggest failure is a
propensity to – how should I put it? – be rather up itself. That is,
to fail to see the reality of our craft, rather than somebody’s arti-
ficial representation of it.

This book falls into none of those traps. It is practical, direct,

correct and insightful. It recognises, for example, that we should
of course talk about how digital is changing our industry. And
we absolutely must explain why PR should have a strategic as
well as a tactical function. And, for that matter, why reputation
management is vital.

But it recognises that the bread and butter of PR continues to

be about relationships with journalists, colleagues and clients.
Good writing skills; the ability to spell (all too often lacking in
new recruits to our industry); a capacity not just to tolerate the
company of clients and journalists, but actually to enjoy it; and
the ability instinctively to see the angle and to know the nascent
story – all of these remain vital to PR.
 FOREWORD | ix

It’s all too easy to lose sight of these basic facts. I have sat
through dozens of talks about Grunig,1 and new paradigms, and
symbiotic relationships, and all of that stuff. It all has a place, and
I do genuinely respect that place. But it is far from the being the
entirety – or indeed the mainstay – of our industry. And some-
times when people seek so very, very hard to create an artificial
intellectual construct with which they can frame our industry’s
work, they serve only to obscure what it does, and to confuse us
all.

The glory of this book is that it doesn’t make any of those

mistakes. And there is an obvious reason why not. It is written
by a poacher-turned-gamekeeper – by a former and respected
journalist who moved to PR. Because of that background, he
knows what journalists are looking for. He knows the things that
annoy them – like calling on deadline “just to check you received
our release”. Like poorly written copy. Like spamming journos.
Like failing to realise that the journalists’ role isn’t to serve your
clients’ interests. All of that insight is of incredible value.

Over the past few years, our industry has grown considerably.
It has done so despite the strongest economic headwinds in living
memory. It is a career of choice, offering good pay, intelligent
colleagues and excellent prospects. And if that is true of the UK,
it is even more valid outside of it. A recent magazine front cover
described how “spin doctors” were taking over the world. Its
language was rather over the top, and its term of choice – spin
doctor – was an unfortunate throwback to a time when our

1
 “The Importance of the Four Models of Public Relations”, [Link]
.edu/projects/fall99/westbrook/[Link] (accessed March 4, 2013)
 x | FOREWORD

industry foolishly embraced that sobriquet. But the message was

clear and right – that ours in an industry of the future.

But every industry of the future needs a route map for its
practitioners. Otherwise, they’re likely to get lost. And that is
why I welcome wholeheartedly this book – an accurate, acces-
sible and powerful atlas for anyone seeking their way through
the PR jungle.
PREFACE

There is a golden rule in media relations, but one that most

people forget. Give journalists what they want. And what do
journalists want? Well, more money mostly – but offering that
would be unethical. What they actually need from you are story
ideas that interest their readers.

If you provide this effectively, you get a lot of coverage. But,

until now, it has been difficult to find practical information on
how to do this well. This book, for the first time, gives an insid-
er’s view on getting press coverage.

I started writing for newsstand consumer magazines in 1994,

was a staff journalist at The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph,
and have also written for The Guardian, the Daily Express, CityAM
and, online, for the Daily Mail. Intermingled with that press expe-
rience, I have also worked trying to secure coverage in the media
– and I’ve lived and worked in three countries: the United
Kingdom, the United States and Belgium. In this book I’d like to
share with you what I learned from all the mistakes, experiments
and successes I’ve made along the way.

These days I have a pretty accurate gut instinct of what will

get good coverage. But this was not always the case – and it is
difficult to acquire. Rarely do journalists properly explain their
 xii | PREFACE

thinking. They say: “I’m sorry but there wasn’t space.” This, I’m
afraid, just means the proposal wasn’t good enough. After all, if
it had been brilliant, they would have made space. Other journal-
ists avoid these conversations. They recognise an unwanted PR
pitch from the caller display and just don’t pick up the phone.

What I’ve realised is that, despite the impression some people

have that public relations is easy, there’s actually a huge amount
to learn. That is why, in this book, you’ll occasionally hear me
bemoaning the failure of some PR practitioners to grow their
skills. Despite lots of media experience, it was only when actually
I joined the staff of a national newspaper that I was able to soak
up what people at the very top of the journalistic trade really
thought about PR pitches. The experience radically transformed
my understanding of what is newsworthy and what is not.

A note about terminology

This book focuses on media relations. Public relations is undoubt-

edly broader than just trying to generate media coverage – includ-
ing everything from event management, to internal staff
communications, to advising executives on what to say to regula-
tors. But it is worth noting the central position that Trevor Morris
and Simon Goldsworthy (who lecture in public relations at the
University of Westminster) give to media coverage within public
relations. They describe PR as: “the planned persuasion of people
to behave in ways that further its sponsor’s objectives. It works
primarily through the use of media relations and other forms of
third party endorsement.”2

2
 Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, PR: A Persuasive Industry? Spin, Public
Relations and the Shaping of the Modern Media (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
p. 102.
 PREFACE | xiii

Some in the PR industry would prefer a definition that saw

PR as giving strategic, board-level advice to the biggest listed
companies. But that is to confuse what the most senior practition-
ers are doing with the majority of the work. Indeed, it’s a bit like
saying house-building is about structural engineering and is
nothing to do with brick-laying or plumbing. As Morris and
Goldsworthy go on to say: “Few modern PR campaigns lack a
media element and most have media coverage at their heart.
Indeed, the PR industry’s reluctance to admit to the centrality of
media relations . . . flies in the face of the understanding of PR
in wider society. To most outsiders PR is forever, and overwhelm-
ingly, associated with journalism and the media.”3

Anyway, I tried to imagine what a normal person sitting in

front of Amazon’s search function would think to look for. It
struck me that the target audience for this book would almost
exclusively say that they need something on “public relations”.

This concurred with my experience hosting workshops teach-

ing similar sessions, in which I found that internet users search-
ing for “media training” were really executives nervous about
imminent television appearances, while “PR training” was used
by people wanting to sell products or ideas through the press.

Why conventional media still matters

Some people – especially, I’m afraid to say, those who are unskilled
at securing press coverage – assert that the conventional media
no longer matters. What is important, they claim, is social media

3
 Ibid, p. 105.
 xiv | PREFACE

– sites like Twitter and Facebook. And, for sure, engaging with
social media is an important part of public relations. But these
people are wrong if they believe that the conventional media is
dead. What is actually happening is that much of it – especially
the trade press and daily news – is moving online. That is not
death: it is a change of format.

Many of the conventional media publications have trans-

formed, or are in the process of changing, into hugely popular
destinations online. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail, The
Guardian and The New York Times now have a global readership
that, on a daily basis, dwarfs what they ever achieved in print.
Martin Clarke, the publisher of the Daily Mail’s website, says of
his site: “People are addicted to it. It’s like journalism crack.”4
Meanwhile, there are no signs that viewers are rejecting quality
broadcasters. The BBC’s global audience hit 239 million people a
week in 2012, up 6 per cent from the previous year.5 And it is
worth noting what happened during the mindless riots in the UK
in August 2011. Social media was given credit both for helping
rioters to mobilise6 and also for assisting community minded
citizens to clear up the damage.7 But when the public wanted
authoritatively to know what was happening, conventional
media played a massive role. On August 9, 13.1 million people
turned to the BBC News Channel, while a 10pm bulletin on BBC

4
 [Link]
-says-editor/ (accessed March 12, 2013).
5
 [Link]
_for_bbc_g.html (accessed March 8, 2013).
6
 [Link]
-media-blackout (accessed March 8, 2013).
7
 [Link]
-riots_n_1136306.html (accessed March 8, 2013).
 PREFACE | xv

One got 7.6 million viewers. ITV’s News at Ten was watched by
2.9 million people, and in one 15-minute segment Sky News
pulled in 9.28 million. So much for the death of the conventional
media.

Two things have changed. First, some of the barriers to entry

have been removed. Expensive printing presses are not necessary
for web publishing. YouTube lets anyone with a smartphone
record and share footage, and give their own video reports of the
news.

Second, the media is globalising. That is particularly savage

for American city newspapers which once practically had local
monopolies. They now find their readers logging on to read not
just internet-only news sites, such as The Huffington Post, but also
to what the British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand media
think.

Television stations in the UK now face competition from the

heavily resourced American-owned Netflix internet service,
which spent $100 million on the hit TV show House of Cards.8 And
the BBC – ITN duopoly on national and international TV news
was shattered, first with introduction of Sky News (major share-
holder: News Corporation, headquartered in New York), then
with cable and satellite services beaming in countless interna-
tional news programmes (from France 24 to Al Jazeera), and now
with the commonplace use of video on news websites.

Does this increased competition mean that the conventional

media is doomed? Well, not in my view. It is clearly painful to

8
 [Link]
-of-cards/[Link] (accessed March 8, 2013).
 xvi | PREFACE

many media companies. Many more will go to the wall. But there
will still be mass media, and – contrary to the doom-filled whining
of some – plenty of it will be high quality.

You see, there are lots of markets where the barriers to entry
seem low, but where some of the big players have huge market
shares. Anyone can make a cup of coffee, yet consumers flock to
brands such as Starbucks. In 2012, the global coffee giant turned
over $13.3 billion and traded in 61 countries.9 Professor Priya
Raghubir of New York University’s Stern School of Business talks
of “the enduring brand loyalty” of the chain. “Starbucks stands
for coffee; it’s converted that into an experience . . . I think they
[the customers] value the convenience, they value the welcome,
they value the fact that they can find the Starbucks anywhere . . .
and offerings are uniform.”10 In other words, using Starbucks is
extremely reliable – and this is information its brand communi-
cates to us.

Similarly, anyone can broadcast news over the internet, but

not everyone has a strong news brand. In war, in particular, I
don’t just want to watch five-second YouTube clips that suppos-
edly show one side behaving badly, or to merely read a view
expressed in 140 characters on Twitter. I rely upon brands such
as the BBC or CNN to bring a researched perspective that I trust.

Moreover, the boundaries between the conventional media

and social media have blurred. Blogs, once regarded as a rival to

9
 Starbucks 2012 Annual Report, [Link]
.zhtml?c=99518&p=irol-reportsAnnual (accessed March 12, 2013).
10
 h t t p : / / w w w. h u ff i n g t o n p o s t . c o m / 2 0 1 3 / 0 3 / 0 7 / s t a r b u c k s - b r a n d
-loyalty_n_2830372.html (accessed March 12, 2013).
 PREFACE | xvii

big media, have been adopted wholeheartedly by newspaper and

magazine websites, from The Atlantic to The Telegraph. Nowadays,
reader comments at the bottom of articles are providing writers
with instant feedback, while Twitter – with its messages limited
to 140 characters – is inevitably pointing us in the direction of
worthwhile journalism, wherever it appears in the world. In 2010
the Daily Mail revealed that 10 per cent of its UK traffic came from
Facebook. Martin Clarke, publisher of the Daily Mail’s website,
said that: “Facebook isn’t a threat or a parasite but a gigantic free
marketing engine.”

The biggest stars of the blogosphere also became stars of the

conventional media: Guido Fawkes, a political gossip blogger,
got a column in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, Tim Mont-
gomerie, who launched the ConservativeHome blog, became
Comment Editor of The Times and Iain Dale, who was one of
Britain’s earliest political bloggers, became a top radio presenter.
On the BBC’s Question Time programme, it has almost become an
integrated part of the show that viewers tweet their views of the
show’s guests and the annoyingness of the studio audience. And
finally, when ITV News announced a relaunch of its website in
2012,11 it started displaying stories in a “live stream”, with older
stories flowing down the page, just as you would expect on
Twitter.

As I see it, the written and broadcast media is principally

about content, while social media is principally about contact (that
is to say, the online interaction with others we like). In fact, social
media’s other name, social networking, is often more apt. Both

11
 [Link]
(accessed November 19, 2013).
 xviii | PREFACE

types of media are useful. But those who pretend that the con-
ventional media no longer counts are promoting a fantasy, which
is not borne out by the readership and viewer figures. After all,
the invention of the telephone – an early social network – didn’t
stop people wanting to read journalism. Neither will social
media.

And with that out of the way, let’s get started.

 Chapter 1
Why Public Relations
Campaigns Fail – and
How to Make Them
Succeed
H
ave you ever seen a hippopotamus? Quite often, you
will find that they have a bird on their back. It’s a
friendship that benefits both sides. The hippo isn’t able
to reach to clean its back. Yet potentially harmful parasites embed
themselves up there. So the hippo makes friends with certain
types of bird, who get to feast on the parasites. Both sides benefit.

Good media relations is like that two-way friendship. The

effective PR person is always thinking: what is in the interests of
the journalist? The ineffective PR person only asks: what message
does my employer want me to drum repeatedly?

Alas, the vast majority of PR pitches – even from some big PR

agencies – fail to acknowledge the needs of journalists.

Ignorance isn’t bliss

The simple and most effective investment you can make in your
public relations is to buy and read the publications that you want
to get coverage in. I know that sounds obvious – much of what
you will read in this book is, on one level, common sense. Yet it
is rarely followed. I often come across people who complain, for
example, that they cannot get newspapers or magazines to cover
 4 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

their material – but who do not have any copies of those publica-
tions in their offices. Of course, they may be accessing them on
their tablets, but invariably they are not.

PR is like other forms of marketing: too many of the people

doing it are clueless. According to Professors Morris and Golds-
worthy, a survey they conducted with one of the largest PR firms
“found that few if any employees recalled reading any books
about PR”.12 That is good – for you. It means that with the basics
you will learn in this book, you can outperform many of your
rivals. I frequently find even sizable companies – turning over
more than £100m a year – who run appallingly unsuccessful
PR campaigns, despite employing supposedly well-qualified in-
house people to run them. Those staff just haven’t invested time
to develop their skills.

The truth is that for all the PR industry’s claims of profes-

sionalism, too much of what gets done in its name is based on
ignorance. Of the 60,000 people in full-time PR jobs in the United
Kingdom, perhaps 15,000 are highly skilled. Only they do things
like going on training courses and reading books to keep their
skills sharp, and join the Public Relations Consultants Associa-
tion and read CorpComms to keep up to date with best practice.

In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates

that there are 212,510 public relations specialists,13 the vast major-
ity of whom are not members of a professional body or trade

12
 Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, PR Today: The Authoritative Guide to
Public Relations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 25.
13
 Bureau of Labor Statistics Economic News Release, [Link]
[Link]/[Link] (accessed February 25, 2013).
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 5

association. If there is a similar split between skilled and unskilled

practitioners as in the UK, that would mean around 160,000 of
American PR practitioners need to radically improve their skills.

This problem is not new. Edward Bernays, one of the founders

of modern public relations, told The New York Times in 1991 that
“Public relations today is horrible. Any dope, any nitwit, any
idiot can call him or herself a public relations practitioner.” They
give the industry a bad name.

That so much PR is bad means that there is no reason why

even small companies – with decent PR – cannot propel them-
selves into the limelight. Indeed, many firms have been built
from scratch using PR as the biggest tool in their marketing
arsenals.

But no PR programme will be truly successful unless it is

based on a genuine understanding of the worldview and the sort
of articles publications prefer. Edward Bernays, writing in 1923,
defined an important duty of the public relations practitioner:

The public relations counsel is first and foremost a student. His

field of study is the public mind. His text books for this study are
the facts of life; the articles printed in newspapers and magazines,
the advertisements that are inserted in publications, the billboards
that line the streets, the railroads and the highways, the speeches
that are delivered in legislative chambers, the sermons issuing
from pulpits, anecdotes related in smoking rooms, the gossip of
Wall Street, the patter of the theatre and the conversation of the
other men who, like them, are interpreters and must listen for the
clear or obscure enunciations of the public.14

14
 Bernays, Edward L., Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: IG Publishing,
1923) p. 78.
 6 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

The so-called “low information diet”, popularised by Tim

Ferriss,15 who suggests that we should stop reading the news,
isn’t an option for those wanting to do well in public relations.
Practitioners who are not reading to develop their general knowl-
edge just won’t prosper. Titles such as The Economist, Bloomberg
BusinessWeek, Wired and, of course, the newspapers are useful
mind fodder.

How to get started

It doesn’t matter what sort of media outlet you’re interested in:

you need to read the publication religiously. That might mean
decamping to a major city library for a few days and reading the
back issues. It certainly should mean getting a subscription, if it’s
a print publication, or always picking up a copy from the news-
stand. Only if you engross yourself in a publication will you truly
understand what to pitch to its journalists.

Let’s say you are trying to get coverage for a startup business
manufacturing camera bags, of various designs. The first thing
to do is to walk into a big newsagent and buy all the titles about
photography – there are lots of them.

You can find out which titles are the most important from
looking at their audited circulation figures. The International
Federation of Audit Bureaux of Circulations has member bureaux
that create reliable figures for how many people read each major
publication. These bureaux cover the circulations of titles in forty
countries, although there are some agencies that are independent
of the global federation. You can find out more at [Link],

15
 Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week (London: Vermilion, 2011), p. 10.
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 7

where you can click through to an agency in your country. Some

of the major circulation bureaux are:

• United Kingdom and Ireland  [Link]

• United States [Link]
• Canada [Link]
• Australia [Link]
• New Zealand [Link]
• The Netherlands [Link]
• Denmark [Link]
• Sweden [Link]

Given that your time is likely to be limited, it makes sense to

concentrate on publications that (a) are instinctively most inter-
ested in your work and (b) have the highest circulations.

For an online publication, you can work out how popular it

is using a website called [Link], which displays how well-
read the site is relative to others. Many major news sites now
have their online readers audited by the Audit Bureaux of
Circulations.

Looking at the circulation figures can be eye-opening. In the

UK, there are local papers that outsell national ones. As I type
this, the circulation figures for the Liverpool Echo show that it
outsells The Independent – just. And the London Evening Standard,
despite being a local newspaper, is one of the most-read papers
in the land. I am sure that a lot of PR campaigns ignore local
papers as unimportant – but I say look at the circulation figures
before making that sort of judgement. Similarly, there are blogs
which have a bigger readership than mainstream publications.
Is there anything more widely read in the Westminster political
 8 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

world than the gossip-filled Guido Fawkes Blog? Everyone in UK

politics seems to read the site, even if they hate it. Meanwhile,
The Daily Caller, which was founded in 2010 and is only available
online, breaks major stories and is one of Washington DC’s most
important news outlets.

As – in our example – you’re making camera bags, let’s say

you are interested in Amateur Photographer, one of the most-read
photography publications, which has been going since 1884. By
reading the news pages over several issues, you discover that its
news editor is interested in bossy police officers and security
guards who pretend that they have legal powers to stop photog-
raphers taking photos in public places. You see, amateur photog-
raphers often set up tripods in public places to take chocolate-box
images of famous buildings. And some security people think this
is suspicious. (“Why is he taking photographs? He must be a
terrorist!”)

Armed with this knowledge, you produce a free booklet about

the legal aspects of photography in public places. The idea is that
photographers can store it in their camera bag and show it to the
police, if challenged.

You contact the news editor of Amateur Photographer and tell

him that you will post this free guide to anyone who requests it
from your website. You get to build up a mailing list of keen
photographers, the public gets a useful guide, and the magazine
gets a news story.

However, this story would be completely irrelevant to Outdoor

Photography magazine. Its readers are landscape photographers
predominantly taking shots in the countryside, and therefore are
unlikely to be stopped by the police.
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 9

The dreary product or personnel announcement

There is only one thing a journalist finds more boring than a press
release announcing a new product. It is a press release announc-
ing a personnel change. If that’s what your firm is doing cur-
rently, I hope this book – especially the next chapter – will show
you a better path.

Admittedly, the press releases just mentioned do sometimes

work – and can actually be a mainstay of trade publications. The
appointment of a new CEO at a major industry player will nor-
mally cause a story with a photograph to appear in a trade pub-
lication, while a more junior appointment might get an inch
somewhere in an “in brief” column. However, they won’t play
so well, if at all, in consumer titles. Yes, when Apple launches a
new product or changes its CEO, consumer news organisations
are desperate to cover it. But most people doing PR aren’t lucky
enough to be representing Apple, and most such announcements
aren’t jumped upon by the press.

The reality is that the vast majority of press releases – perhaps

95 per cent – are ignored by the media. Yet, amazingly, even many
big companies are still totally reliant on product and personnel
press releases, which is why their media coverage is far less than
their size of business deserves. There are PR teams – ones that
don’t read books like this – who are paid good money, but day-in,
day-out issue press releases that are simple, boring announce-
ments. They get some coverage – but not much.

If you want to generate sizeable coverage, your PR has to be

at a higher level.
 10 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

What higher-level PR looks like

Andrew Gadsden is an entrepreneur who blends tea in a factory

in Portsmouth, near England’s best-known naval port. Although
he sells hundreds of teas, his main product is Portsmouth Tea,
which is a better quality of tea than that sold in supermarkets,
giving a fuller flavour. He has built up a strong reputation in the
city and people have started to buy Portsmouth Tea, over the
internet, from all over the country.

Instead of simply issuing press releases saying that he is

selling tea, he does things that the media genuinely finds interest-
ing. One endeavour was to beat a world record: he created the
world’s largest teabag and unveiled it on board the HMS Warrior,
which is moored at Portsmouth.

This simple, relatively low-cost activity secured him an inter-

view on the ITV local television news, a story on the BBC News
website and lots of local coverage. I have linked to the coverage
at [Link]/teabag.

As a result of the coverage, he’s able to show current and

prospective customers that his company has been featured on
the biggest British TV networks, the BBC and ITV. Although the
articles and news reports generated are not product reviews,
the public still sees them as third-party endorsements. Or, to
use the clichéd, but remarkably effective, phrase, his company,
[Link], is “as seen on TV”. If the BBC and ITV think
Portsmouth Tea is kosher enough to cover, it must be decent.

But it is hardly surprising that Andrew’s company gets cover-

age. When I visited his factory, he picked up a newspaper – one
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 11

of those things rarely on display in bad PR agencies – and started

explaining what he liked about it. If you know your publications,
you’ll do well.

How to capture the results of good PR

Some of the people who see your company’s name in print or

on the television will search for your website. However, they will
not necessarily, at that very moment, be ready to buy from you.
It is vital that you set up your website to capture their email
addresses before they forget who you are.

Just as with journalists, you need to offer people something

interesting in return. Andrew Gadsden, for example, offers a free
tea course, in which people learn by email about the varied types
of tea he sells. People will be far more likely to give you their
email address if they think they will get something valuable in
return, rather than just advertising emails.

For best results, avoid sending out emails that look like glossy
leaflets, and instead focus on talking with your prospects as
though you were sending an email just to them. Many people’s
email software is set to block images. And there are still people
who will read them on some primitive BlackBerry phone. Drayton
Bird, who has spent a lifetime measuring the responses to mar-
keting and built the UK’s largest direct marketing agency, says
that: “E-mails that look like text almost always outperform ones
with pretty pictures”.16

16
 Drayton Bird, “31 Insiders’ Direct Marketing Ploys”, [Link]
[Link]/sites/default/files/e-books/DraytonBird_31Ploys_priceless
.pdf (accessed February 23, 2013).
 12 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

The best way to cope with people subscribing and unsubscrib-

ing is to use one of the popular services that automates the man-
agement of the list. Good tools to manage email lists leapfrog each
other, but at the time of writing I like both Aweber and Get­
Response. They are easy to use and free people up from the com-
plexity of installing and then upgrading email list software on
their own webservers. Usefully, both of these tools let you write
pre-written emails that get sent to subscribers according to a pre-
determined schedule. That means all new subscribers get, for
example, a follow-up email exactly a week after subscribing.

I maintain a list of good mailing list tools at

[Link]/emailers (which I update as the tech-
nology progresses).

The need to measure PR

Ninety years ago Claude Hopkins wrote Scientific Advertising.

This showed that by measuring the sales resulting from particu-
lar advertisements, bad ads could be ditched and the best tech-
niques learned.

PR practitioners, however, are only just catching up. In his

American book on measurement,17 Mark Weiner says that the PR
industry has lagged behind because of “loosely defined profes-
sional standards, generally inadequate levels of professional edu-
cation and talent development, and the self-perpetuation of the
myth that PR can’t be measured scientifically”. Ouch.

17
 Mark Weiner, Unleashing the Power of PR: A Contrarian’s Guide to Marketing and
Communication (San Franciso: Jossey-Bass, 2006), p. 21.
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 13

Actually, there are many difficulties with measuring PR – just

as in any social science. But none are sufficient to justify pursuing
PR without modern evaluation.

When I was first a press officer in the 1990s, we measured in

a simple way – we counted the number of press cuttings. Twice
a week the International Press-Cutting Bureau would send us our
clippings and we would glue them in a book. Measuring this way
may have been basic, but it was a cheap and effective way of
assessing our effectiveness. We would then analyse the coverage
qualitatively.

Counting the cuttings is still an objective, basic method that

startups and small businesses can use easily – though it does
have a downside. Funders of PR campaigns just can’t tell from a
cuttings book if the coverage is genuinely achieving business
goals, or merely acting as a vanity exercise. Yet it remains com-
monplace. A 2003 survey conducted in the United States by PR
News found that 84 per cent of respondents used clip-counting
as their primary measure of success.18

Until recently, a measurement called Advertising Value Equiv-

alency (AVE) was popular among those wanting a more sophis-
ticated approach. Actually it still is commonplace, despite
(justifiably) irritating the PR chatterati. The AVE calculates what
the column inches would have cost to buy as advertising. It is a
problematic method because an advert says exactly what you
want it to say, whereas editorial does not. That doesn’t stop users

18
 “Exploring the Link Between Volume of Media Coverage and Business Out-
comes”, Institute for PR, 2006, [Link]
uploads/Media_Coverage_Business06.pdf (accessed February 24, 2013).
 14 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

of AVEs then multiplying the figure by anything from two to ten

times – but most commonly by three – on the grounds that edito-
rial coverage is more convincing than advertising.

Professor Tom Watson, in a paper presented to the Interna-

tional History of Public Relations conference in 2012, wrote about
a study of 500 PR practitioners. It found that AVEs “were the
third most popular measurement method for judgment of com-
munication effectiveness, after clippings counts and internal
reviews, and the first amongst methods of judging the value of
public relations activity. AVE had risen from fifth place to third
in the five years since the previous study.”19

However, PR practitioners are now being forced to improve.

