Catching Flack

The Internet may have changed everything, but let’s face it, most Americans still get a lot of their news and information from local TV news. And the principles of getting local TV coverage remain the same:

• Keep it simple and direct and relevant to the day’s news
• Make sure — MAKE SURE — you have good visuals to illustrate your story

Compared to print, PR actually has a better shot at developing good relationships with TV journalists, and here’s why: they need us more. “People think I have relationships with John Chambers [Cisco CEO] or Meg Whitman [ex-eBay CEO] but I don’t,” says Scott Budman, tech reporter for NBC Bay Area (KNTV-11). “I don’t. I have relationship with you [PR people].”

Translation: writers have more time to develop relationships and hence don’t need the PR person as an intermediary as much. TV people have intense jobs that require a lot of logistical coordination [lighting, locations, backgrounds, etc.] so we PR types can come in handy — if we know what we’re doing.

PRSA Silicon Valley had a “meet the editors” day at KNTV last week, and Budman & Co. gave a great inside look at how a TV newsroom really operates.

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There aren’t many of us high-profile PR bloggers in the blogosphere, sharing our pearly wisdom on major platforms like BNET.com. So I’ve got to give a shout-out to Jack Flack (no relation), who is now blogging about PR as a contributor to the New York Times’ Dealbook blog.

Jack and I are working similar turf — we’re both commenting on business PR. The difference you’ll notice, if you read us regularly, is that Jack is taking on BIG subjects just for the heck of it — commenting for commenting’s sake, if you will.

Here at Catching Flack, we have a different mission: to give you a quick shot of PR insight and actionable ideas based either on the day’s news or the larger world of PR and communications. Some days, we may be commenting on the biggest stories in the news, while others, we may pick out a small item and use it as a teaching opportunity.  Either way, we’re shooting to send you off with a new idea or two about doing PR.

For the record, “Jack Flack” is a nom de plume for a PR guy named Paul Pendergrass, a former Coca-Cola PR exec who’s an independent PR consultant. He had been blogging  at Portfolio.com under the pen name and on the same subject until he was wooed over to the Times last month.

It may look easy, but creating a smooth-running, entertaining national news or talk show is super-stressful. Simply producing TV is hard, and producing it to compete on the national stage is daunting. The people who rise to that level of the media are talented, tough and hard-working by definition.

So if you want to get on one of their shows, should you a) pitch like you always do or b) spend an extraordinary amount of time crafting the absolutely best pitch you can? It’s a rhetorical question, because the answer is obviously b).

I just finished an hour moderating a fascinating Bulldog Reporter webinar with Susan Harrow, author of “The Ultimate Guide to Getting Booked on Oprah,” who discussed the tips and techniques for breaking through with national talk shows.

The overriding message? Bring your A-game. Pitch incredible personal stories or novel products or services, not me-too drivel. Do your homework and be completely ready to go when you get that coveted call from a producer. Think through your entire segment. Practice with a media trainer to hone your skills.

This is true whether you are pitching The Oprah Winfrey Show or the NBC Nightly News. These people have the world, literally, to choose from. If you want to break through, raise your game to their level — don’t expect them to drop down to yours and help you.

Pity the poor quickie biographer — trying to cash in on the sudden fame of a national figure by rushing a book into publication and onto store shelves in enough time to harvest some pre-Election Day sales. After all, if the candidate loses, those books will be remaindered quicker than you can say Elizabeth Hasselbeck.

The biographer in question is Liza Mundy, whose day job is with the Washington Post. And the subject is not Barack Obama, but his wife Michelle.

In an incredibly whiny post on Slate about her trials and tribulations trying to write the book, Mundy complains bitterly about the way the Obama campaign clamped down on access to everyone but the family plumber (oh, whoops), leaving Mundy to interview such insiders as her high school classmates.

Gee, I can’t think of any reason why the Obama campaign might not want a Washington Post reporter delving into Michelle Obama’s life for a book timed to come out right before the election, can you? You’ve got the first biracial man running for President, with his African-American wife who would be First Lady if he’s elected, and you’ve got a ravenous media and blogosphere just waiting with their toothy jaws ajar to devour any personal tidbit that might prove salacious and newsworthy (see: Bill Ayers, Kenyan heritage, etc.).

Memo to Mundy: sorry, but this is hardball. And in the immortal words of Tom Hanks in “A League of Their Own”: There’s no crying in baseball.

The bad PR pitches highlighted in yesterday’s post about the new Dear PR Flack site are half of the equation. What about the other: bad reporting and writing skills?

Just as in any profession, there are some good journalists and a lot of mediocre ones. And just as in any profession, the good ones tend to rise to the top, while those with lesser skills make a living farther down the career ladder. It’s not a perfect system, but you can usually guess that a Wall Street Journal reporter is more talented and experienced journalist than a typical trade or small-town newspaper reporter.

What this means for PR people is that you a) have to know who you are pitching or targeting and b) adjust your approach accordingly. And when you are dealing with individual journalists, you have to be on the lookout for hints into their level of professionalism.

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Interesting post by CBS’s Dean Reynolds comparing his experiences serving in Barack Obama’s traveling press corps and then recently switching to John McCain’s. It gives you a little insight into how at least one journalist views the the treatment the press corps has received from the two camps, and serves as a little insight into media relations from the journalist’s perspective.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a campaign that does a good job taking care of the press is going to see a marginal improvement in their coverage compared to not doing anything, though I’m not sure that a campaign that doesn’t take care of the press is going to see an incremental decline in their coverage. It’s a lot easier to return a favor by giving someone the benefit of the doubt than it is to intentionally retailiate for perceived slights.

Reynolds describes Obama’s media relations as chaotic and his PR people often out of touch, while describing the McCain camp as friendly and organized.   

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There are basically two ways to use PR to get a story in the media: pitch an idea to a journalist and have them do a story, or respond to a journalist seeking information for a story.

The latter, of course, is somewhat easier and infinitely less stressful.

Within the category of responding to queries, there are two subsets: call them the “retail” method and the “wholesale” method.

“Retail“: Having personal relationships with journalists so that when they need a source or quote for a story, they call or email you.

“Wholesale“: Subscribing to a service that