Various PR awards have banned the entry of work that is evalu-
ated with AVEs. This is a good move. Like it or not, we live in a
mathocracy. Business leaders require decent data which proves
that expenditure is worthwhile. Weiner says that “audits” of the
executives who fund PR activities find that what executives want
is not coverage. Instead, they want to see results – easily measur-
able – such as how effective expenditure on PR has been at (a)
raising awareness and (b) delivering key messages to the target
audience.

Although measurement costs money, it does not have to be

outrageously expensive. Lowish-cost tools for PR measurement
include opinion polls of awareness and favourability towards the
brand (taken before and after a campaign), microsites for particu-
lar PR campaigns and “How did you hear of us?” questioning
19
 Prof Tom Watson, “Advertising Value Equivalence – PR’s orphan metric”,
[Link]
-%2520Advertising%2520Value%2520Equivalence%2520%2528MS%2529%25
[Link] (accessed February 28, 2013).
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 15

when people buy. There is a lot of good material on designing

measurement plans in a book by Tom Watson and Paul Noble,
called Evaluating Public Relations, and the Public Relations Con-
sultants Association runs a useful workshop training people how
to use each type of measurement.

There are now several good books on the subject and the
so-called “Barcelona Principles”, set in 2010, have spurred on
many at the elite end of the industry. Some of the biggest agencies
and companies – such as AT&T and Procter & Gamble – have
been able to deduce the return on investment that their PR cam-
paigns produce. They’ve done this with marketing mix model-
ling, a useful tool for mid-sized and large companies.

The results from such modelling can be astounding. As Mark

Weiner reports, the Miller Brewing Company, part of SABMiller,
found that every additional $1 spent on TV advertising brought
a return of $1.06, while PR delivered $8. (The company has sub-
sequently changed its advertising agency.) Ranjit Choudhary, the
marketing mix modelling specialist for Miller, said in 2003: “We
found that PR was much more efficient than other promotions
for the brand.”20

What I find most useful about decent measurement is that it

can redirect what PR practitioners work on. This is because com-
panies often guess about the sort of coverage that benefits them
most. If they rely on this guesswork, without testing it, the PR
activities may fail to deliver the best results.

20
 Mark Weiner, “PR and Meaningful Business Outcome”, [Link]
-[Link]/attachments/3301_Prove%20PR%[Link]%20PR%20
[Link] (accessed February 23, 2013).
 16 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

What is vital, whatever size of business you are, is to compare

your media coverage with that of your competitors, and with
your results in the previous year. It will encourage you to push
ahead, and be a source of ideas.

So what is the best way of tracking your press coverage?

These days PR practitioners tend to receive scanned press cut-
tings in their email inbox, provided by a media monitoring
service. The most highly regarded provider in the UK is Precise,
which will also provide recordings of radio and television men-
tions. There are similar suppliers around the world. For online
cuttings, services such as Google News Alerts, which is free, will
email you, more or less, whenever your company name, or a
preferred phrase, is written on the web.

What to avoid

In the next chapter, we will start to look at how to create a com-

pelling PR campaign. But let’s first debunk some myths.

Critics of public relations describe its practitioners as “spin

doctors” and believe that its role is pernicious. Spin is not
good public relations. It is counterproductive idiocy. The term
arose during the late 1990s, when political figures in the UK
and America ditched authenticity and just put out what they
thought was politically palatable. The result? Lots of news stories
appeared discussing how the government was issuing fake data
and announcing expenditure in a misleading way. The spin
doctors themselves become the story, damaging the reputation of
their masters.
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 17

Andrew Marr, a BBC news show host and former Editor of

The Independent, explained the problem:21

Things got so bad that even when Blair [as British Prime Minister]
was saying something obvious, he was disbelieved.
“Well, the spin is that .  .  .” began a thousand reports. Media
cynicism curdled further. The spinning became angrier still.

Ivy Lee, the inventor of the press release and a pioneer in crisis
communications, had a better approach. He traded under the
slogan “Accuracy, Authenticity, and Interest”. These three terms
were not a sign of uncommercial naivety. The man was extremely
well paid and was retained by the Rockefellers and the steel
magnate Charles M. Schwab. Instead, his ethical position ensured
that his messages were convincing.

In the 1930s, A. H. Wiggin, Chairman of the Chase National

Bank, ordered Lee to get a newspaper to kill a story. “I won’t
do anything of the sort,” Lee replied. His advice, instead, was to
issue a statement so that their side of the story would be aired.

Those three terms in Lee’s slogan, “Accuracy, Authenticity,

and Interest”, remain today at the core of good public relations.
Lee’s “Declaration of Principles”, issued to newspapers in 1906,
are still – more than a century later – some of the best words ever
written on the duty of public relations practitioners. He declared:

This is not a secret press bureau. All our work is done in the open.
We aim to supply news. This is not an advertising agency; if you
think any of our matter ought properly to go to your business
[advertising] office, do not use it. Our matter is accurate. Further
details on any subject treated will be supplied promptly, and any

21
 Andrew Marr, BBC News, [Link]
.stm (accessed February 23, 2013).
 18 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

editor will be assisted most cheerfully in verifying directly any

statement of fact. Upon inquiry, full information will be given to
any editor concerning those on whose behalf an article is sent out.
In brief, our plan is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business
concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public
of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning
subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know
about. Corporations and public institutions give out much infor-
mation in which the news point is lost to view. Nevertheless, it is
quite as important to the public to have this news as it is to the
establishments themselves to give it currency. I send out only
matter every detail of which I am willing to assist any editor in
verifying for himself. I am always at your service for the purpose
of enabling you to obtain more complete information concerning
any of the subjects brought forward in my copy.

Fraser Seitel, a heavyweight of the American PR industry,

who, like Lee before him, has represented the Rockefeller family,
says: “Ivy Lee really, really preached that the public has to be
informed, and if your policies are not good and not in the public
interest, you have to change the policy. And I think that this is
what a lot of people don’t recognise about the practice of public
relations, if you believe it as I do, that it starts with policy, it starts
with performance, it starts with action . . . You can’t pour perfume
on a skunk.”22

When PR won’t work

In the mid-1990s, I was a columnist for IDG, the world’s largest

publisher of IT magazines. When writing a particular comparative

22
 [Link]
-the-indefensible/ (accessed February 23, 2013).
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 19

review, I realised that one of the products was awful. It came from
a micro-business and I thought that few people, realistically, were
likely to ever buy it. While I wrote the odd negative review, on this
occasion I did the company a favour and excluded mentioning
their product in my article.

I later heard that the firm’s proprietor had been moaning

to a journalist on another magazine that he’d gone to great
trouble, personally driving across London to put it through my
letterbox – and I never bothered to mention it!

Here’s the rub: PR only works properly if your product is

good. Journalists aren’t stupid – well, not for the most part – and
they can smell if your product is second-rate. What determines
if a product is good? Well, in the 1940s, Rosser Reeves, the Ameri-
can advertising guru, invented the concept of a “unique selling
proposition”. In his 1961 book Reality in Advertising, Reeves says
that “the proposition must be one that the competition either
cannot, or does not, offer”.

Just as the “unique selling proposition” is vital for selling to

consumers through advertising, it is vital when pitching to jour-
nalists. If you’re manufacturing camera bags (to go back to my
example) that fall to bits and have no obvious benefits, the media
are going to be less keen on promoting you.

The miracle cure

Lots of companies will try to sell you the miracle cure to media
relations. If only you throw money at a newswire service, or a
social media planning tool or a special media database of over a
million journalists, something great is supposed to happen.
 20 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Some of these can be of help, but only if you are doing all the
other things right. In fact, many of the really useful tools are free,
or not specifically aimed at media relations. I will recommend
some in this book. But I find that just three tools are the ones I
definitely need to get coverage: email, a telephone and a copy of
the publication. All the others are optional.

One miracle cure that must, in all circumstances, be avoided

is the so-called professional press release writer – someone who,
for a very cheap price, will write you a release. People who use
these services believe erroneously that the value in public rela-
tions is in the press release. This is mistaken. For a start, the value
that a so-called press release writer will give you is likely to be
small. One, I notice, is offering a “media friendly press release in
two hours” that will “get you coverage in all the right places”.

But the vendor then goes on to say: “I would need a brief

outline of what you want to achieve, the what, when, where, why
and of [sic] the story. As well as a few short quotes and a high
res image. I would also need your website information and
contact details of your public relations person.”

Here, the customer is still doing almost all of the work – and
the difficult part too. No wonder the seller wants just £15 for the
service. Others are as cheap as £9.

Now it is certainly true that most press releases are badly

written, poorly structured and fail to sell the story properly.
But none of the people I’ve seen advertising this sort of service
seem to reveal much about themselves or convincingly explain
why they would produce something better than if you wrote it
yourself.
 WHY PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGNS FAIL – AND HOW TO MAKE THEM SUCCEED | 21

Anyway, these sorts of services are beside the point, because

the real problem businesses have is that the ideas behind their
press releases are bad. A dirt cheap copywriter isn’t going to
solve that for you. What will are good, creative ideas, which we
will be discussing in the next chapter.
 Chapter 2
How to Develop a Story
Idea that Is Newsworthy
A
t the heart of all good media relations is creativity. But
how do you become creative? Well, not by waving a
magic wand. Creativity requires knowledge, which pro-
vides a breeding ground for ideas. PR practitioners need to know
intimately the products they are promoting. They need to read
or watch closely the media outlets in which their clients want
coverage. They need a strong general knowledge. And it helps if
they study the great masters of public relations – such as Ivy Lee,
Edward Bernays and Howard Gossage.

Why is knowledge so important? Well, according to James

Webb Young (1886–1973), an advertising executive who wrote A
Technique For Producing Ideas: “An idea is nothing more or less
than a new combination of old elements”.

And where do these elements come from? Well, Steve Harri-

son, the former worldwide creative director of ad agency Wun-
derman, wrote a book on creativity23 in which he suggested the
answer:

23
 Steve Harrison, How to do Better Creative Work (Pearson Education: Harlow,
2009), p. 6.
 26 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Be curious about the world around you. Read a different newspa-

per, drink in different bars, visit a new website a day, listen to a
different radio station, eat at a different type of cafe or restaurant
and book somewhere totally different next time you’re planning
your holidays . . . and find out what makes people “tick”.

The trap that modern PR practitioners can fall into is homoph-

ily, the tendency of individuals to flock together with similar
people. Following people who are like us on social networks and
reading the same online articles risks limiting creativity because
we don’t experience radically different ideas. “We’re getting
narrower and narrower and more and more tribal,” says Chris
Graves, the global CEO of Ogilvy PR. “And so we’re like an echo
chamber of what we believe.”24

That’s why it can be advantageous to read print editions of

publications, which encourage you – much more than online – to
notice and read things that would not be your first choice of topic.
And it makes radio talk shows a useful resource. Do you get
woken up by a radio alarm clock? It is, in my view, a useful bit
of kit.

The three types of news story

In this chapter, I predominately focus on news stories – of which

there are three types. The first is the “sackable offence” – someone
will be sacked if the story isn’t covered. UK declares war on
France. The US President announces tax cuts. New Apple iPhone
launched. You won’t have any difficulty in gaining coverage for
these sort of rare stories.
24
 [Link] (accessed March 12,
2013).
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 27

Then there’s the type represented by 90 per cent of press

releases sent to newspapers. They are the stories that are so bad
that no self-respecting newspaper would ever publish them.
They exist because the senders don’t know what they are doing
or, more likely, because they are too scared to tell their clients
that no will care. They belong to the all-too-common world of
untrained junior practitioners, who never read the media and
don’t know what they want.

And then there’s third type. The “maybe, maybe not” story
idea. These are what good PR professionals spend most of their
time on. These are stories where there is no guarantee of cover-
age, but with a good pitch and a bit of luck, you’ll find your
company or cause covered in print.

It’s creating this third type of story that we’re going to look
at now.

The perspective of the journalist

If you have invented the cure for bone cancer, then your business
is inherently interesting. Most businesses are not, at least not
most of the time. It requires skill and creativity to turn what your
company is doing into something newsworthy. Those who send
out press releases announcing the minutiae of a business’s deal-
ings – especially if it is a small business – will just irritate journal-
ists. In fact, for something to be genuinely newsworthy, it has to
be out of the ordinary.

Journalists are frequently frustrated by the failure of PR people

to understand what interests their readers. One technology PR
firm – of some size, but not a member of the Public Relations
 28 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Consultants Association – routinely spams press releases to the

national press saying that companies should invest more in
“CRM systems”.

This is wrong on at least two levels. Firstly, the vast majority

of people have not the faintest idea what a “CRM system” is –
and, what’s more, probably don’t want to know. It is, in fact,
a database that companies use to track their customers’ details.
It stands for Customer Relationship Management system and
records how much clients have been billed and the details of
phone calls they have made to the company. So it’s an important
part of modern business, but – let’s face it – normally boring to
the general public.

Secondly, there is no “news hook” in simply saying that busi-

nesses should spend more on this software. By news hook, I
mean such press releases do not connect with any existing theme
in the news. The PR representatives might be able to gain some
interest for their client’s agenda when a major company has
failed its customers through a faulty IT system, with a press
release that reveals widespread underinvestment. A news hook
is not necessary when a story is sufficiently important or interest-
ing to force itself into the news regardless. But when pitching
something specialist – like a CRM system – to mass-market, con-
sumer titles, it is pretty essential.

So how does a news hook work? Well, let’s say you sell some-
thing – gym membership – that helps cure obesity. You produce
some new research which shows that people who go to the gym
twice a week take half as many sick days as those who aren’t
members. That’s pretty interesting. It would be most effective
just after a major public figure has lashed out against the rising
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 29

obesity epidemic. The public figure’s speech would be the news

hook. But obesity is also (how shall I say?) an issue of our age,
and therefore interesting most of the time. In this case, you prob-
ably don’t need a specific news hook. But a news hook always
increases the probably of coverage, and normally increases the
amount of space a publication will allocate to it.

Like the technology PR firm’s spam, I came across a similar

case of PR idiocy being committed by a bank. Its PR agency rang
personal finance journalists on national papers in the UK every
fortnight to read them the bank’s interest rates. It got so annoying
that one tabloid journalist took to exclaiming a profanity, before
slamming down the handset.

These press releases or phone calls were being made so that

the perpetrators could tick boxes to say that they had done the
tasks allocated to them. In such examples, the PR practitioners
deployed no creativity. So, in this chapter, we’ll look at how crea-
tivity can be at the centre of your PR.

Below are several techniques to achieve good creative ideas.

They are all optional, except the first, which should be incorpo-
rated into every PR campaign you do.

Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader

If you take any decent movie – in fact, any movie – you’ll notice
that there is conflict. In Star Wars, the conflict is between the
rebels, such as Luke Skywalker, and the Empire, most notably
represented by Darth Vader. The tension between the two sides
is what makes it interesting.
 30 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Even in more subtle movies, there is tension. In The Cider

House Rules, the protagonist, Homer Wells, is torn in a whole
variety of ways, including between following the path set for him
by his surrogate father, and pursuing experiences elsewhere.
There isn’t a villain incarnate, but the scriptwriters have included
conflict, because otherwise we wouldn’t watch the film.

That same tension is a requirement for media relations. For

example, when Apple launches a new version of its operating
system, the media invariably writes about how it compares with
Microsoft Windows. This is also why politics gets so much cover-
age – journalists know that the readers love hearing about the
battles between the main parties.

That is not to say that you should declare war on competitors

in your press releases, although occasionally it is the right strat-
egy (we’ll discuss the “grenade” strategy later in this chapter).
Instead, you can just describe your product as “the fastest on the
market”. The media, where relevant, will make explicit compari-
sons themselves. And the enemy – the Darth Vader – of the story
may not be another company, but a worse alternative. For
example, a company that rescues a High Street by buying a bank-
rupt shop (which it will turn around) is not fighting against
another company, but a boarded-up street.

A good example of using conflict effectively is this press

release from Kellogg’s:25

25
 Kellogg’s News Release, [Link]
&item=122395 (accessed March 12, 2013).
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 31

Millions of British women could literally be talking

themselves fat

Women should cut out the negative “fat talk” if they want to
successfully lose weight, a new report has revealed.

As millions of British women get ready to embark on a New

Year diet, new research . . . has revealed they could be setting
up for failure by describing themselves as “fat”, “heavy” or
“chubby”.

Eight in ten women said they believed a positive attitude was

the key to losing weight even though over half of women said
when starting a diet they are more likely to be self critical and
use words such as “fat”.

Here, the conflict is between obesity and a perfect weight. It

is a surprising – and therefore interesting – press release. Who
would have thought that talking about weight would make
you fat?

Normally, you should be explicit in any press release about

where the tension lies – just as the Kellogg’s press release is. But
sometimes, it will be sufficiently obvious that it is not necessary.
Where a company submits its products for review, there is an
implicit notion that they are in some way better than others. (If
they weren’t better, in any way, it would be stupid to try to get
the media to look at them.)
 32 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

For example, readers of What Hi-Fi are interested in whether

a Marantz amplifier is better than a Cambridge Audio one. That
is the conflict. In Gramophone, the classical music magazine,
readers want to know if Stephen Hough’s performance of
Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no 2 is better than Vladimir
Ashkenazy’s. The PR approaches that generate comparative
reviews like these are unlikely to mention any rivals. But without
there being any conflict or tension, explicit or implicit, a press
release is unlikely to be very successful.

Opinion polls

News organisations love the results of opinion polls. They give

authority to your story: merely asserting that the public believes
something is nowhere near as convincing as showing that the
public believes something with figures.

The mistake companies make is to cheapskate on the gather-

ing of data. They perhaps use a survey of visitors to their
website. The results lack credibility and newspapers won’t touch
them. To be taken seriously, you have to use a major polling
agency such as YouGov, ComRes, Survation or Gallup. This costs
money – although most polling agencies will help you do it
inexpensively with a so-called Omnibus poll, which asks your
questions along with those of their other clients.

Some thought needs to go into how the poll is set up. To be

newsworthy, the poll results should say something significant.
Normally, a poll where half of the population believe one thing
and half don’t isn’t stark enough to justify coverage. An excep-
tion is election polling, where a difference of a few per cent can
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 33

determine who takes office. But, in general, an ideal poll result

shows a sizeable gap between one view and the other.

I noticed a poll done by [Link], which had the start

of something newsworthy, but did not quite nail it. Here’s the
beginning of the press release:26

Holy Sock! Most men’s socks are over three years old

A survey by [Link] finds that nine out of ten women

are turned off by the state of their partner’s socks. The figures
show that a huge majority of men are wearing socks that are
more than three years old, will rarely – if ever – go shopping
to replace them.

Worse, three-quarters of men admit to wearing odd socks

when their tired old footwear has let them down, and have
failed to act when others have commented on their
appearance.

Nowhere in the press release did it say which polling agency

conducted the poll or how large the sample size was. These are
two essential items, because they are vital for convincing a jour-
nalist that a poll is credible. In general, a poll of 1,000 people is
considered statistically reliable.

The most interesting result, that “nine out of ten women are
turned off by the state of their partner’s socks”, is actually too

26
 Socked Press Room, [Link]
-men-s-socks-are-over-three-years-ol,c9323432 (accessed March 12, 2013).
 34 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

vague. “Turned off” could mean they engage in less sexual inter-
course or are just disappointed in a non-sexual way. Later in the
press release, the company claims that this is “The killer blow for
men’s libido”. But the question asked doesn’t actually establish
that convincingly. A good polling agency would have helped
them clarify the questions they were asking.

Data and research

In a similar vein to opinion polls, data and research from other

sources is highly prized by media outlets. Routinely, newspapers
print stories with headlines that end “research says” or “scien-
tists say”. In the next chapter we will look at how one company
took freely available figures from government statistics, ran a
simple spreadsheet calculation and got substantial coverage
across the UK.

Reframing how we view the world

Travelodge ran a PR campaign suggesting that it is more eco-

nomical to put guests up in a Travelodge than to have an extra
bedroom that’s only used once or twice a year.27 The campaign
attempted to reframe how consumers view the expenditure.
Whereas normally using a hotel would be viewed as a loss
(wastes money), Travelodge presented it as a gain (saves substan-
tially on the mortgage). The press release began:

27
 [Link]
-[Link] (accessed March 12, 2013).
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 35

Over 15 million Brits own homes with more bedrooms than

they need, a situation that’s costing homeowners more than
£20,000 each over the life of their mortgage.

Almost half of all British homeowners (45%) cite being able to

accommodate visiting friends and family as the main reason for
buying an over-sized property.

However, according to a new study from Travelodge, almost a

fifth of British homeowners have never had relatives or friends
stay overnight and just two per cent say it happens once a
week.

On average, Brits put up friends just six times a year, and rela-
tives even more infrequently at five times. Only using a room
a few times each year is an expensive habit, costing the home-
owner approximately £155 each visit.

This got Travelodge a good deal of coverage. Importantly, the

press release went on to name the polling agency, 72Point, and
explain that certain figures were sourced from other reputable
sources, such as the Office for National Statistics.

Gamification

Have you ever noticed that computer games are addictive? I

didn’t play for about 15 years, and then got an Xbox. In the inter-
vening years, the games have become like movies, with scripts
 36 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

as complex and picture quality that’s almost as good. I find

myself playing for what seems like 20 minutes – but is, in fact,
two hours.

The same thing happens in sport: people happily spend 90

minutes glued to a televised soccer match. This is, let’s face it,
just 22 people kicking a ball about – but turned into a game, it
entertains millions.

So is there anything we can learn from the compelling nature

of computer games and sport? Such games contain problem-
solving, escapism, competition, a sense of achievement and
visible rewards, whether in goals, points, a virtual currency or
achievement levels. The science of gamification tries to apply
these to other fields – in our case, public relations.

Jesse Schell, Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carn-

egie Mellon University, defines gamification as “a problem
solving situation which you enter into willingly . . . a symptom
of something that is happening in the nature of design, which is
that we’re moving from a model where we design things to be
efficient and effective, to where we design things so that we like
them”.28

In 1966, Scientific American wanted to sell more advertising to

airlines. Its readers flew a lot, but it had failed to convey this to
their airlines. The “efficient” technique, to use Professor Schell’s
terminology, would have been to issue a press release saying that
advertisers should spend their money with the magazine. No one

28
 [Link]
-gamification/ (accessed March 12, 2013).
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 37

would have covered it. Or they could have placed some adver-
tisements saying that their readers fly a lot. That would have
been somewhat effective.

Instead, the company turned to Howard Gossage, a master of

advertising and public relations, who created a campaign based
on gamification. The magazine announced the 1st International
Paper Airplane Competition, promoted with a single advertise-
ment, a press conference and huge newspaper coverage. It gener-
ated nearly 12,000 entries, including 5,000 from children. A book
of the best entries, The Great International Paper Airplane Book, was
a best-seller. The airlines fell in love with the magazine.

The Royal Society of Chemistry in London did something

similar in 2008, when it challenged the public to come up with a
solution to the cliffhanger in the movie The Italian Job. How, they
asked, could Charlie Croker, the film’s protagonist, and his team,
extract the gold within 30 minutes, without using a helicopter –
and how could it be proved mathematically? This engaged the
readers of The Daily Telegraph’s letters page over many days,
while increasing awareness of the practical uses of science. The
paper ran a substantial story under the headline “Cliffhanger
climax to The Italian Job solved after 40-year wait.”29

Although gamification is too rarely used today, Edward

Bernays – a founding father of public relations – was using the
technique in the first half of the 20th century. For Procter &
Gamble, he ran the National Soap Sculpture Competition in

29
 [Link]
-[Link] (accessed March 12,
2013).
 38 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

White Soap, which convinced children to drop their hostility to

soap and start using P&G’s Ivory brand. By the fourth time the
contest was run, 4,000 entries were submitted, and schools around
the United States were involved.

The bandwagon

The term “bandwagon” originated in 19th-century American

politics. A famous circus clown called Dan Rice helped Zachary
Taylor win the 1848 presidential election. He invited the politi-
cian on to his bandwagon (literally “a wagon used for carrying
a band in a parade or procession”,30 which was often elaborately
decorated). This was a major success and other political cam-
paigns started to use bandwagons in their campaigns. Subse-
quently, politicians would physically jump on to better-known
politicians’ bandwagons in order to gain some of their stardust.

Most publications will have issues or campaigns that they care

deeply about. Jumping on these bandwagons is an easy way of
securing coverage in them. The simple task of reading the pub-
lications relevant to your industry, in addition to general news
sources, will reveal which issues excite them. For example, in
2011 the London Evening Standard launched a campaign called Get
London Reading. It pointed out that 1,000 children in the UK’s
capital leave primary school (aged 11) unable to read properly.31

30
 Oxford Dictionaries, [Link]
bandwagon?q=bandwagon (accessed February 24, 2013).
31
 “Success of our literacy campaign inspires imitators across” in the London
Evening Standard, December 12, 2013, [Link]
-london-reading/success-of-our-literacy-campaign-inspires-imitators-across
-[Link] (accessed February 24, 2012).
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 39

The paper set about fundraising for the literacy charity

Beanstalk.

Specsavers, a franchised chain of opticians, promptly jumped

in and raised a significant sum for the campaign.32 It was a good
fit, because glasses help people to read well, and the campaign
is about reading. The newspaper reported that the opticians had
raised £32,000, “by completing a year of gruelling physical chal-
lenges”, including mountain climbing and a marathon cycling
race. The money would pay for 64 reading mentors to go into
primary schools. It was excellent publicity for the company.

The grenade

This is not a technique that I would advise everyone to use. It

depends very much on your position in the marketplace and on
what sort of product you are selling. It is never, I would say,
appropriate for a luxury goods company, which should rise
above using it. But it has been used effectively by challenger
brands, who use it to grab some of the limelight from the market
leader.

What it involves is using a press release, and perhaps an asso-

ciated stunt, that acts a bit like throwing a grenade at the rest of
the industry. Steve Ballmer, the Chief Executive Officer of Micro-
soft, gained considerable press coverage when he criticised his

32
 “Specsavers staff go to great lengths to raise £32,000 for young readers” in the
London Evening Standard, November 16, 2012, [Link]
news/get-london-reading/specsavers-staff-go-to-great-lengths-to-raise-32000
-[Link] (accessed February 24, 2012).
 40 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

two rivals in the smartphone industry, who were both outselling

his company. He was widely quoted saying33:

The ecosystem of the Android is a little bit wild, that is from an

app compatibility perspective and our world perspective maybe
in a way that’s not always in the consumer’s best interests. Con-
versely the Apple ecosystem looks highly controlled, and, by the
way, quite high priced.

His comments were not vicious, but they contradicted the

sometimes held view that a company should never criticise a
competitor. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, was not adverse to
this technique, accusing a rival, Adobe, of being “lazy”34 and
saying that Adobe’s Flash product “is a spaghetti-ball piece of
technology that has lousy performance and really bad security
problems”. Ouch. Those quotes secured a lot of coverage.

But the grenade is a risky approach because it is quite possible

that, in return, a victim will pull out the pin in one of their
own grenades and lob criticism in your direction. You have to
be thick skinned to use the technique and confident that there
is nothing about your company that would humiliate you were
a competitor to spend a couple of hours looking into your
business.

It can sometimes be deployed not as a direct hit, but under the

cover of trying to be helpful. When British Airways staff went on

33
 The Telegraph, “Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer attacks Android and Apple”,
[Link]
-[Link] (accessed February 23, 2013).
34
 ZDNet, “Steve Jobs calls Adobe ‘lazy’, says Google can’t ‘kill the iPhone’ ”,
[Link]
-google-cant-kill-the-iphone/11925 (accessed February 23, 2013).
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 41

strike, Michael O’Leary, the head of rival Ryanair, gave some advice
to BA via the press. “The unions need to be taken on”, he said. “BA
is massively over-staffed and has got to get its costs down.” But he
added that “I think, like most flag carriers do, they’ll wimp out at
the eleventh hour. The problem for [BA chief executive] Willie
Walsh is that the board of BA has no spine, no balls and no vision.”
The result? Press coverage under the headline “British Airways
lacks the spine to fight union, says Ryanair”.35

The grenade can also tarnish an entire industry if it is used

too frequently. Witness how much everyone hates politicians –
they lob metaphorical grenades at each other every day. It can
also damage relationships with companies you want to work
with. When cable operator Virgin Media was in dispute with Sky,
which produces several popular channels, it replaced Sky News
with an on-screen message saying “Sky Snooze try BBC”. Richard
Branson, the founder of Virgin, ordered the removal of the
message. He told The Guardian: “I have asked them to take it
down. We do not mean any disrespect to Sky News. I think it is
a very good news channel.”36

Days and weeks

One technique that some PR campaigns use is to create a special

day, week or even fortnight of the year to mark an issue. There

35
 Alistair Osborne, The Telegraph, February 24, 2010, [Link]
.[Link]/finance/newsbysector/transport/7301234/British-Airways-lacks-the
-[Link] (accessed February 24, 2013).
36
 “Branson puts stop to ‘Sky Snooze’ joke”, The Guardian, [Link]
.[Link]/media/2007/mar/02/bskyb.broadcasting1 (accessed February 24, 2013).
 42 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

is Red Nose Day in the UK, which raises money for the charity
Comic Relief. Hundreds of thousands of children buy plastic red
noses – or, at least, their parents buy them – and many engage in
charity-themed events at school. In the evening, the BBC broad-
casts a fundraising programme containing performances from
well-known comedians.

In the United States, National History Day involves more than

500,000 school students, who enter an academic competition by
producing a paper, documentary or exhibit. The day is sponsored
by, among others, The History Channel, and has gained coverage
everywhere from The New York Times to Fox News.

If a “day” or “week” is commercial, rather than in aid of

charity, it is vital that it is fun. Chocolate Week is an example of
a week working well, with coverage across national newspapers
and broadcasters. It helps that it is an industry-wide event, rather
than promoting just one supplier.

So, should you use the technique of creating a “day” or “week”

to mark some cause, in the aim of gaining publicity? Rarely, in
my view, because most of the people who try to do this fail. I
have a friend who graduated with an excellent history degree
during the recession at the beginning of the 1990s. He was unable
to get a job, so set himself up as a self-employed grave-digger.
Seeing the funny side of having a history BA, but doing the most
menial of tasks, he sent a press release to major national news-
papers. Soon he was being interviewed by a feature writer and
having his photograph taken by a press photographer. Seeing
that it gained him publicity, he later announced National Grave-
digging Day. It didn’t work. None of the press were interested.
Why was this?
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 43

Well, news organisations endlessly receive press releases pro-

moting some day or other, and the media is suspicious about
them. Journalists think that most of them do not actually involve
many participants. This public involvement is what makes a day
or week newsworthy. Remember, newspapers want to publish
things that their readers find interesting, and so PR exercises
such as “Green Office Week”, promoted by an office stationary
company, are largely ignored.

A journalist never wants to be accused of writing an advertise-

ment. She is constrained by reputation, both the reputation with
colleagues and also with the readers. She may personally like the
PR practitioner, but she may be reluctant to write about a “day”
which feels like an advert for a company. Indeed, most of the
days which are promoted are created very much with the needs
of the vendor in mind, not the journalist or reader.

My grave-digging friend, by the way, went on to run a suc-

cessful PR agency, which gets clients into publications through-
out the year. In fact, the best PR practitioners pitched plenty of
stories that didn’t work well when they were starting out. A dif-
ference between good PR practitioners and bad ones is that the
former analyse what went wrong and learn from the mistakes,
while the bad ones simply blame the media.

Scarcity

From economics, we know that scarcity increases something’s

value. Services such as Pinterest and Gmail gained considerable
coverage when they were not generally available. They were
launched with closed beta tests, and you had to persuade an
existing user to invite you to join. Articles such as “How to Get
 44 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

a Pinterest Invite” appeared on blogs and were widely tweeted.

Journalists loved writing about these services because they were
part of the small number of people who could actually see the
products. Therefore, there were lots of readers keen to read up
on the functionality offered.

Diary stories

Some specialist titles and many newspapers have what are called
“diary columns”, which cover the comings and goings of notable
people. They rose to prominence after the Daily Mail started
publishing such a column under the pseudonym William Hickey
in 1928. Some cover high society, some cover politics, and trade
titles tend to cover figures in the industry. These articles normally
contain a selection of short stories – maybe four or five – in the
same column.

If a trade title covering your sector has a diary column, it is a

good place to get coverage. A diary column might contain gossipy
stories about the sector along with entertaining photographs of
major industry characters. Such columns are worth studying,
before contacting with stories that are in a similar vein. I happen
to know that at least one major PR agency gave its staff the task
of getting into PRWeek’s now-defunct diary column as one of its
staff’s “Key Performance Indicators”, although this struck me as
a little keen.

The best way to approach diary columns is not to sit round

a table struggling to come up with an idea to submit. Instead,
I find it more effective simply to read them and when – by
chance – something funny occurs, then think about emailing the
publication.
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 45

Product reviews

Moving on from news, often the most useful form of coverage is

the product review. These don’t require you to apply a lot of
imagination, but you would be amazed at how many requests
for a review are inappropriate. It is vital that a PR practitioner
does the legwork to find where, if anywhere, in the publication
the review would naturally fit. Some publications don’t review
products, or have criteria that will be apparent to regular readers,
which might not fit what you are selling.

It is often worth pitching directly to someone who has

reviewed similar products, especially if they are a freelancer
and are keen themselves to secure more work. In the pre-
internet days, it was difficult to track down freelancers. Nowa-
days, they probably have a website, or a presence on Twitter or
LinkedIn.

The best PR practitioners never supply a product to a reviewer

on its own. They include a short reviewer’s guide, containing
important information about its advantages and features. This
will help a journalist understand the product properly and not
overlook its main benefits, especially if bashing out the review
quickly. You may find that the journalist agrees that many of the
points you highlight in your guide are indeed important, and
find that he or she refers to them in the review.

It helps to record the contact details of reviewers, especially

if they are freelance. This will save a huge amount of time when
you next want a product to be reviewed, because you will have
a ready distribution list of people who find your products worthy
of coverage. Indeed, it will stop endless frustrating conversations
 46 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

along the lines of: “Who’s that reviewer in Cleveland who wrote
that really positive review last time? I wish we had her number.”

The specific challenge of business-to-business

stories

People often get unstuck when trying to get coverage for com-
panies that sell to other companies, rather than to individuals.
They find that newspapers and consumer titles fail to cover them.
There are two ways to resolve this.

The first is to say that newspapers and consumer titles are

aimed at the general public. While it may be good for the ego to
get coverage in them, the actual readership is likely to be less
interested in buying than the readership of a trade title. Seasoned
PR practitioners all have tales of senior management or
clients who want glamorous coverage that serves no commercial
purpose, and is essentially only placed for reasons of vanity.
From a purely rational point of view, it is better to concentrate
on the trade press.

The second is to say that business-to-business PR campaigns

need to change the angle of their press releases, and start talking
about their products from the perspective of the ultimate consumer.
After all, not every potential business customer will read a trade title,
and in many cases there is no trade title covering the potential cus-
tomer base. Let me give the example of CardSave, a provider of
credit card terminals to small businesses. They are, therefore, a
business-to-business vendor, but how many small businesses sub-
scribe to Credit Card Terminal Weekly (hint: it doesn’t exist)?

The company gained huge coverage in the Daily Mail by being

interesting to consumers. The Mail’s story appeared under the
 HOW TO DEVELOP A STORY IDEA THAT IS NEWSWORTHY | 47

headline “Cash will all but die out by 2032, says expert, as small
businesses accepting card payments double in five years”.37 The
article quoted the head of CardSave extensively, and was news-
worthy on the back of a survey that the company commissioned.
“The survey”, the paper reported, “found that 57 per cent of
people believe that cash will become extinct in the future – 50 per
cent predict that it will happen by 2035 and 36 per cent by 2025”.

A similar example occurred when a manufacturer of scientific

weighing scales, Kern & Sohn, wanted to raise its sales, by stand-
ing out in a marketplace where brand recognition is poor. They
ran an experiment, with the aid of the scientific public. It turns
out that the world is not completely spherical, which means that
objects, on ordinary scales, weigh a slightly different amount
depending upon where they are located on the planet.

The firm launched a microsite – that is, a small cluster of pages

separate from its main website – where people could volunteer
to borrow a pair of the scales and a garden gnome. A gnome’s
arrival on the South Pole grabbed substantial media coverage.
The experiment was covered on major channels from the BBC to
Canada’s CBC News and Australia’s ABC, and in publications
from National Geographic to The Times. By the end of the first week
of the campaign 1,445 sales leads had been generated. Thousands
of people volunteered to participate in the weighing and the
media coverage eventually reached an estimated audience of
more than 350 million people in 152 countries.

37
 Lee Boyce, “Cash will all but die out by 2032, says expert”, Daily Mail, April
24, 2013, [Link]
-die-2032-says-expert-small-businesses-accepting-card-payments-double-years
.html (accessed February 26, 2013).
 Chapter 3
How to Build and
Maintain an Effective List
of Journalists
W
hat is the biggest mistake people make when pitch-
ing to the press? It is to think that having a rented
database of journalists means that they do not need
to personally concern themselves with learning about any indi-
vidual writers. There are huge databases with 1.5 million media
contacts worldwide, containing newspaper reporters, television
and radio editors and even bloggers. They sound like a fantastic
shortcut. Just like get-rich-quick schemes, which promise finan-
cial success without doing much work, these seem to tell you
which journalists to contact without needing to read and research
the publications.

But you might as well just send your press release to everyone
in the phone book.

As a result of the lazy use of these databases by bad PR

people, journalists are endlessly harassed by press releases that
they have no interest in. A PR practitioner pays somewhere
between £900 and £4,500 a year for one of these media databases.
Because they have spent so much money on it, they feel that they
need to get value for money out of it, so they export 500 journal-
ists and send their press release to all of them.
 52 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

It has been estimated that 1.7 billion irrelevant press release

emails were sent in 2009 alone.38

This spamming has got so bad that British trade bodies and
unions including the Public Relations Consultants Association,
the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and the National
Union of Journalists introduced a “Media Spamming Charter”,
in which they wrote: “Practitioners should invest time in research-
ing the editorial scope and interests of a journalist/blogger before
approaching them, to ensure their area of responsibility is rele-
vant to the communications plan.”

It irritates journalists to receive mass-distributed press releases

because it is obvious to them that they are being spammed: these
press releases just aren’t relevant to most of their recipients.

Charles Arthur, the Technology Editor of The Guardian (i.e. a

computing and consumer technology journalist), wrote on his
blog about the irrelevant press releases he receives, including
from people who spam him assuming that his job as a tech jour-
nalist makes him interested in heavy plant machinery:39

This is always done with no regard or interest or even checking

as to whether the journalist is interested, or has ever written about
this topic. That’s because . . . it costs the PR nothing to send the
email; the annoyed journalists’ wasted time simply doesn’t show
up on the balance sheet.

38
 [Link] (accessed March 3, 2013).
39
 [Link]
-works-or-fails-to-work/.
 HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN AN EFFECTIVE LIST OF JOURNALISTS | 53

According to Stuart Bruce, a founder of the English PR agency

Wolfstar:40

Every single media database I’ve tried . . . churns out lots of irrel-
evant targets and misses others no matter what you put in.
The databases give the illusion of research, but in reality are a
lazy way out . . .

An effective press release is unlikely to go to many people –

and sometimes the pitch will be entirely bespoke for each jour-
nalist. Moreover, my experience of using most of the databases
is they are inevitably out of date, because journalists move around
more quickly than they are updated.

However, there is – at the time of writing – one media data-

base that is actually good. I promise I’m not being paid to say
this, but Precise Connect is a dramatic improvement on what has
existed previously. It works well because every day around a
million articles are added to the system, which stores them for
18 months. You can then search for everyone who has written
about a subject in the past 18 months, regardless of what their
job title is (and Precise has a global database of contacts, compre-
hensively covering major countries). Then, you can look at the
articles they’ve written and see if you think a journalist is favour-
able to your position. You get the choice of either clicking to
search for the web version of the article (this is free) or paying to
view a PDF of the article from the print edition.

It is not a replacement for putting time into learning about

journalists, but as a tool, it is actually useful.

40
 [Link]
-[Link].
 54 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Pay-for press-release newswires

These services are mostly a waste of money, yet there is one

advantage to them – which I’ll come to towards the end. These
sites promise to mail your press release to thousands of opted-in
journalists, bloggers and “influencers”, and promise to improve
your company’s search engine optimisation by putting an online
press release on their website.

It all sounds a bit hocus pocus to me, and using them in the
wrong way can cause more damage than good. They are, in the
words of Heather Baker, Managing Director of TopLine Com-
munications: “expertly designed to part fools from their money”.41

Firstly, Google simply doesn’t give much credibility to these

online press releases. If you check the so-called Google PageRank
of a press release on these press release websites, you’ll see that
they have a PageRank of zero. For search engine optimisation,
you probably want sites with a PageRank of 5 or above linking
to yours. But given that a release on a press release distribution
site is likely to have no PageRank at all, any links to your site
from those releases will fail to lend credibility to your site.

This is not just an opinion. The best-known authority in these

matters is Matt Cutts, who is head of webspam at Google. He
was asked about the strategy of using press releases to build links
to a website. According to [Link], he “clarified
that the links in the press releases themselves don’t count for
PageRank value, but if a journalist reads the release and then

41
 [Link]
-money-since-the-advent-of-the-internet.
 HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN AN EFFECTIVE LIST OF JOURNALISTS | 55

writes about the site, any links in that news article will then
count”.42

Separately, on his blog, Cutts wrote: “a legit press release

can get you written up by reporters, or editors/sites may subse-
quently choose to link to your site. But the actual content of the
press release itself doesn’t directly affect a site. For example, on
[a press release about Avatar Financial on a distribution service’s
website] those hyperlinks don’t help [Link].”43

The question, therefore, is: how often do journalists actually

pick up on what appears on online press release sites? For most
journalists, the answer is surely never.

Some of these press release services say that they will get your
article to appear on lots of websites. But what sort of website is
likely to want to publish any old press release? Are they sites that
relevant journalists or your customers are going to read? In 2011,
Google took action against so-called “article directories” that
were full of PR material placed there for the purpose of search
engine optimisation. Google hates duplicate content, just as it
hates webspam. As such, it is better to place your press releases
on your own website.

Secondly, while I’m sure that these services do email many

people who call themselves journalists, the vendors are not at all
transparent about which journalists receive them. I, for one, have
never come across a salaried journalist who subscribes to such

42
 [Link]
-farmerpanda-update-white-hat-cloaking-and-link-building-67838.
43
 [Link]
 56 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

services. After all, why would they want their inbox bombarded
with the stuff? It seems to be likely that the recipients are mostly
freelance journalists – which these days typically means unem-
ployed people. According to the New York news website Gawker.
com: “A few writers (and many bloggers) ask for press pitches;
readers can guess what that means about the quality of these
outlets’ material.”44

What the pay-for newswires may achieve is one thing: they

may get your story to appear on Google News. That might be
worthwhile for you – and it has been for me. I put out a press
release on one of those services. It was read by someone employed
in a PR department in Paris and they paid for a first-class return
Eurostar journey to attend an event. It did not, however, cause
any journalists to get in touch.

In theory, using press release distribution services might be

good if you are trying to piggy-back on a breaking news story
and want to position yourself as a potential expert for television
and radio stations. Journalists searching on Google News to find
out what others are writing may see your press release. But this
is only likely to work if producers are finding it very difficult to
secure a guest.

There is another important consideration, which can make

using these services backfire. If you’re embargoing a story for a
particular date, and send it out on one of these newswires, the
moment it appears on Google News, the embargo is dead. You

44
 Nick Douglas, Gawker, [Link]
-for-pr-workers-from-the-journalists-who-hate-them (accessed February 23,
2013).
 HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN AN EFFECTIVE LIST OF JOURNALISTS | 57

won’t be able to enforce it. (We will talk about the pros and cons
of embargoing in Chapter 5.)

So, if pay-for newswires are of minimal use, why is it that

films and dramas refer to “the wires”, as though they are impor-
tant? Well, a number of them are. It’s just that the ones the media
use are paid for by the media, not the PR practitioners. They are
hand-crafted by teams of journalists and filter out all the worth-
less press releases and report on the genuinely newsworthy.

If your story is picked up by one of these, such as the Press

Association or the Associated Press newswires, you are likely to
get a lot of coverage. I cover how to interact with these agencies
in Chapter 4.

How to build a list properly

The good news is that there are four cheaper and more effective
ways of building a list of journalists.

The first – which I do religiously – is to add journalists I come

across to a section of my Filofax. Every time I read a newspaper
or magazine and come across a byline of someone I think I should
contact in the future, I jot their name and publication down. This
is a surprisingly effective technique, because actually reading a
journalist’s article(s) will do more to improve your pitches than
anything else. Periodically, I sit with my Filofax and computer,
research a journalist’s back catalogue of articles and add her
name to my computer. You can find out what software I currently
prefer to use at [Link]/software.

The second, if the publication has a website, is to visit it online

and use its search facility. If you represent a new brand of gin
 58 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

and tonic, and you want to pitch a story related to the drink, you
could go on to The Guardian’s website and type in “gin and tonic”.
You can sort by date and find out who has written about the
subject recently and decide which journalist or journalists at the
paper would be most interested in your story.

If you don’t recognise the journalist’s name, the newspaper

website might contain some biographical information, or a
Google search might deliver this.

Using a news website’s search facility will deliver much better

results than most of the media databases, because it will be more
comprehensive. If you are pitching a story about antiques, you
are unlikely to find any journalist with the title “antiques corre-
spondent” in a media database. But if you search for “antiques”
on a newspaper website, you are likely to find more relevant
general news reporters or features writers who have written
about antiques previously. If you pitch to them directly, you
might find that they are keen to write something.

The third way of building a list is to use an archive of publi­

cations, which are most notably provided by LexisNexis and
Factiva. Their search facilities let you type in any subject and they
will give you every article written about it in major publications.
Importantly, they contain articles that have appeared in print
publications but which never made it to the web.

The fourth way is to invite journalists who are visiting your

website to join your press release distribution list. It is possible
that there are journalists who are also your customers. They
already love what you are doing, and would jump at the chance
of writing about you. Therefore, you ought to have a “media
 HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN AN EFFECTIVE LIST OF JOURNALISTS | 59

centre” on your website and encourage the press to sign up.

There is more on how to organise an online media centre in the
next chapter.

How to build a relationship with the press

When I got my first column in 1994, in a newsstand computer

magazine, I had no idea what I was doing. But it seemed like I
needed to get some stories, so I wrote to all the relevant compa-
nies and invited them to send me information about what they
were doing. Not all of them replied – those that failed to respond
were PR idiots. Some of them wrote to me saying that they would
add me to their press release distribution lists – they were
amateurs.

Then some guy called Quentin got in touch. His company,

Accountz, sold products by mail order and it was miniscule – just
him and his wife. But he wrote me a personal two-page letter
(this was before email was commonplace) explaining how he had
a Big Idea to defeat the major players in his sector. Unlike some
of the other companies, he had no PR agency – but he had a story.
And during the 15 issues I wrote that column, I could always
rely on him to take my calls and give me a good quote. When I
upgraded to bigger-selling PC titles, including the market-leading
ComputerActive, I kept on writing about his company. Today, his
products are sold in PC World, Currys, AppleStores and Staples,
and as I type this he has just made a successful exit from the
company, passing it on to an investor.

What worked about that PR–journalist relationship is that

Quentin – perhaps unwittingly – had good personal brand. He
never tried to force a bad story on me and never wasted my time.
 60 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Marketing textbooks talk about the importance of a company

brand, but anyone who’s pitching to a journalist has a second
brand to worry about: their personal brand. I get called by PR
agencies and asked if I will help them pitch to the media a press
release they’ve already written. I always refuse that sort of work,
as I know they’ve rung me because the media isn’t interested. It
would be bad for my personal brand to ring journalists with bad
stories, so I only pitch if I’ve been involved in the earlier creative
process.

If you’re dealing with the press regularly, they will get to

recognise your name. Lots of PR people’s emails never even
make it to a journalist’s inbox. That is either because they end up
being spam filtered, or – as is increasingly common – because the
journalist gets so fed up with the worthless material in them that
he creates a filter to automatically divert a particular sender’s
messages to the bin.

Some clever journalists have discovered ways of automati-

cally blocking all messages sent directly through media database
services. Peter Kafka, Senior Editor at the Dow Jones-owned
technology website [Link], launched a Twitter attack
on one of the most famous media databases, saying “Please stop
using them. I’m setting up a filter to delete all their pitches.”45

What you want is for the journalist to get a warm fuzzy feeling
when you pop up in their inbox. How do you achieve that?

First, you need to be picky about what you send them. We

will look at how to create a newsworthy story in the next chapter.

45
 Jeremy Bencken, “PR Spam is a Tools Problem”, [Link]
.com/blog/[Link] (accessed February 27, 2013).
 HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN AN EFFECTIVE LIST OF JOURNALISTS | 61

Second, don’t make every contact a request for coverage. For

example, you ought to be following your target journalists on
social media. Sometimes they’ll ask their friends or followers for
help. If you can assist, especially if it’s not related to what you
are selling, jump in and offer your advice.

While there are some journalists who are showered with

praise and correspondence and offers of undying admiration,
most get little feedback from what they do. They notice – and
like it – if you share their content on social media, or write a blog
highlighting the significance of what they have written. A word
of caution: you need to be authentic, but showing that you are
genuinely interested in what they are writing will do you well.

Third, get to meet the journalist. That doesn’t necessarily

mean a boozy lunch, which is much less common among journal-
ists than it used to be. Most reporters find themselves tied to their
desks at lunchtime, and pop out for a quick sandwich. As Profes-
sors Morris and Goldsworthy put it: “Keeping journalists in the
office, tied to their computers, makes it easier to assess their
productivity.”46 They refer to a study which suggests that British
journalists have to write three times as much as they did 20 years
ago. That’s hardly surprising when you consider the average
number of editorial pages in a selection of major British national
newspapers ballooned from 26.4 in 1995 to 41 in 2006.47 Mean-
while, internet publishing has provided significant opportunities
for publishing extra content.
46
 Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, PR Today (London: Palgrave MacMil-
lan, 2012), p. 32.
47
 “The Quality and Independence of British Journalism”, [Link]
.[Link]/jomec/resources/[Link] (accessed
March 1, 2013).
 62 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

So journalists simply have less time to meet people. As such,

there are lots of meetings that go on over breakfast these days,
especially with financial journalists. Many one-to-ones happen
quickly over coffee at newspaper offices. But you may find that
a beer after work or a “chance” meeting at a trade show will work
better, especially as the journalist then is unlikely to be worrying
about deadlines.

You will also find that the more colourful journalists do speak-
ing engagements and a bit of research on Google may reveal
opportunities to meet them. I routinely go to major exhibitions
and conferences in London where relevant journalists are likely
to be present – perhaps on their magazine’s stand – introduce
myself and have a quick chat.

The purpose of meeting a journalist is not to harangue them

into writing about you. It may be that you give them materials
related to a future story. But it may be just to introduce yourself
and let them know the sort of things you are working on and
find out from them what they are really looking for.

Journalists, for the most part, don’t want to have meetings

with press officers, unless they are seen as having clout in their
own right. A political journalist would normally be delighted to
have a meeting with the Director of Communications at Number
10, but less so with a Junior Account Manager at a small PR
agency. Generally, journalists want to meet the person in charge
– e.g. the entrepreneur, the chief executive or the head of research.
The job of a PR executive is to set up that sort of meeting, and
perhaps sit in on it.

In the BBC comedy series Absolute Power – a must-watch for

PR practitioners – a pop singer goes for an interview with a music
 HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN AN EFFECTIVE LIST OF JOURNALISTS | 63

journalist. He is with what he calls his “media mummy” – the

PR consultant. The client doesn’t always say the right things – not
least because he is a druggie – so the consultant periodically
interjects to keep her client on track.

Fourth, invite a journalist to chair, speak at or attend a pres-

tigious event which is not directly a pitch for your products. It
could perhaps be something that you are sponsoring. Never offer
them money for doing this, though you could offer to make a
donation to a charity of their choice.

Fifth, interact with journalists on social media. I come across

media relations managers with abandoned Twitter accounts,
which they haven’t used for a year or two. This is a terrible sign.
It implies two things to me: they aren’t consuming much media,
because if they were, they would get excited by some of it and
share a link on Twitter. Second, they are failing to interact online
with any journalists or opinion formers in their sector. Now, it
may be that they are old-school and lunching the press every day,
but somehow I doubt it.

Social media is personal, and therefore it is better for PR prac-

titioners to use their real names on Twitter than hide behind some
anonymous department name.

How to get the best results when emailing

the press

Did you know that the time you send an email will affect the
response? You would not believe how many emails get sent to
journalists at 5:20pm on a Friday afternoon, when they are franti-
cally trying to meet a deadline and thinking about the weekend.
 64 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

The best time depends upon the publication. Let’s say it’s
Tuesday and you are tapping out an email to the editor. You
know that it goes to press on the same day. So today is really a
bad day to be emailing the editor because it’s his busiest. What
should you do?

Well, there is a wonderful facility in Microsoft Outlook for

Windows called “Delay Delivery”. On any email you type, you
can choose that option and set it to send after a certain time, say
not before Thursday at 10am. The first time Outlook checks your
email messages after that time, your email will be sent. In Google
Mail, you can add an extension called Boomerang which simi-
larly delays emails.

This feature is particularly useful for those who like to get

some work done at the weekend. Emails received out of office
hours don’t tend to get much attention. I routinely type emails
at the weekend and get them to send on the Tuesday.

Likewise, if you are sending press releases through an email

list system such as GetResponse or Aweber, you can schedule the
message to be sent at a time you think will be most effective.

Research by MailChimp found that Tuesday to Thursday are

the best days of the week to email, because a higher percentage
of emails are opened on those days.48

Every journalist is different – and every desk on a newspaper

is different – but I have found that 10am until 11am is a golden
hour for the national press. If a journalist arrives at the paper

48
 [Link]
 HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN AN EFFECTIVE LIST OF JOURNALISTS | 65

somewhere between 9am and 10am, he will then spend some

time prior to 11am reading all the stuff that has happened over-
night. He starts making plans for the following day’s paper. He,
or his boss, might need to go into an editorial meeting at 11am
or 11:30am, where decisions are taken.

The worst time to contact most newspaper journalists is late

afternoon, when they are trying to write their articles for the fol-
lowing day’s paper and are much less keen on taking phone calls
or dealing with emails. By the way, I hate leaving telephone mes-
sages for journalists: not all bother to listen to them, but if they
do and you call again, it looks like you are pestering. Journalists
find listening to them time-consuming and therefore annoying.
A.J. Jacobs, the Editor at Large of Esquire, says: “I’d rather get
almost any other type of message than voicemail – email, text,
telegram, telex, cuneiform tablet. At least you can skim those.”49
Or, as one newspaper journalist told me while listening to a
barrage of mobile phone voicemails: “Why does everyone choose
to talk to me on voicemail when they have an extremely detailed
and lengthy message?”

It is worth asking journalists whenever you meet them what

times of the day and week are busiest for them and when in the
week they are keenest for stories. The information will be
invaluable.

49
 “Is it Ever OK to Leave Voicemail Anymore?”, [Link]
when-is-it-ok-to-leave-voicemail (accessed March 1, 2013).
 Chapter 4
How to Write an
Attention-Grabbing Press
Release
W
hat makes a good press release? If you read all the
nonsense spouted about them on the internet, you’d
probably believe that they have to be very short, that
they should start with “London, 18 November – Company today
announced” and finish with “ENDS”.

In fact, there are no hard-and-fast rules about laying out a

press release – except that you have to grab the attention of a
journalist. The old “rules” of press releases no longer apply. For
example, the word “ENDS” was useful when sending a multi-
page press release by fax, as it would indicate that the final page
had been received. It is no longer necessary.

Starting a press release containing domestic news with the

city and date – known as a dateline – is pointless in an email,
because it takes up space on a journalist’s computer screen which
could be used for words that are actually interesting. Besides, all
emails are stamped with the time and date anyway. The dateline
predates the press release, and was used, from the 19th century
onwards, by The New York Times and other papers at the start
of news stories from other cities. Outside of wire services and
American newspaper reports of foreign news, it is archaic.
 70 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

But the genuinely pernicious myth is that press releases must

be short. In fact, 27,600 websites contained the phrase “press
releases should be short” when I Google-searched it during the
writing of this book. This ludicrous advice is one of the reasons
why PR campaigns fail.

The case for length

It is certainly true that some press releases ought to be short. But

many – if not most – should be long. After all, if a story is so
unimportant that the PR representative cannot find more than a
couple of hundred words to say about it, should it be issued in
the first place? Short press releases often go hand-in-hand with
ideas that lack any weight.

The most effective media operators routinely issue press

releases that, in the old days of paper, would have taken up two
to four pages of one-and-a-half-spaced text. For example, I took
a random Apple press release advertising a new product from its
website: it came to 1,296 words.50 Even a new staff appointment
press release from BP taken at random came to 726 words.51

People say to me: why would a journalist want to wade

through 900 words, when it could be condensed into 300? That’s
a good question. But think of what happens on the first two occa-
sions when a journalist is likely to read your release. The first is
when it appears in his inbox. If he is busy, he will not want to

50
 Apple Press Info, [Link]
-[Link] (accessed February 23, 2013).
51
 BP Press Releases, [Link]
&contentId=7080802 (accessed February 23, 2013).
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 71

read the whole release, just ascertain whether it is a potential

story.

Journalists are used to skim-reading. As part of their job, they

tend to read every issue of all the publications relevant to their
brief. Of course, they would have no time to write themselves if
they read every word of every article. Instead, they get used to
reading the headlines and the first sentences or first paragraphs.
And so they will try to do the same with your press release.

The question is this: is your story understandable from the

headline and first sentence? The length of the rest of it, at this
point, is irrelevant.

The second occasion he will read your release, he will make

a proper decision about whether to write about your story. He
will read the full thing and try to assess whether it “stands up”
and is as interesting as he suspected. If you have only written
300 words, you will struggle to sell it to him. He will think: “How
will I write a 450-word news story about this? There isn’t much
to it.”

The inverted pyramid

The conventional way a news story is written is using a structure

called the “inverted pyramid”. This is also how effective press
releases are written. So what is this upside-down pyramid? Well,
it just means that the weighty, most important information is at
the top, and the lighter, less important facts are underneath. It
allows the journalist to stop reading part-way through and still
understand what the story is about.
 72 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Traditionally, a press release incorporates the who, what,

when, where and why of the story. That is:

• Who is it about?
• What happened?
• When did it take place?
• Where did it occur?
• Why did it happen?

Let’s look at a good press release from Dyson,52 which follows

this design. The headline explains substance of the story:

Dyson doubles number of UK engineers

It starts with the when, who and what. The who and what should
always be in the first sentence:

From April 2010, Dyson is doubling its UK engineering team

from 350 to 700. Bucking the trend, Dyson is increasing
research and development investment and recruiting during
recession.

Next we get the where, with more of the what:

The new engineers, many from university, will work at Dyson’s

Wiltshire laboratories, where machines are conceived, researched
and designed. New positions include graduate design engineers,
mechanical engineers and acoustic engineers.

52
 Dyson Press Centre, [Link]
?ReleaseID=76 (accessed February 23, 2013).
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 73

Later on, we get the why:

James Dyson said: “I am extremely proud of the new technol-

ogy developed by our engineers in Malmesbury. It is vital that
Dyson – and the UK – continues to invest in the nation’s engi-
neering talent if we are to stay ahead.”

If you follow that sort of structure, you’re on the right path.

Why newspaper standards matter

Press releases frequently fail to secure coverage because they do

not hold themselves to the same standards of accuracy as would
be required of a newspaper reporter.

According to Edward Bernays:53

The writing must be good, in the particular sense in which each

newspaper considers a story well written.
In brief, the material must come to the editorial desk as care-
fully prepared and accurately verified as if the editor himself had
assigned a special reporter to secure and write the facts. Only by
presenting his news in such form and in such a matter can the
counsel on public relations hope to retain, in the case of the news-
paper, the most valuable thing he possesses – the editor’s faith
and trust.

Some deliberately attempt to mislead the media in their press

releases. A common example is the opinion poll, which has been

53
 Bernays, op cit, p. 190–91.
 74 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

conducted only once. The release claims that the poll shows that
something is “increasing”, where there is in fact no previous poll
to compare the findings with. As Charles J. Rosebault wrote in
The New York Times over 90 years ago: “Newspaper editors are
the most suspicious and cynical of mortals but they are as quick
to discern the truth as to detect the falsehood.”54

A journalist on a British paper told me of an occasion when

she was geared up to write a major story. A press release and its
accompanying report made the astounding – and therefore news-
worthy – claim that a majority of opinion formers in a particular
sector that is controlled by the state now favoured privatisation.
The reporter, however, wanted to check who these opinion
formers were. She found that the author of the research had
mostly asked people whose pro-privatisation views were already
well-known. In other words, the research seemed to be rigged.
She spiked the story.

The problem of corporate waffle

Just as important as getting the structure correct is using the right

sort of language. Ray Eldon Hiebert, in his 1966 biography of Ivy
Lee, writes:

The most important attribute of any man who worked for Lee was
the ability to write with simplicity and clarity. He had shelves of
dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as books on writing tech-
niques and texts on semantics. Whenever a new man would join
the firm, he was given two books: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On
the Art of Writing, specifically for the chapter “On Jargon,” and
Havelock Ellis’s Dance of Life, for its chapter on expression.

54
 “Men who wield the spotlight” by Charles J. Rosebault, in Times Book Review
and Magazine, January 1, 1922.
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 75

Although his staff writers were excellent, Lee could usually

improve any copy which he went over with his editor’s pencil,
and he was appreciative when associates edited his own copy. In
the end, the printed material that went out of his office had a
clarity, simplicity, and polish that seemed to have been achieved
effortlessly because of its smoothness, but actually had involved
much intense labour in preparation.

Personally, I swear by Sir Harold Evans’s Essential English for

Journalists, Editors and Writers, and Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
I wish that both of these were more commonly read by PR prac-
titioners, as putting their linguistic advice into practice would
help to improve the reputation of the PR industry among
members of the press.

Corporate waffle, especially at the opening of a press release,

kills a journalist’s attention. One company issues releases that
clog up their first sentences with boasts such as that they are “the
world’s leading provider of quality of daily life solutions”. There
is no such thing. They are a catering company.

The same firm’s American unit issued a press release which

stated that:55

Sodexo’s mobile recruitment strategy was recognised by two

organisations for its forward thinking approaches to talent
acquisition in an increasingly competitive labor market, and its
pioneering adoption of innovation and technology to attract and
retain diverse, top talent in an increasingly mobile, digital world.

55
 Sodexo Press Release, [Link]
-Mobile-Recruitment-Strategy-Recognized-with-Multiple-Awards/[Link]
(accessed February 23, 2013).
 76 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Such clichéd corporate diarrhoea damages the chances of

press coverage. Unfortunately, in the PR world, it is endemic. If
colleagues try to force you to send out releases containing it,
show them this page.

Sadly, there are times when the language used renders the
entire press release incomprehensible. Here’s one from Adobe, a
brilliant company whose products I have reviewed favourably:56

European Enterprises Need to Rethink their Collaboration

Methods

London, UK – 10th Feb 2009 – Adobe Systems today announced

the results of a European commissioned study conducted by
Forrester Consulting on behalf of Adobe to gain insight into
the nature, the methods and the perceived limitations of col-
laborative work among European knowledge workers. Study
results show that despite the pervasive collaboration trend,
current tools are not meeting knowledge workers’ need to
work efficiently, confidently and securely together in their
efforts to produce high-impact deliverables.

As far I can tell, no media outlet anywhere covered it. This is

a pity, because what I think Adobe was trying to say is that we’d
all be better off if we used video conferencing, but that most of
the available software is rubbish.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with this release.

56
 Adobe Press Release, [Link] (accessed
February 23, 2013).
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 77

The headline is weak. The word “European” should not

be there: there are almost no pan-European newspapers. (Quite
what they were thinking when they decided to push research
covering the whole of Europe, rather than individual countries,
I do not know.)

Jargon is everywhere. It speaks of “enterprises”, when normal

people talk of companies. “Need to rethink” makes it sound like
whatever is being proposed hasn’t been thought through. And
talk of “collaboration methods” should never appear in a press
release.

Have you ever had a conversion with someone in the pub in

which you’ve talked about “collaboration methods”? Nor have
I. It is an awkward phrase that the public never use.

What the headline should be saying is “British companies lose

£1 billion a year from unnecessary staff travel, says research”,
before explaining how video conferencing, online whiteboards
and Twitter would save money.

By the way, it is vital that you say explicitly what you are in
favour of.

This press release never, anywhere in the full version of it,

names what it wants people to choose. Instead, it says that
IT experts should “select and develop enabling solutions to
satisfy enterprises’ business needs and meet knowledge workers’
demands”. I have no idea what they mean by “enabling technolo-
gies”. Do they mean Facebook?

If they do, they should say so, as it would make the story a
lot less opaque.
 78 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

No journalist wants to know that the “commissioned study

[was] conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Adobe” in
the first sentence. He wants to know what the research says.

Some PR managers in large companies try to avoid sending

press releases at all, given that there are so many layers of
bureaucracy that want to translate their impeccable English into
corporate gibberish. Instead, they simply send emails written in
plain language. That’s not a bad idea, even if you are not sur-
rounded by idiots.

Effective headlines

A successful headline provides a “relevant abruption”, to use

a term coined by the advertising creative Steve Harrison.57 By
abruption, I mean it says something dramatic which breaks away
from the banal content that fills much of what is sent to journal-
ists. By relevant, I mean that it refers closely to the content beneath
it. There’s no point in using a killer headline that grabs attention,
only to disappoint the readers by providing body text that doesn’t
meet expectations.

As Steve Harrison himself says: “It is no good, however, if all

it gains is your prospect’s attention. For example, setting ‘BULLS-
HIT’ [in big text] . . . will undoubtedly get you noticed. But unless
you’re actually in the agricultural fertiliser business . . . you’ll just
irritate your audience and, in turn, make them think less of the
brand whose reputation you are trying to promote.”

57
 Steve Harrison, How to do Better Creative Work (Pearson Education: Harlow,
2009), p. 67.
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 79

Press releases with no real story

People are naturally interested in what they are doing. So they

often assume that other people are fascinated by the same things.
The result is as I mentioned in Chapter 1: lots of press releases in
which people bore their readers with the minutiae of their own
products, without genuinely creating a story. Here’s one:58

Kitchen Magic’s acrylic doors coming soon!

With a wealth of options, finishes and design features, Kitchen

Magic’s extensive refurbishment ranges are already great value.
But to give their customers even greater choice, the UK’s
leading kitchen refurbishment company is introducing a new
line of acrylic doors for 2013.

“Our gorgeous new acrylic doors mean that our customers can
choose from even more options, so that they really can have
the kitchen of their dreams,” comments Marketing Manager
Samantha Davies. “These beautiful doors combine elegance
and practicality, and are the perfect choice for a modern, ultra-
chic kitchen design,” she adds.

When I Google searched for acrylic kitchen doors, there

seemed to be lots of other companies selling such things. There
is no story here.

58
 Kitchen Magic Press Release, [Link]
-Magics-Acrylic-Doors-Coming-Soon (accessed February 23, 2013).
 80 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

What if the press release delivers bad news?

For publicly traded companies, there are times when a press release
has to deliver bad news, such as redundancies. The correct thing
to do is to be honest and open, rather than try to hide the bad news.
One press release which generated much criticism was issued
by Citigroup59 and was headlined:

Citigroup Announces Repositioning Actions to Further Reduce

Expenses and Improve Efficiency

Sounds positive, but no press release should be that vague.

The first two paragraphs say:

Citigroup today announced a series of repositioning actions that

will further reduce expenses and improve efficiency across the
company while maintaining Citi’s unique capabilities to serve
clients, especially in the emerging markets. These actions will
result in increased business efficiency, streamlined operations and
an optimised consumer footprint across geographies.

Michael Corbat, Citi’s Chief Executive Officer, said: “These actions

are logical next steps in Citi’s transformation. While we are com-
mitted to – and our strategy continues to leverage – our unparal-
leled global network and footprint, we have identified areas and
products where our scale does not provide for meaningful returns.
And we will further increase our operating efficiency by reducing
excess capacity and expenses, whether they center on technology,
real estate or simplifying our operations.”

59
 Citigroup News, [Link]
(accessed February 23, 2013).
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 81

What this press release is actually saying is that they are laying
off 11,000 employees. This message, however, does not appear
until the end of the third paragraph, after more than 200 words.
What is appalling about this press release is that nowhere in it
does the boss express any regret whatsoever about the lay-offs.

Ironically, the news coverage went big on the job losses. The
Guardian’s article was titled “Citigroup to cut 11,000 jobs world-
wide under new chief executive”,60 while USA Today ran with
“Citigroup slashes 11,000 jobs”.61 Forbes used: “The Citigroup
Bloodbath: New CEO Cuts 11,000 Jobs”.62

If the attempt was to make the job losses less of a story, it most
definitely failed. As a way of making employees feel valued, it
was awful.

How to take and issue photographs

Online publishing has freed publishers from the space constraints

of print editions. The result is that good photography is more in
demand than ever. It is now feasible to have a picture with even
a short online news story about your company, whereas in print
days a magazine or newspaper might only use a picture to
accompany the very longest reports.

60
 The Guardian, [Link]
-cuts-11000-jobs-worldwide (accessed February 26, 2013).
61
 USA Today, [Link]
-11k-jobs/1747897/ (accessed February 26, 2013).
62
 Forbes, [Link]
-bloodbath-new-ceo-cuts-11000-jobs/ (accessed February 26, 2013).
 82 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

The most important thing to remember is that photography

should be of a professional standard. It is always a mistake to go
to the supermarket, buy a cheap digital camera and take a few
snaps yourself. Publications like stunning photographs. Besides,
it’s better for you if the picture of your CEO is flattering and
lights his face properly, rather than making him look weird and
shifty in the shadows. According to Matthew Fearn, Picture
Editor of The Daily Telegraph: “People say that everyone is a pho-
tographer now. They’re not. Unless it is breaking news, if the
quality is poor it won’t stand a chance.”63 Professional photogra-
phers, with greater expertise and better kit, will be able, consist-
ently, to take images of a magazine and newspaper quality.

So how do you find a good photographer? There are plenty

of freelance press photographers about, and – strange as it may
sound – you may find that impoverished landscape photogra-
phers are a good choice, as they understand light exceptionally
well.

Photographers will use a couple of tricks to get the right sort

of photographs. Usually, the photographs that work well in news
media are produced using a wide-angle lens. They let the pho-
tographer get extremely close to the subject, which produces
photographs where the action is right in the foreground, creating
an exciting, energetic feel.

If the photographer is taking a headshot, he will need a por-

trait lens: this compresses the face and gives a flattering picture.
You will need head-and-shoulders photographs of all the people
likely to comment to the media. They will be used regularly, but

63
 “The rising power of the image” in PRWeek, March 1, 2013, p. 25.
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 83

my advice would be not to rely on them. If you can have a stock

of more interesting shots – those taken with the wide-angle
lens – you will be able to provide the media with something
more appealing. Journalists have seen thousands of headshot
photographs, and they can be a little bit boring. What’s
more, many news sites like to place a photograph at the top
of an article, taking up the full width of a story. That means
they want a photo that’s “landscape” in format, rather than “por-
trait” – which, unsurprisingly, is the usual shape of a portrait
photograph.

If taking pictures in fast-paced or dark settings – for example,

an awards ceremony, where the lights are dim – your photogra-
pher will need a fast lens (technically speaking, that is one with
a wide aperture). This will mean the photographs come out well,
often without the need for flash, which can be disruptive and
cause people to blink. A useful guide to the subject is Professor
Ken Kobré’s book, Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach.

By the way, attaching photos to an email clogs up inboxes, so

a better approach is to upload them to a private part of your
website and include a link at the bottom of the press release.
Alternatively there are services that will host your images, such
as Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. For use in print publications,
the images need to be 300 dots per inch – or “hi-res”. An image
intended for web use won’t do, as it will appear pixelated in
print, even if it seems smooth on a computer screen.

Photographs for report covers

If you are issuing research publications along with your press

releases, you will probably want to use some form of photograph
 84 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

for the covers. Please avoid clichéd corporate shots, especially of

executives shaking hands. If you’re licensing an image from a
major library, you’ll often get to choose whether you want a
“creative” image or an editorial picture. Go for the latter, if they
will let you licence it, and not only will the image be more inter-
esting, it will appeal more to the press.

After all, the best photographs look natural, rather than

posed – as though the people in the photo were not aware of
the existence of a camera. Journalists spend their time with
press photographs, which aren’t staged.

By the way, most men like looking at women, and most

women like looking at other women. That’s why men’s mags
tend to have women on the front and women’s mags are the
same. This is worth considering when licensing images.

Press conferences

For most companies, press conferences should be avoided. There

are certain product launches or announcements where a press
conference works. They involve stories in which every relevant
journalist has to cover the story. Manchester United, for example,
can get a journalist from each news organisation that has soccer
coverage to attend.

That is, alas, not the case for the majority of companies. Most
journalists find themselves tied down to their desk, and travel-
ling across a city to come to get information that could just be
written in a press release wastes their time. I once went to a press
conference attended by only two journalists. This sort of attend-
ance looks embarrassing – even if the participants are the most
important journalists you want to communicate with.
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 85

Elisabeth Lewis-Jones is one of many practitioners who has

cut back on press conferences. She talks about when she first
started working in PR in a blog post: “I worked in-house at Bir-
mingham Airport. We regularly held press conferences and a
variety of local, regional, business, trade publications and broad-
cast journalists would attend. I actually can’t remember the last
time I organised a press conference – the media just don’t have
the time or the resources to attend.”64

It may be that ditching the word “conference” fixes the

problem, or instead just meeting journalists one-on-one. When I
reviewed Apple’s Aperture photo software for a computing mag-
azine, the technology firm flew me out to Munich to their Euro-
pean HQ for a demonstration. I attended with a small group of
other journalists, from various European countries. It was not a
press conference per se, and, as I understood it, other journalists
were being shown the software on different days. So the fact that
only half a dozen of us attended was not unexpected. The firm
wanted to demo it to the press before letting us use it on our own
computers so that we all understood the important features and
how they worked. It was a smart strategy.

However, even when an announcement merits a press confer-

ence, it can go badly. I went to a press conference along with a
Guardian journalist. He was hostile to what the company hosting
the event was doing, and his questions were heard by all those
present. The result was that every journalist listened to both the
favourable angle the company the company wanted to project
and to a more critical view, too.

64
 “Churnalism”, PR Voice blog, [Link]
[Link]/pr_voice/2008/02/[Link] (accessed February
27, 2013).
 86 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Why you should avoid sending attachments

Lots of people send their press releases as attachments. Lots of

those releases remain unread.

Your press releases will get read in more haste and on more
basic equipment than you might realise when you’re sending
them. There are still people who have primitive BlackBerrys, and
they may read your release using one under the table in an edito-
rial meeting. A PDF or Microsoft Word document just compli-
cates matters for them. I know, I know, your boss or client wants
you to include your company and trade association logos in some
complicated design that you can only do easily in Word, but this
won’t actually help you get coverage.

The best way to send a release is in the body of an email. The

subject line should normally contain the headline. Don’t use the
words “press release” in the subject: it will just take up space on
the screen. By the way, I don’t buy the argument – put forward by
some PR commentators – that the press release has to be renamed
a “news release”, to account for TV, radio and online media. It’s
been called a press release since its invention in 1906 by Ivy Lee,
and the term is part of the media’s traditions. If we were going to
rename it, the time to do this would have been in 1920, when
KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became the world’s first
licensed radio station. Besides, I’ve been in too many BBC studios
where producers refer to a “press release” to think it is out of place.
Maybe the terminology will change over time – but it hasn’t yet,
and – today – everyone knows what a press release means.

All press releases should be addressed to an individual jour-

nalist. It is bad form to “blind carbon copy” (BCC) a distribution
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 87

list. This suggests to the recipients that they are being spammed
along with hundreds of others. They will therefore consider the
message less seriously than a personal email.

In fact, it is increasingly dangerous for the PR practitioner to

spam hundreds of inappropriate journalists. Some news organisa-
tions have moved their staff on to software, such as Google Mail,
which has a “report spam” button. If lots of journalists use this
on your press releases, you might find that your future ones –
including to other reporters – are automatically spam filtered.
There have also been occasions when IT departments at media
organisations have blocked all incoming mails from a specific
domain name. Moreover, 55 per cent of individual journalists
have blocked a sender of press releases.65

If you don’t have a relationship with a journalist – and even

if you do – I would include a short two- or three-line note at the
top of the message, starting with “Dear Alice”. By doing that you
are indicating that you are not a spammer, but someone who has
genuinely thought about the journalist. However, avoid the
behaviour of brain-dead PR flacks who start their emails with
“Hiya” and end with kisses (xxx).

Customised press releases

It is often a good idea to produce more than one version of a

particular press release, so that each publication or set of publica-
tions receives news that is relevant. You will recall earlier in this

65
 Press Release Irrelevance Survey Findings, January 2010, [Link]
[Link]/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/An-Inconvenient-PR-Truth
-[Link] (accessed March 1, 2013).
 88 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

chapter the Adobe Systems press release which talked about

“European knowledge workers”. That release was ill-conceived
not just because it talked in corporate-speak, but because it failed
to recognise that few media outlets are pan-European. A Dutch
newspaper, for example, wants to know what people in the Neth-
erlands think.

If you are aiming for local newspaper coverage, each area

most definitely needs its own release. Local newspaper journal-
ists find it irritating when PR people send them press releases
that bang on about “the United Kingdom”, when their readers
buy their papers to get local news. So if you’re a national or
international company, how should you approach them? Well,
here’s part of a report from the Eastern Daily Press:66

New research reveals that Cambridge is significantly more

entrepreneurial than its boat race rival.

Cambridge has a business for every 21 people, whereas Oxford

lags behind with a business shared between 26 people.

The figures have been calculated by Accountz, which sells

home and business accounting software.

Chairman Quentin Pain said: “Cambridge beats Oxford because

the best science students in the country are attracted to its
university . . .”

66
 Eastern Daily Press, [Link]
oxford_for_entrepreneurs_1_952364 (accessed February 26, 2013).
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 89

But this PR project did not just involve press releasing the
papers in East Anglia: versions of the story appeared in papers
all over the country, even on the Orkney Islands. Here’s what
Scilly Today wrote:67

Figures calculated by Accountz, a software firm, show that

Scilly is more entrepreneurial than London – and, in fact, the
most entrepreneurial place in Britain . . .

Quentin Pain, Chairman of Accountz, says the Isles of Scilly is

a hotbed of entrepreneurs and family businesses and he says
its residents should be “proud of their contribution to Britain’s
economy.”

These stories were based on a calculation that used govern-

ment figures – creating a fun story at low cost.

“Did you get my press release?”

There is never an excuse for ringing a newspaper or magazine

and asking if they received your press release. It is a telltale sign
of an amateur PR practitioner – and journalists find it incredibly
annoying. You won’t necessarily get an informed answer. As the
American journalist, Todd Wasserman, wrote on Twitter: “If I get
a call asking if I received so and so, I always say yes just to rush
the person off the phone.”68

67
 Sicily Today, [Link]
-place-in-britain-says-new-survey/ (accessed February 26, 2013).
68
 [Link]
 90 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

There are only two times when you should ring a journalist
after sending a press release. One is where you are genuinely able
to offer something extra, such as an interview with a chief execu-
tive. The second is when you have offered the story as an exclu-
sive, and you are ringing to see if they want it. It is fine to offer,
but not to pester or bully.

No one enjoys making needless nagging phone calls to jour-

nalists, so why not spend your time instead with a pot of tea,
coming up with some decent new ideas for future press releases?

Alas, many of those amateur practitioners believe that if they

put pressure on a reporter to cover their story, it is more likely to
gain coverage. They would do well to remember the words of
Ivy Lee69:

I know the editors of many newspapers; editors and reporters. I

never ask them to print anything in their papers. In the first place,
I think it is very bad business, very poor policy on the part of
anyone to make such a request; and furthermore, I always feel that
if I did make it, and the papers printed a story or article at my
request – which they would not have printed if I had not asked
them to – the people would not read it.
Editors of newspapers print what they do print because they
have been taught by long experience that certain things, which are
said to have news value, are the items which the public will be
interested to read . . . Now if the trained judgment of these men
does not make them feel that a particular item will be read, what
is the use of getting it printed?

69
 Publicity, Some of the Things It Is and Is Not, Ivy Lee (New York: Industries
Publishing, 1925), p. 2.
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 91

Embargoes

If you are aiming for traditional media to cover your story, it is

often a good idea to embargo it. This is as a courtesy to the jour-
nalist. You are giving them time to think about the story and do
some research, safe in the knowledge that they will not be scooped
by another media outlet that rushes it out.

Just write at the top of the press release “Embargoed until

Thursday 1 May”. Some people try to be clever and write that
it’s embargoed until “00:01 hours” – which is wholly unneces-
sary. Besides, first editions of newspapers are available in
major cities before midnight. This is, by the way, not counted as
breaking the embargo, nor is putting a story on a newspaper
website in the evening. Neither will damage your ability to get
coverage.

Despite setting an embargo for the Thursday, a late-night

11pm television interview on Wednesday on the subject would
be fine, but an appearance on the BBC News Channel at 8:30pm
would be pushing it.

While print media will almost always honour an embargo,

online media may be more problematic. In 2008, Rafe Needman,
then a journalist at the CNet technology news website in the
United States, asserted, on a personal website, a break from jour-
nalistic tradition. He wrote that: “If you send an unsolicited email
with an embargoed press release in it, we consider that fair game
to cover immediately.”70

70
 [Link]
 92 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Most journalists would be appalled by that attitude. But he

may have a point. Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch,
wrote a lengthy blog the same year explaining why his site would
no longer take notice of most embargoes.71 He explained that PR
companies were sending their “embargoed news to literally eve-
ryone who writes tech news stories . . . Any blog or major media
site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used
to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem.”

The result was that some tiny website would break the
embargo, meaning that sites such as TechCrunch were at a com-
mercial disadvantage. “A year ago embargo breaks were rare,
once-a-month things,” he said. “Today, nearly every embargo is
broken, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes by half a day or
more.”

Now, my view is that sending press releases to blogs is usually

inappropriate. Many independent bloggers hate receiving press
releases, regarding them as relevant to the mainstream media – or
“MSM”, as they call it – but not to them. Because independent
bloggers are not, for the most part, paid, they don’t see why they
should have to deal with them. Blogs, therefore, require a more
personal approach, in which emails are tailored specifically with
the readers of that blog in mind – and, I’m afraid to say, you do
need to read the blog. Spamming a list of carelessly chosen blog-
gers with embargoed press releases is asking for trouble. A
trained journalist will regard an embargo as a convention that
should be followed, whereas a blogger may see it is something
you are asking them to follow, but something to which they have
not agreed.

71
 [Link]
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 93

It is OK, however, to provide bloggers with embargoed infor-

mation if they are bloggers who you have a relationship with,
who you trust and who value you. It may be that you want them
to review a product and would ideally like some reviews to be
available on the day of release. Giving them the product under
embargo would be beneficial to both sides.

If, given what sites like TechCrunch are now saying, you think
your coverage will principally be online media, you may wish to
ditch the embargo and write at the top of your press release “For
immediate release”. Or you could just send professional media
the embargoed press release in advance, and give bloggers the
information later.

In practice, in the era of 24/7 news, embargoes are less impor-

tant than they once were, but they are still appreciated by most
professional journalists working for newspapers, magazines and
broadcasters. And they can increase the amount of coverage a
story receives, because they get around the problem where a
specialist correspondent is so busy on a particular day that she
cannot find time straight away to think about your pitch. With a
“for immediate release” story, a journalist may think that she has
to write about it right now or not at all. If she writes about it in
two days’ time, she will look like she has been scooped by com-
petitors or is lacking in her nose for news.

Giving advance notice

If you are working on a story several weeks in advance, you may

gain an advantage by tipping off media planning services such
as the Precise Media Planner, which – in the UK – is used by all
the major news organisations from the BBC to The Guardian. An
 94 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Associated Press-branded version of this media planner, called

AP Planner, is available in the United States. Media organisations
use these media planning services regularly to ensure they know
what is happening in the coming weeks.

It is also worth alerting specialist correspondents at each

newspaper that a story is coming in a few weeks. Let’s say your
story is about how aid needs to go up to 12 per cent of GDP to
pay for the cost of climate change. Ring up the environment
editor or correspondent of each newspaper and let them know
to expect it.

If you’re a real pro, you’ll try to give each paper something

special. The magic words to use are: “we’d like to give you an
exclusive angle”. If you’ve done a survey, then you can tell The
Guardian, for example: “We did a poll of 1,000 young people on
their attitudes to social policy. 73 per cent of them favour legalis-
ing drugs, while 94 per cent think pubs should serve them at 16.
But separately we’ve put together a focus group and we’d love
to assemble them to be questioned exclusively by you.”

Some PR campaigns do very well by meeting specialist cor-

respondents for lunch or drinks. Political think tanks, for example,
will arrange lunch with Political Editors once every year or two,
a few weeks before a major report launch, while telecoms firms
may well have lunch with the Telecoms Correspondent on the
City desk of each newspaper.

The most important thing when arranging lunch is to have in

your mind a portfolio of three ideas to give to a journalist over
lunch. They want to feel that they have got some good material
 HOW TO WRITE AN ATTENTION-GRABBING PRESS RELEASE | 95

from you. And it helps them justify their time out of the office if
they have a boss who likes to keep them on a leash.

Journalists, on the whole, don’t want to have lunch with a

junior press officer, so you may need to massage your job title,
or consider putting someone at a senior level in front of them.

Different journalists have different deadlines, so some will be

unavailable for lunch, or have earlier or later preferences. As
discussed in Chapter 3, many find it difficult to get away for long
periods. The worst invites are ones that involve travelling long
distances. Being invited to lunch at the other end of a capital city
can add an hour to lunch – and there is an increasing desk-bound
culture in newspapers. So you will be best off suggesting a res-
taurant near to a newspaper’s office.

If you’re a poverty relief charity on a limited budget, don’t

worry. The expense you go to should fit in with the sort of organi-
sation you are. If you’re supposed to be helping starving children
and you take a journalist to a restaurant with two Michelin stars,
the journalist is going to think you need your head examined.

Newswires

Although I don’t recommend pay-for newswire services, there

are proper newswires, funded by media organisations, which are
worth contacting. Indeed, newspapers and broadcasters rely
heavily upon them to find and filter news. In the UK and Ireland,
general news is covered by the Press Association. The equivalent
in Australia and New Zealand is the Australian Associated Press
(AAP). In the United States and Canada, the Associated Press and
 96 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

The Canadian Press, respectively, take the lead. Reuters and

Bloomberg are the main wire services about finance.

Each newswire service will provide you with details of

how to submit your press release. They are, in my experience,
extremely good at sorting through the material they receive by
email.
 Chapter 5
Dealing with Incoming
Media Enquiries
T
he more you issue good press releases, the more your
reputation with the media will grow. You will get what is
called “woodwork coverage” – that is, coverage simply
because you are well-known and your reputation is in the wood-
work. Taking incoming media calls, which are normally extremely
welcome and beneficial, does nonetheless require some skill and
caution.

Incoming phone calls

I was given some useful advice when I started my first job, as a

press officer in Westminster: “Never do or say anything that you
wouldn’t like to appear on the front page of The Guardian.” With
that parked to one side, let’s examine how to deal effectively with
media phone calls.

Sometimes a journalist will be struggling to find a decent

organisation or person to comment on a subject. But quite often
they have a choice and will be ringing down a list of possible
bodies to interview or feature in some way. Therefore, it is vital
that their phone calls are dealt with quickly and helpfully –
which is not always what happens. Andrew Buncombe of The
Independent says: “I cannot believe the opportunities that big
 100 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

companies let pass when I am seeking a comment from them on

a story that is at worst neutral and at best very much in their
favour. Some [public relations people] are pathetic.”72

Allowing media calls to go through to voicemail is foolish,

even out of hours. There are journalists working during evenings
and at weekends. It therefore makes sense to have a media line
for evening and weekend calls. Some companies have a mobile
handset for incoming media calls, which they take turns to carry
while the office is closed. Of course, there will be times when
even this doesn’t mean a journalist’s call gets answered – such
as when you are out of reception. You can increase the likelihood
that a journalist will leave a message by recording an outgoing
voicemail message saying that messages are picked up through-
out every evening and weekend and that all of them are returned
extremely quickly.

It is important to log the details of those journalists who ring

you, as these details will be useful when you later issue press
releases.

Online media centre

You will attract more incoming calls (and more coverage, even
without the phone calls) by placing useful materials for the press
on your website. In days gone by, PR teams would create press
kits, containing useful photographs, recent press releases and
background information in an attractive folder. Nowadays, these
have morphed into online media centres – web pages designed
for journalists.

72
 David Henderson, Making News (Nebraska: iUniverse, 2006), p. 31.
 DEALING WITH INCOMING MEDIA ENQUIRIES | 101

Here you should prominently list contact details for journal-

ists to ring or email, plus give them the opportunity to enter
their details in order to receive future press releases. Quite how
you deal with those who leave their details will depend on the
sort of stories you put out. You may want to research who the
journalists are before you add them to an email list. After all,
you may get competitors entering their details, along with
charity campaigners who are hostile to your industry. And you
may issue press releases on a variety of topics, and recognise
that each press release should go to a different selection of
journalists.

You may also want to deal with independent bloggers in a

slightly different way to professional media, for example, by
issuing an embargoed press release to professional media, and
then by sending a personal email to relevant bloggers on the day
of the launch. That means that addresses collected through an
online media centre will need to be sorted, rather than automati-
cally added to an email list.

Photographs of your executives and major activities should

be easily downloadable from the media centre, preferably in a
variety of sizes. Internet outlets will want a small image – maybe
300 pixels wide for a headshot – while print publications will
need high-resolution pictures.

Finally, your past press releases should be placed in the media

centre. This will help more people find you on search engines. In
fact, improving your site’s ranking in search engines is a good
reason to host the media centre yourself, rather than paying a
press release newswire to do it. It means your site gets incoming
links, rather than theirs.
 102 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Unhelpful press offices

Over the past 20 years, I have witnessed a small minority of PR

departments that are deeply unhelpful both to the media and to
their employers. They don’t return journalists’ calls or they erect
unnecessary roadblocks. It seems to be either a weird attempt to
feel powerful or just plain cluelessness.

Here’s one example of press office unhelpfulness being uncov-

ered. Iain Dale presents a popular talk show on LBC radio, a
London station with around a million listeners. He writes:

Nine times out of ten when our producers call a government press
office to ask if we could have a minister on my Sunday show, they
say no. Half the time I’m sure the press officers don’t even ask the
ministers. The Department of Health, Home Office, Department
of Education and the MoD are the worst offenders. It gets to the
point when you wonder what on earth the dozens of press officers
in those departments actually do all day. Every time I am turned
down by the Department of Education I have a simple policy. I
text Michael Gove [Secretary of State for Education]. And more
often than not he texts back to say how delighted he would be to
come on.

You see the disconnect there? The boss (Michael Gove) wants
to appear, but his irrational subordinates don’t seem to want to
find this out. This is particularly odd, because Dale is himself a
celebrity in Westminster. He is not someone with a reputation of
unfairly stitching up guests, so the actions of those press officers
is mind-boggling.

In this case, we are talking about central government press

officers, and there is a specific problem in Whitehall public-sector
 DEALING WITH INCOMING MEDIA ENQUIRIES | 103

PR. Too many people doing it are interested in either being civil
servants or in being part of politics, but are not plugged into the
wider knowledge-base around public relations. I was told by the
head of media at one government department that they do not
spend any money on external training. This sentences the depart-
ment to a myopic understanding of public relations.

This is despite the view of the late Sir Stephen Tallents (1884–
1958), head of the Empire Marketing Board, who said that PR
“should be recognised as a professional job demanding special
training and special capabilities”.73 Yet I note from the job adver-
tisements for government press officers – well, the ones I could
find – that there was not even the suggestion that applicants
might be a member of a professional body, or, for example, have
a degree in public relations. Not even the most basic professional
certificate was mentioned. This is especially odd given that there
are thousands of public sector communicators who are members
of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), an organisa-
tion originally set up by local government PR staff.74 Currently,
only one central government press office is accredited with the
PRCA professional body, while a number of local government
ones are. And of the 30 press officers listed on the Department of
Health website as I type this,75 not a single one is listed on the
CIPR’s membership register.76

73
 Sean Larkins, [Link]
-word/ (accessed March 1, 2013).
74
 Jacquie L’Etang, Public Relations in Britain: A History of Professional Practice in
the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 57.
75
 [Link] (accessed March 7, 2013).
76
 [Link]
-register (accessed March 7, 2013).
 104 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

The lack of proper PR education and training has become

especially bad with the rise of special advisors – normally young
party political hacks – getting involved with media relations,
with often little previous experience and certainly no qualifica-
tions. The results of all this can be cringe worthy.

Commercial PR departments tend to fare better, because of the

increasingly important role given to measurement and greater
emphasis on training (just as in local government PR depart-
ments, too). Being helpful to the media, and securing coverage,
helps commercial PR staff deliver measurable outcomes and
therefore score more highly in their end-of-year reviews.

Smelling a rat or an opportunity worth avoiding

It is, of course, always important to assess whether a request for

an interview, or other involvement, is a trap. If your business is
in any way controversial – maybe you build wind turbines, which
campaigners hate – make sure you find out exactly what the
journalist’s plan is. If a journalist wants to do the dirty on you,
he will be extremely vague about the nature of the intended
coverage, which should be a red flag. There is no shame in resist-
ing a request for an interview until the editorial line being pro-
moted is revealed.

If you are providing an interview with an executive, and you

have the slightest worry, exchange emails with the media organi-
sation confirming what they have told you on the phone about
the scope and purpose of the interview and how long it will last.
If it is for a broadcaster, ask whether there will be phone-in,
where listeners can ring with questions. There is a huge differ-
ence in the amount of preparation and knowledge needed for a
 DEALING WITH INCOMING MEDIA ENQUIRIES | 105

three-minute interview with a presenter and for an hour-long

phone-in. That said, if the interviewee is confident with the
subject, phone-ins can be fun. For broadcast interviews that are
pre-recorded, or that will be transcribed into a written publica-
tion, you may wish to take along your own visible tape recorder,
for your records. If you later feel that your words have been
misquoted or taken out of context, your complaint will have
ammunition.

Even where the coverage is likely to be hostile in tone,

there will be times when you should participate. If there is a
problem with your company or its products, engagement with
an interested media is vital. If you choose not to give your side
of the story, you give them considerable leeway in what they can
write – some of which may be inaccurate. If you, at the very least,
issue them with a written statement or written replies to their
questions, you will find some or all of it is incorporated into their
coverage. They will want, for legal and ethical reasons, to give
you the opportunity to put your side of the story.

To apply a “tough stance” to a hostile media in more everyday

circumstances, chapter 12 of PR Today, by Professors Morris and
Goldsworthy, provides a useful guide to various techniques, all
of which the authors say come with “health warnings”.

Withdrawing the use of a press office

There may be times – especially if your company is controversial

– that you find that a publication routinely writes negative stories
about you. This can be depressing, and how you deal with it
requires caution.
 106 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

It is easier to do something about factually inaccurate stories

than about merely hostile ones. In the UK, television stations are
regulated by Ofcom (and, in the case of the BBC, by the BBC
Trust). The newspapers have an Editors’ Code of Conduct and
an independent regulator. If a newspaper story is materially inac-
curate, you may wish to submit a letter for publication, which
will be covered in the next chapter, or request a correction. If the
newspaper accepts that you may be in the right, they will readily
accept these suggestions, as if you make a more serious com-
plaint to the regulator, it will waste considerable time and have
greater potential for embarrassment.

The best technique with hostile journalists, in the first instance,

is to be as nice as you can to them – even if you do need to correct
their perspective by, for example, issuing a statement on your
website. Rising to the bait and denouncing them could encourage
more hostile coverage at some future juncture.

Sometimes the correct response is to cut off all ties – but this
has significant risks. In 2012, David Tovar, Walmart’s vice presi-
dent for communications, announced that “We have made a busi-
ness decision not to participate in [the online publication’s]
articles going forward due to the one-sided reporting and unfair
and unbalanced editorial decisions made by .  .  . reporters and
editors.”77

This was an effective strategy because the media coverage

around the ban has acted as a loud rebuttal of the website’s
77
 Eric Wemple, “Wal-Mart banishes Huffington Post”, November 30, 2013
[Link]
-banishes-huffington-post/2012/11/30/23ffdc50-3b40-11e2-9258-ac7c78d5c680
_blog.html (accessed February 24, 2013).
 DEALING WITH INCOMING MEDIA ENQUIRIES | 107

criticisms. And the technique wasn’t unprecedented. In 1984,

Mobil Oil, fed up with coverage in a major US paper, boycotted
the publication’s journalists. The head of public affairs Herb
Schmertz said: “We concluded that the situation couldn’t get
worse. We did it for our own self-respect.”78

But it can backfire, as the act of banning a publication will

often be seen as unfair in the eyes of wider public – and as an
attempt to stifle debate or hide the truth. The banned publication,
if it is of note, can turn the ban into a huge negative story in and
of itself. There have been occasions when bans have turned a
difficult relationship into a toxic one – and the chances of such
consequences increases with the importance – in the eyes of the
public – of the publication. A charm offensive is normally a better
strategy, and this should always be deployed first.

The dangers of a hostile press are one reason why companies

in the public eye retain PR consultants with crisis communica-
tions experience, who can be deployed at short notice. Often,
when an unexpected crisis hits, companies with underfunded PR
operations are unable to react quickly enough to the needs of
media. And speed is important. That is why it is vital that social
media is monitored, as this can provide an early warning of a
crisis. As the phrase goes: “A lie can be halfway around the world
before the truth has got its boots on.”

And it is why, even when a journalist is unsympathetic to your

position, banning them from your press office should be a last
resort.

78
 Herb Schmertz, Goodbye to the Low Profile: Art of Creative Confrontation (London:
Mercury Books, 1986).
 108 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Crisis contingency planning

All organisations in the public eye need to plan for crises. After
a train crash, the PR team in the rail company concerned will
need to deal with a dramatic spike in media requests and atten-
tion on social networks. Simulating how the company will deal
with a range of possible crises in advance will help it to react
quickly.

A good book that I can recommend is Crisis Management: Plan-

ning for the Inevitable by Steven Fink. It is a very practical read
because the author was involved in crisis communications efforts
for the Pennsylvania Governor during the Three Mile Island
nuclear disaster. Similarly, the Public Relations Consultants Asso-
ciation runs a high-quality course on crisis communications – I
participated in an excellent session led by Sheila Gunn, a former
Times journalist who became political press secretary to Sir John
Major, when he was British prime minister.

As a crisis hits, it is normally sensible to bring in external crisis

communication consultants. They will help to deal with the extra
workload. Because they are experienced crisis PR practitioners,
they will bring experience that an in-house team may lack. And
because they are independent, they will not feel as emotionally
under attack as an in-house team, and will therefore be able to
think in a more detached fashion. It is worth keeping a list of
who you would want to work with should a crisis erupt.
 Chapter 6
How to Successfully
Pitch a Letter
T
he letters page can be one of the most-read parts of a
publication. That’s because readers see it as their page –
one where they get to express their opinions. It is, there-
fore, a valuable property for public relations consultants.

The problem for PR people is that letters editors of newspa-

pers prefer letters from normal readers, and most of the letters
sent by PR flacks are worthless. But there are still plenty of letters
published in the press from companies and charities, and if you
can avoid sending a letter that sounds like a press release, you
have a good chance of getting published.

The spirit of a letters page

For a letter to be printed, the writer needs to get into the spirit
of a letters page. It needs to be written as you would speak, not
how a committee of jargon-lovers would write it.

A letter saying that the government’s criteria for approving

drugs on the NHS are harming drug companies’ profits is a self-
interested letter. Letters editors are going to wonder how much
the readers will care. The letter would be much more appealing
if it said that “your readers who are concerned about getting the
 112 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

best treatment” should be worried that increased government

rationing is going to stop them getting the latest drugs. This is
basically the same point, but from a more reader-friendly
direction.

Infuriatingly, many letters sent by bad PR companies seem to

be no more than an attempt to tick boxes on their to-do lists,
rather than a genuine attempt to get a letter printed. They read
like recycled press releases – and probably are.

So it is vital to write the letter with the aim of informing

readers, rather than as an attempt to get free publicity. Writing
the letter simply to get the chief executive’s name in print is a
bad motivation, because you will most likely write a bad letter.
However, genuinely trying to help out the readers will lead to
good publicity.

The lack of naked self-interest is why charities do very well

at getting their letters printed, whereas companies are often less
successful, unless they are responding to a City story referencing
them.

The competition

Major newspapers receive hundreds of letters per day, although

they get fewer at the weekend. Older readers still write by post
or fax. But the majority of letters come by email – and that’s what
you should use. It means that your letter will arrive more quickly
and in a more convenient format.

Inevitably, many of the letters received are unprintable. They

include ones about voices in readers’ heads and “top secret”
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 113

information about how major politicians are part of a plot by

lizards to take over the world.

On a major paper it is quite likely that between 100 and 200

letters will be thought about seriously by a letters editor each day.
Then perhaps 50 each day will be shortlisted. They may sit in a
“queue”, waiting to be used, if a space becomes available, for up
to two weeks afterwards. But, normally, if they are going to be
used, they will be published within two or three days. About
20–25 letters are printed each day on a typical letters page.

How a letters page is split up

Every newspaper has a formula for its page, with a mix of serious
topics and lighter ones. It is good to get a feel for the types of
letters that are published, as each letters page is different.

If the letters page uses a photograph, this gives the opportu-

nity to be helpful. If you are submitting a letter, for example,
lobbying for more defence expenditure, and you refer to some
battle in the First World War, you could always mention in a
P.S. that there is a brilliant painting of this in the Imperial War
Museum (and, by the way, it’s available from Getty Images). A
word of caution, however: a suggestion that the paper might
want to use a self-satisfied picture of your executives shaking
hands will not go down as well.

What to avoid

Here’s the start of a letter by Gabe Kavanagh and Rosa Campbell

that was sent to The Sydney Morning Herald, in response to a
 114 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

column by Paul Sheehan. It’s a near perfect example of what not

to do:79

We’re on it, Paul.

In two weeks, 400 feminists are going to argue to the death

about what feminism means at the F Conference. Please come
along – it can only make us stronger. Plus, your ticket’s on us.

The answer will be as complicated as ever – even if you don’t

come.

When you argue that women are feminism’s worst enemy, you
make the same case hundreds of opinionated men and women
have done before you – but you don’t tell us anything new.

And so it went on for another four paragraphs. The writers

complained on their blog that the letter wasn’t published because
(a) it was written by women and (b) by feminists.

Rubbish, if you ask me. The letter suffers from several

problems. First, it is written to the wrong person. It should be
written as a letter to the editor, not to the writer of the original
column. Second, the readers aren’t interested in whether there’s
a free ticket available for Mr Sheehan or not. This content is
irrelevant.

79
 Gabe Kavanagh and Rosa Campbell, [Link]
30/how-to-get-a-letter-published-in-the-smh-1-be-a-bloke/ (accessed March 1,
2013).
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 115

Third, it’s not clear to me what the original columnist was

arguing, or, indeed, what the letter writers are trying to say. What
do they mean by their opening line: “We’re on it, Paul”? On what?
The phrase “you don’t tell us anything new” seems gratuitous,
and the letter, taken as a whole, appears to lack an argument.

Third, the letter is advertising a conference. That will have put

a quick black mark against the letter, because a letters page is for
discussing ideas, and papers really don’t like them to become
commercials.

Fourth, it’s too long. The full thing is 300 words, which for a
letter that is largely vacuous, is too much. Could they not have
made a point in 100 words?

The writers say that they rang the paper’s letters editor to ask
if it was to be published:

The answer wasn’t at all straightforward – although he did say

that “at this stage, I’m leaning against publishing it”.

Well, there’s a tendency at newspapers not to get into a

detailed discussion about why something is no good, because it
just ends up causing offence. No one wants to be told that they
can’t write (for example).

Letters editors frequently receive calls from people complain-

ing that their letters never appear. However, the truth is that
letters don’t get printed because they are not interesting or well-
written enough.

If you are at a loss to understand why the letters editor doesn’t

like your letter, there is a magic phrase that you can use to get
 116 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

past the fob-off. Just say: “What could I do to make it better?” At

which point, you’ll often get useful advice – and maybe you’ll
have time to revise your letter.

One reader of The New York Times submitted a good, if slightly

long, letter on the psychological effects of video games such as
Quake and Doom. It was the sort of letter that newspapers like,
because it was informative and was the opposite of the conven-
tional video-games-are-evil position. But he did something that
irritates letters editors:80

I was contacted by the Times expressing interest in printing an

edited version of my letter (I’m sure they wouldn’t have printed
the whole thing, it’s much too long), and asking if it had been
published anywhere else. I told the person I was talking to that I
had published it on my personal website, and she said she’d call
me back if they were still interested. She didn’t, so I guess they
weren’t.

Some PR people will now pre-empt publication by releasing

their letters to the editor in advance on their websites. This is a
mistake. First, it scoops the newspaper, thereby making the letter
less valuable to the paper. Second, it’s impossible for the letters
editor to actually edit the letter, because the writer is holding up
the letter to the public and saying: this is what my letter was
before this evil newspaper got their hands on it.

Normally, if the letter has been through a company’s bureauc-

racy, it will need some editing to rid it of illiterate phrases and
to get it into the style the newspaper’s readers like.

I would normally be relaxed about the editing. Newspapers

employ professional editors, whose job it is to make sure your
letter communicates well. But, if you are worried, it’s fine to ask

80
 [Link] (accessed March 1, 2013).
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 117

for the edited version of the letter to be emailed to you, so that

you can check that your point is correctly expressed.

A correcting letter

This, from Graham Louth of the regulator Ofcom, appeared in

The Guardian:81

You report that Ofcom will hold a second public consultation

on proposals for 4G mobile services (Delay to 4G sale puts
back smartphone revolution, 8 October). The report says
that “Ofcom has decided once more to tear up its rules for the
auction”.

This is not the case. We have decided to hold a further public

consultation to refine our proposals. This is because . . .

It’s a good belt-and-braces letter, which avoids getting emo-

tional. “This is not the case” is a wonderfully matter-of-fact
phrase, which makes the point, but without making the newspa-
per look silly.

Too many letters of correction use aggressive words and

phrases, such as “misrepresent”. That particular word is legally
problematic, because it could imply that the journalist has
engaged in some wrongdoing. You might think that to be the
case, but you’d be better off merely assuming than an honest
mistake has been made.

81
 “Consulting on 4G” in The Guardian, [Link]
2011/oct/14/consulting-on-4g-ofcom (accessed March 1, 2013).
 118 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Furthermore, it’s important to avoid being strident. Some

companies attempt to rebut legitimate concerns about their prac-
tices by sending heavy-handed letters that infuriate the readers,
and cause days of letters in response. Always sound reasonable
and caring, and you’ll do much better.

The position letter

Here’s one from me, published in February 1999 in The

Independent:82

Serious economists, as well as pop stars (report, 11 February),

have supported Jubilee 2000, and urged the cancellation of
Third World debt.
At the Adam Smith Institute, we have expressed the view that
this debt burden is holding back development. These were often
ill-considered loans lent by ill-advised banks to illegitimate gov-
ernments. The capital is gone, in most cases wasted, and repay-
ment comes from what little income these countries generate.
By cancelling that debt on a one-off basis, we not only raise
the living standards of the desperately poor, but we give them
the chance, and the investment, to embark on that upward
path which generates growth, wealth and jobs.
Cancellation is in our interest as well as theirs.
ALEX SINGLETON
Adam Smith Institute
London SW1

82
 [Link]
-[Link] (accessed March 1, 2003).
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 119

The reason this works is, first, because it is unexpected. The

conventional view was that do-gooders were in favour of debt
cancellation, whereas free-marketers were against. So publishing
a letter setting out an unconventional position was appealing to
the letters editor.

Second, the letter has a neat turn of phrase: “ill-considered

loans lent by ill-advised banks to illegitimate governments”.

Third, it has an argument that wasn’t heard much back then:

“Cancellation is in our interest as well as theirs.”

If I were writing it today, I would change the tense from “have

urged” to “are urging” and “we have expressed the view” to “we
take the view”. Using the present tense sounds more current and
is therefore more powerful.

The informative letter

This, from The Scotsman, was a brilliant letter, not just because it’s
to the point, but because it informs readers about something that
isn’t commonly known. Certainly, I had never heard this argu-
ment before:

I was astonished that Scottish Socialist Party spokesman Colin

Fox didn’t appear to know that VAT on domestic fuel is only
5 per cent (not 20 per cent).

Perhaps he and others who wring their hands over what they
see as an outrageous rise in fuel costs also do not know that
official statistics show that, in 2009, fuel expenditure as a per-
centage of total household expenditure was 4.7 per cent.
 120 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

That is only slightly higher than it was in 1990 (4.5 per cent)
and less than it was in 1980 (5.6 per cent).

Steuart Campbell

Edinburgh

This sort of letter appeals to letters editors because the use of

figures makes it sound authoritative. It is quite common on letters
desks for editors to wonder: “Is this letter credible? Is it true?”
Sometimes letters editors will try to verify them, particularly if
the letter is disputing someone else’s claims. It helps, therefore,
if you footnote your letter with an explanation of where the
figures came from, and include a web link, if available. This
won’t be printed in the paper, but it will put the letters editor’s
mind at rest.

The anonymous letter

Newspapers – the high circulation ones, anyway – hate anony-

mous letters. They look fake, and newspapers take the view that
if someone wants to throw stones in a letter, he should have the
courage to put his name on it. (The exception are letters in the
troubleshooting columns of personal finance sections, where, for
obvious reasons, names are often ditched.)

It’s a bit different on local papers, where “Name and address

supplied” is more common, and in one local paper caused the
phrase “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” to be born. Apparently, a
past editor of the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser was so short of letters
that he asked his journalists to write some. One signed his name
“Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells”, creating one of the most famous
phrases in the UK.
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 121

The grassroots or astroturf letter

In the United States, the word “astroturf” has come to refer to

fake grassroots campaigns. And when letters editors receive huge
numbers of letters that are being sent as part of an orchestrated
campaign, letters editors are unimpressed. That’s because all the
letters invariably contain exactly the same phrases. Letters editors
have numerous tales of the 200 “spontaneous” letters that each
contained the likes of “[Insert your name and address here]” in
the line above each writer’s name and address.

Letters editors are not naive, and providing hundreds of

people with cut-and-paste letters does not work. In fact, it is
more effective to spend time penning a truly good letter from one
person.

The group letter

One technique is the group letter by eminent people. Ring up the

letters editor and say you’re thinking of putting together a letter
on x, and see if there is some interest. The fact that you have rung
first will whet his appetite and make it more likely that the letter
will appear on the shortlist when you email it to him.

The call can also be useful because he may say that he has no
interest in it, and then you can either tweak the theme or offer
the letter to another paper.

When you ring, a good question to ask is: when would you
need it by? The letters editor may think it would fit well on a
particular day. For example, it may be that he struggles to create
 122 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

a really strong letters page for a Monday morning, and therefore

receiving your letter by Saturday would help him enormously.

After you’ve spoken to him, keep in touch. Send him a copy

of the letter while you’re still getting signatures so as to keep his
interest. He might respond with a couple of suggestions for
improving the letter. And he will feel that he has invested time
in you, and therefore will want to print the letter.

If the content is particularly newsworthy, ring up a specialist

correspondent and tell him what you’ve submitted. The special-
ist might be game for running a story announcing that “in a letter
to this newspaper, thirteen eminent doctors have written calling
for the government to cancel their NHS reforms” (or whatever
your particular cup of tea is).

What’s more, if a specialist correspondent tells a letters desk

that he wants to run a story about a letter, the letter’s publication
is practically guaranteed. The letters editor won’t spike the letter
because he will want to be seen as helpful to his colleagues. And
having a letter picked up by the news pages indicates that the
letters page is driving the news agenda and is important. Some-
times, radio talk shows and television programmes will pick up
these sorts of letters, so they can be an extremely time-effective
way of raising profile for an issue.

Oh, and if you want the best possible chance of getting your
letter printed, send it to a Sunday newspaper. These get fewer
letters than daily papers. That’s because readers have far more
interesting things to do on a Sunday than sit at their computers
typing letters – like being nagged by their spouses or walking
around the countryside. Certainly, there are few readers on a
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 123

Sunday sitting at work at 9:05am, bored out of their minds with

their employment, writing to the press.

For a Sunday newspaper, you ought to get your letter submit-

ted by Thursday lunchtime. You would be amazed at how many
companies submit letters at 5:30pm on a Friday afternoon, in the
belief that someone is going to come into work to edit their letter
on a Saturday. By that point the page will have been finished.

With a group letter, try not to go overboard on signatories.

Normally, only a few of the names will appear in the print edition,
along with a message telling readers that they can see the full list
online.

As a rule of thumb, I would say six to a dozen signatures is a

good number (although the Chicago Tribune has a rule of “No
more than four signatures per letter”). But it very much depends
on the weight of the signatories. If you have 100 Nobel prize-
winners, that is better than just six. But I wouldn’t scrape around
trying to get any old signatory in the hope that quantity will
impress.

When to submit your letter

The best time of the day to send a letter to a daily paper is in the
morning before about 10:30am, although obviously it varies from
newspaper to newspaper. They letters page may well be the first
section of the features and comment pages that gets designed.
On one major newspaper, the letters desk has normally finished
compiling the page by 1:30pm, and they need letters by 10:30am
in order to start working on them.
 124 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

A letter, therefore, that arrives at 3pm has almost no chance

of making the next day’s paper (unless it is breathtakingly stop-
the-press startling). And in the afternoon, aside from proofread-
ing the page, and reading and shortlisting hundreds of letters for
the following day, the letters page staff may go off to other duties.

Letters to national newspapers should always be exclusive to

one newspaper, and it helps to state that this is the case. If you
put: “This letter is exclusive to The Guardian” at the bottom of
your email, it will reassure the letters editor that you aren’t
sending a round robin.

The reason papers like exclusive letters is that the page is sup-
posed to be a page of letters to that paper’s editor, rather than a
bulletin board. Although most people may just read one paper,
there are plenty of individuals – for example, those reading in a
library or from an office collection of papers – who will flick
through two or three. And it looks poor if the letters are repeated
in several newspapers.

If you are responding to an article or letter in the paper, don’t

sit on the task for a few days. Your chance of being published is
substantially greater if you submit the letter straight away. If you
are running a good PR operation, you should be able to submit
a letter on the same morning that the article it refers to was pub-
lished. If your organisation is too bureaucratic for that, get your
organisation to change. It really makes a difference.

Getting the details right

So how do you write a good letter? Being short helps hugely. The
maximum length a letters page will normally print is 250 words,
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 125

and those printed tend to be in the 50–150 word range. The New
York Times explicitly says that “Letters for publication should be
no longer than 150 words, must refer to an article that has
appeared within the last seven days”,83 which is a good rule of
thumb across the English-speaking world.

However, while newspapers publish many letters referring to

articles, they do also print some without any reference to previ-
ous newspaper content.

The best technique for writing a letter that fits in with the
writing style of the page is to open up a newspaper and see how
letters there are phrased. For example, you might notice that a
belt-and-braces way to start a letter is:

John Smith (report, June 20) says that there is shortage of

potatoes caused by disease. Your readers might like to know
that there is a variety that they can grow which is immune . . .

Here you will notice: journalist says x. Your readers y. This

works well.

The most important things to include are your full contact

details, namely a telephone number (including mobile) and a full
postal address. In most papers, the address will not be published,
but (in the UK) it allows the paper to verify your address on the
electoral roll. And the phone number is vital if the paper wants

83
 “How to Submit a Letter to the Editor”, [Link]
help/site/editorial/letters/[Link] (accessed March 1, 2013).
 126 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

to confirm any edits or just check up on whether you are who

you say you are.

You can help the letters editor by including the date and
section of the original story to which your letter refers. If you are
reading the paper on the internet, then including a link to the
story at the bottom of your email can be a genuine help. After
all, the paper publishes hundreds upon hundreds of stories each
week, and it is quite possible that the letters editor won’t have
the faintest idea when and where something appeared.

PR companies often have much newer computer systems

than newspapers, and this can cause problems. Journalists – used
to working in software such as Adobe InCopy – do not necessar-
ily have Microsoft Word installed on their computers, and if they
do, it won’t necessarily load the latest files. Many newspapers
have custom-written software where emails to inboxes like the
letters page go directly into the editorial systems. These systems
may strip out the attachments that people send. And they don’t
necessarily show the complicated formatting people use in their
emails – only old-school, plain text.

So sending attachments is a mistake. In fact, good email eti-

quette has always been to avoid sending attachments unless they
are necessary, because opening them wastes the time of the recip-
ients. On a newspaper letters desk, if the editor has to read 500
incoming emails a day, fiddling with attachments is an unwel-
come addition to his workload.

Now let me mention the most hated email attachments of all.

They are when the sender has written a letter, printed it out,
signed it, scanned it and then emailed it to the newspaper as an
 HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY PITCH A LETTER | 127

image. They are, therefore, impossible to cut and paste from. So

the letters editor is forced to retype the whole thing.

How often should you write?

If you do get published, pause sending letters to that paper.

Papers don’t like to give the impression that they only have two
readers. Many have a rule that they won’t print you more than
once a month. Some are even stricter. The Los Angeles Times says
“we generally do not publish more than one letter from a single
person within any 90-day period”.
 Chapter 7
Persuade the Public with
Compelling Comment
Articles
A
s a PR practitioner, you’ll find that you need to write
articles quite often. It’s why many journalists have suc-
cessfully made the transition into PR – they know how
to write. But it is a skill that it is vital for practically everyone in
the industry to gain, regardless of background. After all, clients
and employers need good-quality writing all the time. As Fraser
Seitel, a leading American practitioner, points out: “The warp
and woof of public relations is still: ‘I’m a professional commu-
nicator. You hire me because I’m a better writer than you are.’
Therefore, the fundamental bedrock skill of this field is still . . .
writing.”84

Much of the need for article writing comes from two sources.
First, when specialist publications, whether online or in print,
ring asking for written commentary, which may be ghost-written
by a PR practitioner. Second, for so-called “brand journalism” or
“content marketing”, where PR people write blogs and other web
articles in order to get found in search engines or be shared on
social media. And, for those doing public affairs, there’s a third
source: comment articles in national newspapers.

84
 [Link]
-surprisingly-rare/ (accessed March 1, 2013).
 132 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

For external publications, it does not matter whether the pub-

lication wants a small box of 150 words, a blog of 350, or a fully
fledged 900-word opinion piece. The quality needs to be high.
After all, if the publication has any self-respect, it won’t want to
keep commissioning pieces from people who can’t write. Unfor-
tunately, many otherwise intelligent university graduates fail to
recognise that writing well for the media requires rare skill. It
requires practice.

Publications are normally too polite to explain that they won’t

commission from a PR flack because he can’t write well. They
know that editing another of his submissions would take all day.
Moreover, these days journalists have a pretty good idea of how
popular a particular contributor’s articles have been. They can
see by installing Google Analytics on their website what’s popular
and what’s not. And the number of comments left underneath an
article indicate if it provoked any debate.

But there is another challenge, too. Just as many press releases

have boring topics, so do many articles submitted to publica-
tions. They should never be entirely self-serving, but should raise
an important point for the sector. I came across one case where
a PR flack had written and then pitched an article to a range of
trade publications saying that readers should buy more of his
client’s products. He could not see why none of the titles would
publish it.

The expert position

All publications are looking for one attribute in everyone they

commission commentary from. They are looking for expertise.
A newspaper thinking about school choice does not want to
 PERSUADE THE PUBLIC WITH COMPELLING COMMENT ARTICLES | 133

commission “a taxpayer from Chiswick who drives a Volvo”. It

wants the leader of a teachers’ union, or the headmaster of Wel-
lington College, or a current or former Secretary of State for
Education. In other words, the authority of the person pitching
an article is vital.

Therefore, always put forward to the press someone who has

the profile of an expert. That might mean reframing their role in
the organisation, or changing who is presented to the media.
There is not necessarily much difference between being a Cam-
paign Director and being a Communications Director, but the
former is definitely more appealing to the media. Someone who
is a director is more attractive than someone who is a deputy
director – no publication wishes to admit that it has accepted the
B-team.

How to pitch the article

When you pitch a comment article, it helps if it links with an

ongoing news story. True, some comment articles can put topics
on the news agenda, rather than follow them. But that occurs less
frequently. You will need to a find an appropriate “slot” in the
publication, where experts who are not on the publication’s
payroll contribute. There is no point in pitching an article to The
Economist. They do not have guest columnists. But The Times has
a daily column, often written by an outsider, called Thunderer.

A quick note about terminology. In British newspapers the

normal term is “comment article”, while American papers call
them “Op-Eds”. An Op-Ed is sometimes mistakenly thought to
be short for an “opinion editorial”, but is actually short for
“opposite the editorial page”. An editorial in the UK could mean
 134 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

all sorts of things, but in American newspapers it has the specific

meaning of a commentary written by the editorial board, which
is not attributed to any individual author. It represents the official
position of the newspaper. In the UK, these unsigned editorials
have a different name: a “leading article”, or “leader” for short.

It is best to talk with the publication, either by phone or email,

before writing the article. The commissioning editor (who could
have any number of actual job titles, normally the Comment
Editor or the Op-Ed Editor for a newspaper) will be able to give
you some pointers about the angle that will appeal to her readers.
She may suggest that you include a reference to something else
that has appeared recently in the publication. And she may just
say that the topic is not relevant at the moment, but would be
more interesting when there is a news hook later in the year.

She may try to get some idea of your credentials and whether
you can write. It helps hugely if you have a back catalogue of
articles already published, which you can refer to. If appropriate,
you could offer to email a couple of examples.

Some people think that they should write the article first, and
then pitch it to a paper. Outside of the United States, where the
practice is commonplace and comment editors receive 100 unso-
licited articles a day, this is a mistake. It won’t be what the pub-
lication wants to publish.

For newspapers, a commissioning editor might suggest that

you write it and submit it “on spec”. What that means is that they
aren’t committing to print it. Perhaps they don’t necessarily think
that you will write a good enough piece, but they would like to
use it if they can.
 PERSUADE THE PUBLIC WITH COMPELLING COMMENT ARTICLES | 135

The alternative is that they might “commission” it, which

means that they are basically agreeing to pay for it. In fact,
the publication will assume that you, unlike a journalist, are
being paid by your employer to write the piece and you should
assume that you won’t actually get a fee. But the terms, if used,
can still give you some idea of how keen the paper is to use your
work.

By seeking a commissioning editor’s opinion in advance, not

only will the article be better tailored to the publication, but the
commissioning editor will feel some affinity with the article and
be more likely to publish it. Moreover, you will be in a stronger
position with colleagues within either your company (if you work
in-house) or with your client (if you’re in an agency). They may
want you to write something that is tediously boring, because they
are not used to dealing with the media. But if you can say that you
spoke to the editor and she said that it needed to cover such and
such, it is more difficult for people to argue with you.

When to pitch a comment article

There is no specific number of days in advance that you must

pitch a comment article to a newspaper, but if you know that
something is going to be in the news in advance, then suggest it
to the paper up to a couple of weeks ahead. If you pitch it the
day before you want it in print, you’ll probably find you are too
late, or that the day you have in mind is full with regular
columnists.

However, if you are trying to write based on breaking news,

pitching the day before publication is fine. But do it as early as
possible, before 9:30am. Email is a fine way to pitch.
 136 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

For a magazine, you will need to get an idea of how their

deadlines work. Asking a journalist there is perfectly OK. If they
are a weekly, it may be that they put the title “to bed” on a
Tuesday, and each Wednesday start working on the next issue.
So a Wednesday is an ideal day to pitch.

When a publication approaches you

A publication may well approach you or your client if you have

a reputation as an industry leader, or if they have found examples
of your blogging or other brand journalism when doing an inter-
net search of a subject.

Let’s say the publication is interested in having you write 800

words on the merits of flying cut flowers from Kenya to London,
despite carbon emissions. On the phone you need to reassure the
editor who’s rung that you know the subject in detail. I would
mention how I went out to see farmers, and visited the good-
quality houses built by the companies growing the flowers, and
I’d seen the school that had been purpose built for their children.
And I’d say that the opponents of this trade want to steal this
better lifestyle from these families and sentence them to poverty.

If you could tackle the article in several ways, ask: “Do you
have an angle in mind?” The editor will then explain what he’s
hoping for. You then more-or-less repeat it back to her, and, if
your ideas are remarkably similar to her conception of the piece,
she will then commission you.

You should ask how many words she is after, and when she
will need it by. And if the title is particularly high end, it is a good
idea to drop in that you’ve previously written for The Times (or
 PERSUADE THE PUBLIC WITH COMPELLING COMMENT ARTICLES | 137

wherever), as it will help to reassure the commissioning editor

that you are up to the job.

The most important thing of all is that deadlines aren’t like

deadlines in many other industries. They count. If you promise
a piece by 3pm and deliver at 5:30pm, you won’t get commis-
sioned again.

Tricks for writing newspaper-quality articles

I’m going to cover some of the techniques of writing good arti-

cles. They should not only improve how you write, but also make
the writing process quicker.

A good comment article has to grab people’s attention right

at the start. Here are some good beginnings:

There’s nothing like a great government-sponsored gravy train

to make onlookers jealous. – Titania Touché, The Grocer85

So Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy agree – there is a

problem in the Eurozone, apparently, and something needs to
be done about it. But as to what that should be, forget it. –
Allister Heath, CityAM86

85
 “Titania takes on Pointless Portas Pilots and Citrus calamity”, in The Grocer,
[Link]
-citrus-calamity/[Link] (accessed March 1, 2013).
86
 Allister Health, [Link]
politicians-fiddle-while-rome-burns (accessed October 22, 2011).
 138 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Whatever happened to the mighty Australian Labor Party?

Just three years ago, Kevin Rudd’s federal Labor government
was enjoying an extended honeymoon. Labor held power in
every state and territory. Yet .  .  . – Nick Dyrenfurth, The
Australian87

The last of these three examples is the easiest to copy – the

writer asks a question. Questions work because you are asking
the reader their opinion (even though it is a mere piece of rheto-
ric). This makes you sound interested in the reader, and therefore
he becomes interested in your article.
Journalists have a particular dislike of excessively bubbly copy,
which they always add to their mental list of bad things the PR
industry is responsible for. Too much PR material starts with
phrases like: “When it comes to [insert topic]” or “Whether it’s the
x or y, you need . . .” before turning into a fully fledged sales pitch.
Almost as important as a strong beginning is a good ending,
which should land a punch. There is nothing worse than an
article that fizzles out, leaving the reader feeling that the writer
didn’t finish it. The ending should make sure readers leave
understanding the urgency of what you are saying and maybe
calling them to action.
Here are some good examples:

In the meantime, the vulnerable will continue to suffer at the

hands of the very service that is supposed to help them. –
Simon Heffer, Daily Mail88
87
 [Link]
-back-to-the-workers/story-e6frgd0x-1226173497722 (accessed October 22, 2011).
88
 [Link]
-[Link] (accessed March 8, 2013).
 PERSUADE THE PUBLIC WITH COMPELLING COMMENT ARTICLES | 139

I was going to suggest that it might help to listen to [Canadian

pianist Glenn] Gould after taking some of his beloved Valium
– but, actually, I’ve just tried that experiment and, no, it doesn’t
help. – Damian Thompson, The Spectator89 (the dash, followed
by “but actually”, works superbly)

David Cameron may get his way next week, but the price at
next year’s European elections could be bloody. – Norman
Tebbit, The Daily Telegraph90

The content of an article

Just like a press release, a comment article needs to have some

conflict. It may be, for example, you are recommending some
improvement against the status quo. But sometimes people
overdo the conflict and allow the tone to go wrong. Anger is OK
occasionally, but if the tone is too outraged (e.g. it uses phrases
like “this is disgraceful”) the readers will recoil. In fact, comment-
writing is like cooking. If you use too much heat, the cake will
burn on the outside, but be half-baked inside.

It is much better to keep an article feeling a bit more relaxed

– indeed, jollier in tone – than come across as a raving nutter.
And if you get the opportunity to gently poke fun, you’ll capti-
vate the readers.

What is essential is that your articles are not wooly and are
explicit in what they are arguing. When Ernest Hemmingway –
one of the greatest fiction writers of the 20th century – was a
89
 Damian Thompson, The Spectator, [Link]
6649333/pillpopping-pianist/ (accessed March 1, 2013).
90
 [Link]
[Link] (accessed
March 8, 2013).
 140 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

reporter at the Kansas City Star, he was given a sheet of tips for
writing well. This included the advice that he should “Use vigor-
ous English”. David Garfinkel,91 former San Francisco Bureau
Chief of McGraw-Hill World News, defines this as follows: “It’s
muscular, forceful. Vigorous English comes from passion, focus
and intention.”

Newspaper grammar

Go easy on the adjectives – and perhaps eliminate them entirely.

PR people love them, but if overused they make text sound less
convincing.

No column should contain a semi-colon – ever. Newspapers

are designed to be read at speed and semi-colons create unneces-
sarily long sentences. Use a full stop and a start afresh. As the
poet Richard Hugo put it: “Semi-colons indicate relationships
that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are
ugly.”92

Don’t split an infinitive. There is nothing in the laws of

grammar that says that this is wrong and to routinely split them
is perfectly correct English. Indeed, it is sometime preferable, as
it helps the clarity and beat of the sentence. However, like split-
ting the atom, it upsets campaigners. H.W. Fowler, the great
authority on the English language, mocked the anti-split infini-
tive brigade, but the bogus rule holds sway.

91
 [Link]
_blog/2005/03/four_copywritin.html (accessed March 1, 2013).
92
 John Henley, “The end of the line?” in The Guardian, [Link]
.[Link]/world/2008/apr/04/[Link] (accessed March 2, 2013).
 PERSUADE THE PUBLIC WITH COMPELLING COMMENT ARTICLES | 141

Fake rules taught at school about the supposed wrongness of

prepositions at the end of sentences, or of the evil of sentences
beginning with “and” and “but”, can be ignored. As Winston
Churchill, who worked as a journalist before a higher calling,
wrote: “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will
not put.”

Newspapers prefer an active, rather than passive, voice. In the

active voice, the thing in charge of doing stuff is the subject. For
example: “The journalist turned on the computer.” The passive
would be “The computer was turned on by the journalist.” Sud-
denly, eight words are used instead of six. The passive also
sounds more boring.

Proofreading

Once you’re written your piece, it helps to print it out in double-

spaced 14pt Times New Roman text and slowly read it back to
yourself – preferably aloud. Printing off a hard copy is routinely
done by journalists, who can find it is easier to see problems on
paper than on a screen.

This will not only help you spot typos and missing words, but
also ensure that the text flows well. And if you can get a colleague
to read it, too, that’s even better. You may also spot stylistic prob-
lems, for example the overuse of the same word several times in
a paragraph. If “employee” keeps being used, why not change
one reference to “worker”? It makes for a less repetitive read.

Finally, make sure your facts are correct. It is easy to “remem-

ber” things that are almost correct, but not quite. No one at the
publication will necessarily fact-check your article, as the days of
 142 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

hundreds of sub-editors and copy editors is over. Publications

will assume that you know what you are talking about. And if
the editor has to later print a letter correcting your piece, not only
are you going to look silly, but you are also less likely to be used
in future.

The most important word in the

English language

How do you keep readers interested? One way is to make them

each feel as though the article was written for them – and them
alone. The simple use of the word “you” littered throughout the
piece will make it seem more relevant. But the “you” should
always be singular – it doesn’t work as well if you start referring
to “you readers”.

Asking the readers a rhetorical question or two is also very

effective. It will encourage comments to appear under online
articles if the facility is available and, again, will keep interest.

The Flesch–Kincaid reading ease test

Before you submit an article to a publication, a useful check is to

run it through the Flesch–Kincaid reading ease test. You feed
your article into a mathematical analysis on your computer, and
the result it gives will indicate how easy your article is to read.
The higher the score, the better. The test is actually built into
Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker, although it has
to be turned on in the program’s preferences. I find it quicker and
easier to paste my copy into one of the websites that offer Flesch–
Kincaid reading ease tests.
 PERSUADE THE PUBLIC WITH COMPELLING COMMENT ARTICLES | 143

A study looking at popular magazines in America found

that Reader’s Digest on average scores 65 out of 100 on this test
and Time magazine scores 52. I checked an article in The Econo-
mist, and found 42.

So what do those figures mean?

A score of 90–100 means that an article is easily understood

by an average 11-year old. 60–70 means it is easily understood
by a 13–15-year old school pupil. And below 30 means it is best
understood by a university graduate.

If you’re writing in a quality newspaper, you ought to always

get a score of 40 or higher.

The Flesch–Kincaid reading ease test can be an effective way

for PR teams to persuade others in their organisations to revise
their articles. It is, after all, not a subjective view about the merits
of an article, but an objective one.

Promoting the article

Once a comment article has been published, you may want to

promote it yourself as widely as possible – and the publication
will love you for doing so. The more hits the online version of
the piece receives, and the more comments, the better. It will
indicate to the publication that your work attracts the interest of
the readers and that you are worth using again in the future.

Make sure you email it to whatever relevant email lists you

or your organisation control – and share it on social networks
such as Twitter. Your existing customers or supporters will be
 144 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

reassured by seeing you appear in a reputable publication: it acts

as one of those third-party endorsements that are so valuable in
public relations.

Dealing with rejection

You probably won’t get much feedback from a publication – just

a yes or no. Plenty of editors – if they weren’t as polite – would
love to use phrases such as one written by Hunter S. Thompson,
who, working at Rolling Stone, sent a rejection letter93 saying:

You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate s**t! Don’t ever

send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again.

In fact, Thompson himself used an ingenious method of learn-

ing to write well: he placed his typewriter next to Ernest Hem-
mingway novels and retyped those books. And you may find that
by sitting with a comment article by a major pundit and trying
to see how she structured it, you will get some ideas on how to
do it well.

As always, you can ask an editor: “For future reference, how

could I improve this?” and if you’re lucky, you’ll get some con-
structive advice.

The problem with American newspaper columns

One reason why American city newspapers are losing readership

to UK newspapers and home-grown websites is that they publish
93
 [Link]
-letter_n_928491.html (accessed March 1, 2013).
 PERSUADE THE PUBLIC WITH COMPELLING COMMENT ARTICLES | 145

too many dull columns. Tedious essays displace the lively banter
that British, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian newspapers
thrive on. I asked the boss of one of the most popular American
news websites why this was (I had a copy of The Washington Post
in my hand at the time) and he said that the journalists “have
given up”. Most of these papers, before the internet, were effec-
tively local monopolies, and they believed that their authority
came from being as formal and learned as possible. The Brits,
conversely, have always had a healthy selection of national news-
papers, fighting daily at the newsstand for custom.

Even William Dean Singleton (no relation), whose MediaNews

firm is the fourth largest newspaper company in the United
States, admits that American newspapers are “boring”: “We’ve
got to make them much more compelling than they are today. As
an industry, for the last 30 years, we’ve edited newspapers for
each other and to win awards so we could pat each other on the
back.”94

It’s a point echoed by Matthew Engel, writing in The Guardian

in 2003:95 “Since Watergate, the [Washington] Post has acquired a
virtual monopoly over the Washington newspaper market, grown
fat and – frankly – journalistically flabby. Its op-ed page is notable
for its turgid prose.”

The problem these stuffy American newspapers cause is

that many of the people doing media relations for global
94
 Katharine Seelye, New York Times, [Link]
business/media/[Link] (accessed March 1, 2013).
95
 Matthew Engel, “Bushwhacked”, January 13, 2003, [Link]
.[Link]/media/2003/jan/13/[Link]
(accessed March 1, 2013).
 146 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

organisations have learned media relations from America. Several

British PR practitioners have told me of the difficulties they face
when American clients send them pre-written material to place,
which is unsuitable for the British press.

But the American media is changing rapidly – and becoming

more British. The Daily Mail’s website has, in the words of the
BBC, “stormed” the American news market,96 while new Ameri-
can news sites from The Huffington Post to The Daily Caller have
grabbed market share. The desire in the United States for interest-
ingly presented comment is hardly surprising: America’s ratings-
driven television news programmes have always been livelier
than heavily regulated British ones.

96
 BBC News, “How the Daily Mail stormed the US”, [Link]
news/magazine-16746785 (accessed March 1, 2013).
 Chapter 8
The Secrets of Effective
Television and Radio
Appearances
A
ppearing on television and radio is one of the most
effective ways of communicating with a mass audience.
The BBC’s flagship Today programme gets 6.94 million
listeners a week, while its namesake in the United States, NBC’s
Today show, gets around five million TV viewers.97

The emergence of 24-hour news channels, plus the enduring

popularity of talk radio, means that broadcasters are in constant
need of knowledgeable experts to appear as guests. But, I must
say, potential guests do need to have a credible claim of expertise.
The head of operations at a train company is an expert in trans-
port. A published author, who has written a history of the America
Civil War, is a history expert. And the head of an anti-poverty
pressure group is plausible to talk about foreign aid. But, after
the success of television programmes such as The Apprentice and
Dragons’ Den, lots of self-employed people decided that they
were experts in entrepreneurship and pitched themselves around
the media. It didn’t work, because – unlike Donald Trump and
Lord Sugar – they didn’t appear to news organisations as having
any particular expert status.

97
 [Link]
-brings-higher-ratings-to-good-morning-america/ (accessed March 5, 2013).
 150 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Let’s say you work for a company that offers pensions to the
public. You want to secure more broadcast appearances by your
CEO. The simple, first task is to produce a one-sided “expert
sheet”. You get a box of nice paper and put the word “Expert” in
big letters across the top. Underneath you put the CEO’s name
and position, and a selection of half a dozen bullet points about
the things he is able to speak on – for example, how plans for
pension regulation will strangle the industry. Then, include a
paragraph on the CEO’s current role and background – for
example, you could mention that he was an advisor to a govern-
ment commission on the future of old age. This is where you are
selling him as a genuine expert. Somewhere on the page a good
photograph should be included, so that television programmes
know that he doesn’t look weird. At the bottom of the page,
include contact details through which programmes can book him.

This simple and cheap technique was effective enough to get

me interviewed by BBC Two’s Newsnight and Radio 4’s Today
programme the first time I used it.

Appearing on television

You will either appear in the same studio as the presenter or, if
the main studio is too far away, in a remote studio. If you are
with the presenter, you should always look at him (or the other
guest). The cameras should be completely ignored. The camera-
men will do their own work, but if you stare at the camera, you
will look unnatural.

However, if you are in a remote studio, different rules apply.

There, you look straight at the camera. There is a temptation that
many people fall into. They look at the screen somewhere above
 THE SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE TELEVISION AND RADIO APPEARANCES | 151

or to the side of the camera, which displays how they look on

television. The viewer sees them moving their eyes to look off
screen. The result is that the interviewee appears shifty and
untrustworthy. I know someone who fell into this trap while on
prime-time British television. He was mightily upset about it,
because, after the interview, people kept pointing it out to him.
So never look anywhere other than the camera lens.

It is best to lean very slightly forward, rather than slouch back,

as this will make you look more engaged. When someone else is
speaking, turn your head slightly to one side, to indicate that you
are listening. And, unless you are appearing to defend a company
which has just killed a dozen people, remember to smile. It makes
you look friendly and like a decent person. Moreover, it improves
the sound of your voice.

This may sound obvious, but television is a visual medium.

You should therefore play up to it. If another guest is saying
something you disagree with, shake your head. Or raise your
hand in front of your chest and wave it dismissively. Or grin,
knowingly. The programme’s crew will almost always change
camera in response, moving from your opponent to you.

Although we live in an increasingly informal world, it is

almost always correct to dress smartly for television. For women,
that might mean a business suit in a solid colour. For men, it
means a jacket and tie. Occasionally, I have been on television –
particularly on a Sunday – where the programme has specifically
wanted to avoid tie-wearing. But the tie will help to make you
look thinner (if that’s an issue) and also give you more authority.
I once did a BBC Breakfast segment incredibly early in the morning,
and the other guest turned up in a stained T-shirt that presumably
 152 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

he’d been sleeping in. “What? I didn’t know this was television!”
he said. It helped me appear the better informed.

If you don’t always dress smartly in the office, for example

during the hottest part of the summer, it is worth keeping a spare
set of clothes in a cupboard somewhere. Finely striped patterns
should be avoided on clothing. These can cause “interline twitter”,
which is an annoying flickering, on some televisions.

Depending on the programme and the broadcaster, you may

be offered make-up. Always accept this, as it will make you look
healthier under the studio lights. Moreover, if you are – how can
I say this delicately? – someone plagued by spots or broken capil-
laries, the make-up will probably disguise all this. Most impor-
tantly, it will remove any sweaty shine that might exist on your
face. Infamously, Richard Nixon was said to have lost to John F.
Kennedy during the 1960 US presidential election as a result of
a sweaty face during a televised debate. If the programme does
not offer make-up, go into the studio’s lavatory and check that
you look OK in the mirror. A quick wash of the face may be just
what you need.

Finally, consider that you could be being recorded even when

you don’t think you are. In 2010, Gordon Brown, then the British
Prime Minister, still had a live wireless microphone attached to
his suit when he described a voter he had just met on the cam-
paign trail. She was, he said, a “bigoted woman” and his conver-
sation with her had been a “disaster”.98 The gaffe dominated the
news for days and became a defining episode of the election.

98
 How Gordon Brown “bigot” jibe row unfolded, [Link]
uk_politics/election_2010/[Link] (accessed March 6, 2013).
 THE SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE TELEVISION AND RADIO APPEARANCES | 153

Appearing on radio

Radio is easier than TV, because you can have a sheet of paper
in front of you while you speak. I never have more than 10 words
written down, and typically include a few killer figures that I
don’t want to forget. It would be a mistake to have a written-
down speech as reading from it would make you seem wooden.

You will quite often be given much longer to speak on radio

than on television. There is a different level of preparation
required for a three-minute interview than for an hour-long pro-
gramme. Radio phone-ins, where normal (and even abnormal)
members of the public can ask you a question or dispute what
you are saying, require a good debating style. Interviewees who
were debaters while at university will enjoy this. Others, who are
not used to debating, would benefit from first doing a mock
interview, where they take part in a simulated – and deliberately
difficult – interview.

As with television, I always prefer to be in the same studio as

the presenter. You can catch his eye, and before the programme
you can build up some personal rapport. However, I always
avoid, where possible, discussing the topic of debate with another
guest (assuming they are there to give an opposing view). It’s
much better to keep the adrenaline stored up for the debate itself,
and there’s no point giving out your best lines in advance.

Major broadcasters will treat you fairly. But be careful of tem-

porary community radio stations and internet programmes – the
interviewer may just want to have a go at you. You need to have
a pretty good idea of their biases and proposed line of question-
ing before agreeing to appear.
 154 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Your own radio studio

Sometimes a radio station will be willing to do an interview, not

in their own studios, but down the telephone with you. This is
not ideal for them, because the sound quality of an ordinary,
analogue telephone call is actually quite poor. You and I don’t
notice it normally, but when the interview is played on listeners’
expensive hi-fi sound systems at home, it sounds awful.

Therefore, if you are putting forward staff to appear on radio

regularly, and travelling to broadcasters becomes a pain, it can
make sense to create your own soundproofed radio studio. This
requires a small room, big enough for a desk and chair. Instead
of a normal phone line, you get your telecoms company to install
a digital phone connection, called an ISDN line, plus some equip-
ment called an ISDN Reporter’s Box. This squeezes really high-
quality sound down the ISDN line. There are suppliers of these
systems who will advise you on exactly what you need. Glen-
sound Electronics supplies the BBC and has sold over 8,000 units.
And it is worth having a chat with a studio technician when you
are next at a major broadcaster, as they will be able to explain
their preferences.

For pre-recorded programmes, internet-based phone calls can

be used as an alternative. These occur both in their conventional
form of “Voice over IP” (IP being internet protocol), which nor-
mally means Skype, and in a specific broadcast standard called
Audio Contribution over IP,99 which is gaining momentum.

99
 BBC Research White Paper, “Standardising Audio Contribution over IP
Communications”, [Link]
[Link] (accessed March 6, 2013).
 THE SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE TELEVISION AND RADIO APPEARANCES | 155

However, normal, bog-standard internet connections are gener-

ally considered to be too unreliable at present to be used safely
for live broadcasts. While Audio Contribution over IP is probably
the future due to the way it deals with the vagaries of internet
traffic, ISDN is a standard that works reliably today.

The pre-record

Sometimes television and radio will want to interview you, on

your own, to include as part of their “package”. This is a short
video that is played during the programme to introduce the topic
to the viewers at home. A crew may be sent to your premises to
do this sort of recording. Normally, the questions the interviewer
asks you will not be included when clips from the interview are
broadcast, but ask if this is the case before you start answering.

If the questions won’t be used, then you need to answer in

such a way that the topic is clear from your answer. Let’s say you
are asked: “Is the opening of your new factory a vindication of
the government’s economic policies?” You should never answer
with: “Yes, very much so.” That would be unusable on its own.
You should answer: “The opening of our new factory shows . . .”

Pre-recorded interviews do normally allow you to fluff your

lines and then answer a question a second time. Just say “Sorry,
can I do that again?” The crew will take care of it in the editing
process. You would have to be very unlucky, or hated, or a
Cabinet minister, for the unedited interview to be broadcast.
But if you are concerned about being stitched up, insist on a
live interview. As Herb Schmertz, a Vice-President at Mobil Oil,
wrote in 1986: “A growing number of executives refuse to be
 156 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

interviewed at all, unless the interview is live. That way, ‘crea-

tive’ editing cannot distort what they say.”100

Don’t be a robot

In a notorious pre-recorded interview with ITV’s Damon Green,

Ed Miliband, leader of the UK’s Labour Party, answered every
question he was asked with exactly the same set of soundbites.101
Six times he said the same thing, making a recording which the
interviewer described as “so absurd”. It went viral on YouTube.
According to Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a presenter on Channel
Four News:102

Somebody in political PR training school obviously told [politi-

cians that if] you want to make sure the media only use what you
want them to then only say one thing.
Ed Miliband’s crime was to deploy the technique to such a
perfected degree that he looked like a robot.

Effective guests are quotable and they do ensure that their

main points are incorporated, but it is important to be human.

Start off small

You may not always have the luxury of doing this, but I would
also suggest putting a new talking head on a programme with

100
 Herb Schmertz, Goodbye to the Low Profile: Art of Creative Confrontation (London:
Mercury Books, 1986), p. 89.
101
 [Link]
-shame-strike-soundbites (accessed March 5, 2013).
102
 [Link] (accessed March 5,
2013).
 THE SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE TELEVISION AND RADIO APPEARANCES | 157

low audience figures. This will be less stressful than a prime-time

show, and if mistakes are made at least they did not happen on
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I think my first
TV appearance was on a current affairs programme produced
by a local ITV station called Grampian. It was broadcast only in
central and northern Scotland, at half past midnight. Inexplica-
bly, my boss did not want to take the seven-hour train journey
from London to Aberdeen to appear in it, but I was happy for
the experience – even if next to nobody watched it. The practice
was invaluable for when I later appeared on highly rated shows
such as Newsnight and Ten O’Clock Live.

Now, there is always the possibility that a terrible perform-

ance on a low-visibility programme will then be retransmitted in
a more popular programme. But, generally, programmes with
low ratings are a good way to train for the prime time.

Preparation

Never do a broadcast interview without preparation. There will

be occasions when the right decision is to turn down an interview
because it is about a topic that you haven’t thought about for a
couple of years and you don’t have sufficient time to read up on
the subject, or to get the latest data.

A good plan is to have three points, one of which is your key

one. Don’t give them all in your reply to the first question, but
incorporate them into your answers as the interview progresses.

The snowball

If a guest is an effective and interesting voice in the media, there

will be a snowball effect. That is to say, if BBC Breakfast rates his
 158 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

appearance, he will get put down in a programme researcher’s

contacts list and get invited repeatedly.

Broadcasters never seem to have a centralised database of

talking heads. I did ask various people at the BBC, but there is
no such thing. However, there have been occasions when I have
appeared on one show and then another show contacted the first
for my details.

Broadcasters often pick up on news stories that have appeared

in the newspapers or on newswires (that is to say, the ones that
are paid for by media organisations, not wires that send out PR
spam). So if you have appeared in a morning newspaper, it is
quite possible that a researcher on a programme you had not
thought about will contact you, asking if you will appear as a
guest. “For as long as anyone can remember”, says David Hend-
erson, a former CBS News correspondent, “it has often been the
habit of television news to follow or react to major stories that
first appeared in newspapers. A big story appears on the front
page of a morning paper, and throughout the day and into the
evening, it’s recycled by television news.”103

In fact, the relationship works both ways. A major interview

on the BBC’s Today programme may get picked up by newspa-
pers – especially by their websites.

103
 David Henderson, Making News (Nebraska: iUniverse, 2006), p. 19.
 Chapter 9
How to Choose an
Agency or Consultant
I
f you work in-house as a PR practitioner, you may at some
point want to hire a PR agency or freelance consultant to help
you. Many firms prefer to use agencies or consultants, rather
than manage a mushrooming in-house team. This is for three
reasons. First, it gives them more flexibility. They can hire and
fire a third party more easily than staff, and they can speedily
increase or decrease the amount of PR support they are buying.
For example, a company which hosts a yearly conference every
November may need a lot of PR resources in the autumn, but
much less in January. Use of an agency or independent consultant
allows a firm like that to cope with a seasonal increase in media
interest.

The second advantage of using agencies or independent con-

sultants is that they enable companies to bring in specialist skills
– such as crisis communications and government relations – that
may only be needed, in a massive way, once a decade. Practition-
ers with a lifetime use of these skills might be prohibitively
expensive to employ in-house.

Thirdly, agencies and independent consultants bring an extra

source of ideas. After all, it’s easy to become wedded to an
employer’s normal way of working. External staff will probably
 162 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

have worked on a range of clients and therefore bring a wide

range of perspectives.

It is this third reason – an extra source of ideas – that most

commonly causes an agency or consultant to be hired, and nor-
mally on retainer. They bring an injection of creativity. This can
work so well that some in-house teams have outsourced the
bulk of their media relations, becoming commissioners of agency
work, while doing high-end counsel to executives themselves.
This was made most apparent to me when I went to provide
media-relations training to the PR team at one of the UK’s largest
law firms. “We don’t actually deal with the media ourselves”, the
head of PR said. “But we want you to teach us more about media
relations, so we know if our four agencies are telling us the truth
or just stringing us along.”

How to select an agency

I hate to say the obvious, but if you want to hire an agency on a

big retainer, why not try them out on a project first? An agency
may seem fantastic when its boss comes and presents an intricate
PowerPoint presentation, full of diagrams containing Maslow’s
“hierarchy of needs” and Grunig’s “two-way symmetrical public
relations”. But an impressive presentation does not prove that
you will work together well. It is something that will only become
apparent if you give them a trial before contracting with them
long-term.

One company told me that it had invited three firms to pitch

for a retainer. All of them had a background in the relevant sector.
Two of the companies pitching displayed PowerPoint shows that
 HOW TO CHOOSE AN AGENCY OR CONSULTANT | 163

expressed no knowledge of the client. The third presented Pow-

erPoint slides about the client. This third agency, unsurprisingly,
was the one which won the work. Unfortunately, the implemen-
tation was passed to an inexperienced staff member and the firm
did a lousy job. It failed to provide any measurable benefit and
passed off as press coverage articles that appeared on websites
where PR practitioners can upload whatever they wish. The
agency, which is not a member of a trade association, was good
at pitching, but appalling at doing.

Audit your communications first

There are many reasons why clients and agencies separate, but a
common reason why some companies keep changing agencies is
that they are not procuring them correctly. It is almost always
worth commissioning an external audit of your communications
before contacting potential agencies. This should be from an
independent consultant with no plans to tender for your agency
contract.

A communications audit will benchmark your current results

against both your direct competitors and also companies of the
same size as yours in other, but related, sectors. This will give
you a realistic view of the results an agency can achieve – and
highlight issues around your public relations that you may not
have considered. The knowledge is advantageous because during
the procurement process you will invariably find agencies that
are foolishly optimistic about what they can achieve. So you will
be in a better position to choose wisely and perhaps save yourself
a messy and time-consuming divorce.
 164 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

Why trade association membership matters

If you’re in the UK, make sure the agency is a member of the

Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). There are
similar, affiliated organisations around the world. The PRCA,
which was founded in 1969, ensures proper standards are fol-
lowed and gives you access to an independent complaints pro-
cedure. It also forbids its members from badmouthing any former
clients – something that an old, finished contract is unlikely to
ensure as effectively.

Almost all of the good agencies opt to join the PRCA, which
includes firms of all sizes and specialisms. Partly this is because
the PRCA is a major supplier of training to agencies. It gives
discounts to members, so those agencies that are investing in
their staff’s skills almost invariably join the organisation. Moreo-
ver, agencies who, instead of wanting to make a quick buck, are
thinking longer term about raising standards in the industry, join
the PRCA so they can contribute to the sector’s thinking.

You can ask the PRCA to match you with an appropriate

agency, using its Find a PR Agency service. The association will
shortlist agencies who have an appropriate size and expertise for
your work. All the agencies that are recommended have passed
a certification called the Communications Management Standard
and have been audited within the past couple of years. What
does this mean? Well, the certification is almost a hybrid of ISO
9001 and Investors in People. It indicates that a company is well
run and has effective systems in place.

In the United States, the Council of PR Firms represents agen-

cies which include “global companies and small boutiques that
 HOW TO CHOOSE AN AGENCY OR CONSULTANT | 165

provide expertise to Fortune 500 companies all the way down to

Main Street mom and pops”.104 You should also check out the
influential trade newsletter O’Dwyer’s, founded by a former
Chicago Tribune reporter in 1968, which runs a Find The Right PR
Agency set of listings on its website.

Both the PRCA and the Council of PR Firms are members of

the International Communications Consultancy Organisation
(ICCO). This global body has a website ([Link]) that
lists trade bodies in many countries. Through the ICCO, the
Communications Management Standard is becoming adopted in
many countries – in 17 as I type this – and looks set to become a
global standard.

Other considerations

First, check whether the agency has a profile within the industry.
An agency which is getting coverage in Communicate, CorpComms
or O’Dwyer’s is investing time in promoting its reputation – and
is less likely to be stuck in a rut. Always be keen to give the
agency credit for its efforts, and, if the work is sizeable, make
sure they are associated with your company through a news
story in the trade press saying that you have awarded them the
contract. Suggest that they enter their work for you as an entry
for one of the industry awards. This will ensure that they sweat
blood to do a good job on your account, as their reputation is on
the line as much as yours.

Second, once you have made a shortlist, ask to see the results
of an agency’s work. If your aim is to get into GQ magazine, what

104
 [Link]
 166 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

coverage for similar companies have they managed to secure

there? Most agencies will freely make available a list of their
clients. If they specialise in public affairs (government relations),
it is considered bad form not to disclose their clients. Indeed, it
is a requirement of PRCA membership that they name their
clients on the association’s public affairs register.

Third, avoid those small agencies where the PR is just a bolt-

on to other marketing services. In practice, this can mean that
the proprietor is actually an expert in desktop publishing, logo
design or internet marketing but does a bit of PR on the side. You
wouldn’t hire a decorator to install a new gas boiler in your
home, after all, so why hire a logo designer to do PR? They may
not realise that public relations needs skills and knowledge, but
need them it does. A small agency that will be good at PR is one
that specialises in it.

Fourth, take up references. There are some unethical agencies

(outside of the PRCA or similar bodies around the world) who
have no happy clients at all. But they are surprisingly convincing
when signing up new ones, promising vast coverage. Usually,
they keep their clients for a few months, before being sacked for
non-delivery.

Ethics are important in PR, because they are the right thing
to follow and because they deliver better results. According to
Tom Watson, a professor of public relations at the University of
Bournemouth: “Every year, a few students coming back from
placements with stories of how their PR employers had misled
clients, asked them to write fake customer reviews on websites,
switched account teams after winning pitches, charge high for
 HOW TO CHOOSE AN AGENCY OR CONSULTANT | 167

untrained internship staff and falsified evaluation data.” He says

that “most of the miscreants are in the 80 per cent plus of UK PR
practitioners who are not members of CIPR [Chartered Institute
of Public Relations] or PRCA”.105

The staff

You will want to vet the individuals who will personally be

working on your account – just as you would if you were hiring
them to be a PR practitioner on your firm’s payroll. Find out how
long the staff seem to stay at the agency: there is nothing more
disruptive, as a client, than having the people working on your
PR change continually. I have seen instances of agencies at the less
reputable end of the industry with “account managers” who are,
in fact, unpaid, temporary interns with no previous experience.

In fact, having unpaid interns in an agency is increasingly

seen as beyond the pale, after television and newspaper exposés.
The Public Relations Consultants Association and PRWeek in the
UK have campaigned against the practice of using unpaid staff
for genuine work. As Francis Ingham, Director General of the
PRCA says: “The short-term benefits of free labour are greatly
outweighed by the way that this practice devalues our expertise
and reputation. It is unfair to ask young people to work for free,
just so that in the short term organisations can benefit financially.
Public relations professionals provide valuable counsel and
should be prepared to pay those who contribute accordingly. I

105
 “Does PR need to clean up its act?” in PRMoment, January 10, 2013, http://
[Link]/1249/[Link] (accessed
February 24, 2013).
 168 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

believe passionately that we can set an example to other indus-

tries on how our young workforce should be treated.”106

The independent consultant

Independent consultants are typically experienced practitioners

who have previously worked in agencies or the media, who bring
a premium and personal service to their clients. They may prefer
the excitement of helping clients to the bureaucracy that inevita-
bly comes from leading a large agency, with all the staffing and
marketing hassles that such posts entail.

There are two main types of independent consultant. The first

are those that act as contractors who deliver normal PR services,
including writing press releases and getting coverage. They bring
some external creativity into what you might be doing in-house
and, for smaller companies, act as an outsourced press office. You
can spot the good ones from professional body membership:
they are typically members of the Chartered Institute of Public
Relations.

The second are the higher-end strategists, who will help for-
mulate and evaluate your PR efforts, provide crisis communica-
tions help, train your in-house team and ensure that you’re
outperforming your competitors. Strategists can also help you
run your procurement process for hiring an agency, as they will
have a good idea of which agencies are performing well and will
know what questions to ask and what commitments should be

106
 PRCA Intern Guidelines, [Link]
Intern%[Link] (accessed March 1, 2013).
 HOW TO CHOOSE AN AGENCY OR CONSULTANT | 169

requested. And they will have an encyclopaedic knowledge of

what stakeholders – including the media – will find of interest.

Independent consultants tend to consider carefully which

clients they take on, as they don’t have to meet their sharehold-
ers’ growth targets. Rather, they want clients with whom they’re
going to have a good relationship.

Qualifications for PR practitioners

Anyone can call him or herself a PR practitioner. As Stephen

Waddington, a leading figure in the industry, says: “There is little
that separates public relations practitioners from car salesmen
and women, estate agents, journalists or lap dancers. All are
respectable occupations to varying degrees but none require a
professional qualification or any form of formal training to
operate.”107 Therefore, it is worth asking a prospective agency
about their staff’s credentials and what commitment they have
made to the professional development of their staff. Effective
agencies host a regular programme of training workshops for
their staff with external speakers or allocate each staff member a
training budget.

Mostly, PR practitioners are university graduates – although,

since 2011, there has been a government-backed apprenticeship
scheme in the UK. Graduates have degrees in a variety of subjects
– and it is worth remembering that a good, creative agency will
have staff with a wide range of backgrounds.

107
 [Link]
-for-chartered-qualification/ (accessed March 6, 2013).
 170 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

How to pay for PR services

How you pay for public relations affects how well an agency (or
consultant) performs – whether they “sweatshop” the work, or
do a proper job. Public relations is – in the definition I prefer to
use – “the planned persuasion of people to behave in ways that
further its sponsor’s objectives”.108 The words “planned persua-
sion” are important, because they indicate that a public relations
practitioner is not a mere spammer of press releases, but is bring-
ing valuable expertise about how to communicate a company’s
messages.

This is why payment to an agency is normally in the form of

a professional fee, either a fixed sum for a project, an agreed
retainer or a daily or hourly rate. There are some crude pay-by-
clipping services, which are sometimes offered by marketing
companies. Here, the incentives are wrong.

The agency may call it “payment by results” (PBR). But the

clients who want this service invariably provide neither money
nor margin to pay for any proper evaluation, so it really is nor-
mally just payment for cuttings. The result, all too often, is low-
grade, sweatshop-produced publicity, which does not utilise any
creativity, and fails to inspire readers or deliver real business
objectives.

The model encourages the vendors to sign up as many PR

clients as possible, without appropriately increasing their staff

108
 Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, PR: A Persuasive Industry? Spin, Public
Relations and the Shaping of the Modern Media (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
p. 102.
 HOW TO CHOOSE AN AGENCY OR CONSULTANT | 171

numbers, and then go after the lowest-hanging fruit with quickly-

drafted press statements, which are spammed to hundreds of
journalists. The clients for whom the easiest coverage can be
found will be prioritised.

You may recall, back in Chapter 1, that I referred to audits of

executives who fund PR activities. They did not, it turned out,
see coverage as the goal. The execs wanted easily measurable
results, such as how effective PR activity has been at (a) raising
awareness and (b) delivering key messages to the target audi-
ence. An agency that is charging you by counting any old clip-
pings is missing the point. And, let’s face it, if an agency is just
doing the easy stuff, it makes outsourcing the work to them
rather pointless.

Moreover, journalists hate the idea that a PR company charges

a fixed rate for a mention in their articles. Alexia Tsotsis, co-editor
of TechCrunch, a popular AOL-owned website, was scathing
about this arrangement:109

While we’re not in the business of advising PR people on their

pricing, we think that making press coverage this transactional
crosses an ethical/editorial line and diminishes the integrity of
our brand and our writers . . . We will be banning . . . anyone who
we catch doing this from pitching [to] us. . . .

The view is echoed by Martin Bryant, Managing Editor of The

Next Web, who says: “In truth, if I knew how much a PR firm

109
 [Link] (accessed
March 5, 2013).
 172 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

charges when I publish a post about one of their clients, I’d feel
a bit dirty.”110

In practice, hiring a PR agency is about hiring their staff’s

time, just as much as if you hire an in-house staff member. If they
are paid for their time, they are incentivised to be helpful to you
regardless of whether an activity will result in cuttings. They will
be keen to invest their time in difficult-to-secure, but well-worth-
it coverage in the most prestigious, best-read titles. This work
might include, for example, having meetings with journalists –
something that the pay-for-cuttings brigade won’t necessarily
wish to do.

Above all, a good PR practitioner will sometimes advise you

not to try to get press coverage, when the results would not be
in your interests. One company asked me if I would get them
featured in the investigative magazine Private Eye. My advice
was not to seek this coverage, because, in this case, it seemed to
me that there was significant risk that the magazine might instinc-
tively support the other side. Would an agency that relies on
cuttings for its income give the same advice?

110
 [Link]
-much-we-are-worth/ (accessed March 5, 2013).
Chapter 10
Future Learning
T
he PR world – just like every industry – has two types of
people in it. There are those who are constantly learning,
who hunger after new techniques and keep up to date
with the latest thinking. And then there are those who don’t, who
think they know everything – but are actually a little bit rubbish
at their jobs. If you’re reading this book then you are, by defini-
tion – thank goodness – one of the former.

It may seem strange for someone who has written a book

called The PR Masterclass to admit to this, but I go to all sorts of
people’s training workshops, and to breakfast briefings about
well-run PR campaigns. I read lots of books on the industry too,
and on PR’s colourful historical figures, many of whom ran fas-
cinating but long-forgotten campaigns. I am not alone in doing
this. When I left the national press and started doing PR training
workshops, I was initially amazed at some of the experienced
and high-profile people who booked. “Why on earth does such-
and-such want training?”, I asked myself. But I quickly realised
that these people are experienced and successful precisely because
they always want to find out new ways of getting better results.

The best PR teams ensure that there is a learning culture at

their core. We know that countries that are open to globalisation
grow faster than those which close themselves off from the
 176 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

world.111 Just look at North Korea. Similarly, those PR practition-

ers who engage with others in the industry and the thinking
that others develop are likely to do better. Those who shut them-
selves off are likely to stagnate. Therefore I would encourage
everyone – whether in-house, at an agency, or freelance – to join
a well-run trade or professional body. This will help you to inter-
act with other good practitioners, and learn about innovative PR
campaigns. In the UK, the rapidly growing PRCA runs breakfast
time sessions in which successful campaigns are explained, plus
member drinks events – all invaluable opportunities for getting
information that will help your PR activities.

Many of the good agencies regularly run training afternoons,

where they bring outside experts to speak. Others allocate money
per head for every staff member to go on external courses. Since
quitting journalism, I have found myself training in-house teams
at companies from Kellogg’s to Axa, and many of the biggest and
best agencies. A sizeable number in our industry have a hunger
to stay at the top of the game. Before this book draws to a close,
let’s look at some of the resources that can help.

The essential reading list

One of the best books I read in 2012 was Rethinking Reputation:

How PR Trumps Marketing and Advertising in the New Media World.
It’s by two American authors, Fraser P. Seitel and John Doorley,
and is a sensible, easy-to-read guide on managing a reputation
and on crisis communication.

111
 Greg Mankiw, [Link]
-[Link] (accessed March 5, 20130).
 FUTURE LEARNING | 177

I mentioned Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable by

Steven Fink earlier in the book. I have read most books out there
on crisis communications, and most are tediously academic. This
one is heart felt and practical, because the author was personally
involved during the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, when he
served on the Pennsylvania Governor’s crisis management team.
He has subsequently written a follow-up book called Crisis Com-
munications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message, which
I also recommend.

PR: A Persuasive Industry? Spin, Public Relations and the Shaping

of the Modern Media, by Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy,
is a useful guide to how public relations works, and is eminently
realistic in its outlook. They authors don’t hold by the more out-
landish claims of the PR chatterati, which is unsurprising given
that one-half of the writing team spent most of his career in agen-
cies, rather than just writing about them.

Mark Weiner’s Unleashing the Power of PR is a challenge to the

PR industry to carry out its measurement and evaluation better.
The author has worked since 1994 implementing evaluation
systems for public relations, so the book is not just theoretical,
but full of practical advice and examples.

Steve Harrison’s biography of Howard Gossage, Changing the

World is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man, examines one practi-
tioner who fused advertising and public relations. Harrison’s
book covers his most famous campaigns, techniques from which
can usefully be copied today.

Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals brings

together a group of 24 leading UK practitioners who are part of
 178 | THE PR MASTERCLASS

the social media panel of the Chartered Institute of Public Rela-

tions. It has become a handbook of best practice and the latest
thinking.

The Social Media MBA, edited by Christer Holloman, uses case

studies from companies such as Dell and Kodak to show ways
to reap bigger rewards from social media than the obvious ones.

My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism by Andrew Marr

gives an inside view of how the British press works, from a
former newspaper editor and one of the BBC’s top talkshow
presenters.

Useful websites

Reading PRWeek ([Link] in the UK and [Link] in

the US) is a great way of keeping up with industry trends. There
are excellent online magazines, The Drum ([Link]), Mark
Ragan’s PR Daily ([Link]), The Holmes Report (holmesreport.
com) and PRMoment ([Link]). In the UK, Communicate
([Link]) and CorpComms (corpcomms-
[Link]) are well-respected subscription magazines,
while, in the USA, O’Dwyer’s ([Link]) is a lively,
even compulsive, read.

Behind the Spin ([Link]) is a guide for stu-

dents to the PR world. It has published interviews with industry
heavyweights and useful information about courses.

Meanwhile, Twitter is an effective way of keeping up with the

thinking of other figures in the PR industry, including many
agency heads. I come across a lot of interesting research this way.
 FUTURE LEARNING | 179

The future

If you get some interesting results from implementing the

techniques in book, why not drop me a line and let me know
about them? I’m at book@[Link] and normally reply
personally within a day. Finally, if you register your book at
[Link]/register, I’ll send you some exclusive
bonus materials, including three videos that further illustrate the
techniques in this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Singleton is one of the world’s leading public relations strate-

gists. Through consultancy, training and speaking, he helps organ-
isations, large and small, all over the world. Companies such as
Kellogg’s, Virgin Atlantic and FirstGroup, along with major chari-
ties and public bodies, have turned to him for his expertise.

Alex was previously a journalist at The Daily Telegraph in

London and has also written for The Guardian, the Daily Express
and Mail Online. He has been interviewed on countless news
programmes on broadcasters such as the BBC, CNN, CNBC and
Bloomberg, and successfully appeared on Channel Four’s comedy
show Ten O’Clock Live.

He ran PR campaigns as Research Director of the Adam Smith

Institute and President of the Globalisation Institute, and has
given testimony in House of Commons and House of Lords select
committees.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sorry, but you’ve come to the self-indulgent part of the book. I

hope this isn’t too tedious. But stick with me – you get a mention.

I’ve always warmed to people whose default behaviour is to

encourage. And I’d never have been in a position to write this
book without them. Mark Moxon, a magazine editor, gave me
my first break. He had the immense wisdom or insanity to
give me, then a schoolboy, a monthly column in a computing
magazine. This gave me my first appearance on the shelves of
WHSmith – and a thorough education in magazine publishing.

I worked with countless brilliant and professional writers and

editors at The Telegraph, but here I’ll just name four who were
immensely helpful: Iain Martin and Simon Heffer, who saw my
potential, Will Lewis, who was responsible for my being hired,
and Damian Thompson, a fantastic columnist and great conver-
sationalist, who forced me to write better.

This book would never have happened without the enthusi-

asm of my agent, Anthony Haynes, who instantly saw its poten-
tial and was relentless. I couldn’t have wished for a better
publishing team than Jonathan Shipley, Jenny Ng, Vicky Kinsman
 184 | ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

and Carly Hounsome at Wiley, who, with their colleagues, are

responsible for this book being in your hands now.

And, lastly, let me thank you for choosing this book. I’m
always happy to hear from those like you who are considering
implementing the ideas in this book, so you are very welcome to
contact me at book@[Link]. I read messages sent to
that address personally and normally respond.
INDEX

Absolute Power  62–3 authenticity  17

Accountz  59, 88–9 Aweber  12, 64
accuracy  17–18, 106
Adam Smith Institute  118–19 bad news  80–1
Adobe  40, 76–8, 88, 126 Baker, Heather  54
advance notice  93–5 Ballmer, Steve  39–40
advertising  12, 15, 19, 43 bandwagons, jumping on  38–9
Advertising Value Equivalent “Barcelona Principles”  15
(AVE)  13–14 BBC  10, 42, 47, 86, 93, 149, 150,
agencies  161–8, 169, 170–2, 176 157–8, 178
[Link]  7 Behind the Spin  178
Android  40 Bernays, Edward  5, 25, 37–8,  
anonymous letters  120 73
Apple  9, 30, 40, 70, 85 Bird, Drayton  11
Arrington, Michael  92 Blair, Tony  17
Arthur, Charles  52 blogs  7–8, 52, 61, 92–3, 101, 131
articles see comment articles Bloomberg  96
Associated Press  57, 93–4,   “brand journalism”  131, 136
95–6 Branson, Richard  41
astroturf letters  121 British Airways  40–1
AT&T  15 Brown, Gordon  152
attachments  86–7, 126–7 Bruce, Stuart  53
Audio Contribution over Bryant, Martin  171–2
IP  154–5 Buncombe, Andrew  99–100
Australian Associated Press business-to-business
(AAP)  95 stories  46–7
 186 | INDEX

Campbell, Rosa  113–15 creativity  25–6, 29, 162, 168

Canadian Press  95–6 crisis communications  107, 108,
CardSave  46–7 161, 176, 177
Chartered Institute of Public Cutts, Matt  54–5
Relations (CIPR)  52, 103,
167, 168, 177–8 The Daily Caller  8
Chocolate Week  42 Daily Mail  44, 46–7, 146
Choudhary, Ranjit  15 Dale, Iain  102
Churchill, Winston  141 data  34
circulation of titles  6–7 databases  19, 51, 53, 60
Citigroup  80–1 datelines  69
comment articles  131–46 deadlines  137
American newspapers  133–4, diary columns  44
144–6 Doorley, John  176
beginnings and dress  151–2
endings  137–9 The Drum  178
content  139–40 Dyrenfurth, Nick  137–8
expertise  132–3 Dyson  72–3
how to pitch  133–5
promoting  143–4 editorials  13–14, 61, 133–4
reading ease test  142–3 email  11–12, 20, 60, 63–5, 69,  
rejection of  144 78
use of the word “you”  142 attachments  86–7, 126–7
when to pitch  135–6 comment articles  135, 143
commissioning editors  134–5, letters  112
136–7 newswires  96
Communicate  165, 178 spam  52
communications audit  163 embargoes  56–7, 91–3
Communications Management Engel, Matthew  145
Standard  164, 165 ethics  166–7
competitions  37–8, 42 Evans, Harold  75
competitors, criticising  40–1 expertise  132–3, 149–50
conflict  29–32, 139
consultants  107, 108, 161–2, Factiva  58
168–9 Fearn, Matthew  82
“content marketing”  131 fees  170–2
CorpComms  4, 165, 178 Ferriss, Tim  6
Council of PR Firms  164–5 Fink, Steven  108, 177
 INDEX | 187

Flesch-Kincaid reading ease Holloman, Christer  178

test  142–3 The Holmes Report  178
Flickr  83 Hopkins, Claude  12
Fowler, H.W.  140 Hugo, Richard  140

Gadsden, Andrew  10–11 IDG  18–19

gamification  35–8 The Independent  99, 118
Garfinkel, David  140 Ingham, Francis  167–8
Goldsworthy, Simon  4, 61, 105, interest  17–18
177 International Communications
Google  54–5, 58 Consultancy Organisation
Google Analytics  132 (ICCO)  165
Google Mail (Gmail)  43, 64, 87 International Federation of Audit
Google News  56 Bureaux of Circulations  6–7
Google News Alerts  16 internet-based phone
Gossage, Howard  25, 37 calls  154–5
government departments  102–3 interns  167
government statistics  34, 35 interviews, requests for  104–5
grammar  140–1 inverted pyramid  71–3
grassroots letters  121 ISDN Reporter’s Box  154
Graves, Chris  26 ITV  10, 156, 157
grenade technique  39–41
group letters  121–3 Jacobs, A.J.  65
The Guardian  52, 81, 85, 93, 94, Jobs, Steve  40
99, 117, 145 journalists  3, 27–9, 43, 44
Guido Fawkes Blog  7–8 embargoes  91, 92, 93
Gunn, Sheila  108 hostile  85, 106–7
Guru-Murthy, Krishnan  156 incoming calls from  99–100
maintaining a list of  51–65
Harrison, Steve  25–6, 78, 177 meeting with  61–3, 94–5, 172
headlines  71, 72, 78 online media centres  100–1
Heath, Allister  137 pay-for newswires  55–6, 57
Heffer, Simon  138 press conferences  84, 85
Hemmingway, Ernest  139–40, press releases  70–1, 74, 86–7,
144 90
Henderson, David  158 product reviews  45
Hiebert, Ray Eldon  74–5 requests for interviews
The History Channel  42 from  104
 188 | INDEX

Kafka, Peter  60 meeting with journalists  61–3,

Kavanagh, Gabe  113–15 94–5, 172
Kellogg’s  30–1 microsites  14, 47
Kennedy, John F.  152 Microsoft  30, 39–40
Kern & Sohn  47 Microsoft Outlook  64
Kitchen Magic  79 Miliband, Ed  156
Miller Brewing Company  15
language, use of  74–8 Mobil Oil  107, 155–6
LBC radio  102 Morris, Trevor  4, 61, 105, 177
learning  175–6
Lee, Ivy  17–18, 25, 74–5, 86, 90 National History Day  42
letters  111–27 National Union of Journalists  52
anonymous  120 Needman, Rafe  91–2
of correction  117–18 negative coverage  105–7
getting the details right    The New York Times  5, 42, 69, 74,
124–7 116, 125
grassroots or astroturf  121 “news hooks”  28–9
group letters  121–3 news stories, types of  26–7
informative letters  119–20 newspapers  6, 7, 27, 43, 90, 158
position letters  118–19 American  133–4, 144–6
what to avoid  113–17 business-to-business
when to submit  123–4 stories  46–7
Lewis-Jones, Elisabeth  85 comment articles  131, 133–5
LexisNexis  58 grammar  140–1
Liverpool Echo  7 letters to  111–27
local papers  7, 88, 120 photographs  81
London Evening Standard  7, 38–9 press releases  88
Los Angeles Times  127 regulation of  106
Louth, Graham  117 standards  73–4
newswires  19, 54–7, 95–6
magazines  81, 136, 178 newsworthiness  27, 32
Mailchimp  12, 64 Nixon, Richard  152
marketing mix modelling  15 Noble, Paul  15
Marr, Andrew  17, 178
measurement of PR  12–16 obesity  28–9, 31
media centres  58–9, 100–1 O’Dwyer’s  165, 178
media monitoring services  16 Ofcom  106, 117
media planning services  93–4 O’Leary, Michael  41
 INDEX | 189

online media centres  58–9, newswires  54–7, 95–6

100–1 online media centres  101
opinion polls  14, 32–4, 73–4, 94 photographs  81–4
Private Eye  172
Pain, Quentin  59, 88–9 PRMoment  178
payments  170–2 Procter & Gamble (P&G)  15,
phone-ins  104–5, 153 37–8
photographs  81–4, 101, 113 product reviews  18–19, 45–6, 93
Picasa Web Albums  83 proofreading  141–2
Pinterest  43–4 PRWeek  44, 167, 178
politics  16, 30, 38, 102–3 Public Relations Consultants
polling agencies  32, 33, 34, 35 Association (PRCA)  4, 15,
Portsmouth Tea  10–11 52, 103, 108, 164–5, 166, 167,
PR Daily  178 176
PR News  13 publications  3–4, 6, 20, 26, 58,
pre-records  105, 155 87
Precise  16 circulation  6–7
Precise Connect  53 comment articles  131–46
Precise Media Planner  93 negative coverage from  105–7
Press Association  57, 95 see also magazines; newspapers
press conferences  84–5
press cuttings  13, 16 qualifications  169
press offices, unhelpful  102–4
press releases  9, 20–1, 27, 29, radio  26, 122, 153–5
51–2, 69–96 Ragan, Mark  178
advance notice  93–5 reading ease test  142–3
attachments  86–7 Red Nose Day  42
bad news  80–1 redundancies  80–1
conflict in  31, 32 Reeves, Rosser  19
customised  87–9 references  166
embargoes  91–3 report covers  83–4
following up  89–90 reputation  43, 99, 136, 165, 176
grenade technique  39–40 research  34
headlines  71, 72, 78 Reuters  96
inverted pyramid  71–3 Rice, Dan  38
language used in  74–8 Rosebault, Charles J.  74
length of  70–1 Royal Society of Chemistry  37
newspaper standards  73–4 Ryanair  41
 190 | INDEX

scarcity  43–4 Touché, Titiana  137

Schell, Jesse  36 Tovar, David  106
Schmertz, Herb  107, 155–6 trade associations  164–5, 176
Scientific American  36–7 trade press  46
The Scotsman  119–20 training  4, 15, 104, 164, 169,
search engine optimisation  54–5, 175–6
101 Travelodge  34–5
Seitel, Fraser  18, 131, 176 Tsotsis, Alexia  171
Singleton, William Dean  145 Twitter  45, 63, 89, 143, 178
Sky  41
snowball effect  157–8 unique selling proposition  19
social media  19, 61, 63, 107, 131, United States  4–5, 42, 133–4,
143, 177–8 144–6
[Link]  33
Sodexo  75 “vigorous English”  140
spam  52, 60, 86–7, 92 Virgin Media  41
special days and weeks  41–3 voicemail  65, 100
Specsavers  39
spin doctors  16 Waddington, Stephen  169
staff issues  167–8 Walmart  106
strategists  168–9 The Washington Post  145
Sunday newspapers  122–3 Wasserman, Todd  89
surveys  32–4, 47, 94 Watson, Tom  14, 15, 166–7
websites  11, 47, 54–5, 57–8
Tallents, Stephen  103 embargoes  91–2
Taylor, Zachary  38 media centres  58–9, 100–1
Tebbit, Norman  139 photographs  83
TechCrunch  92, 93, 171 publishing letters on  116
telephone communication  20, useful  178
65, 99–100, 154–5 see also social media
television  10, 106, 122, 146, 149, Weiner, Mark  12, 14, 15, 177
150–2, 155–8 Wiggin, A.H.  17
Thompson, Damian  138 “woodwork coverage”  99
Thompson, Hunter S.  144
The Times  47, 116, 133 Young, James Webb  25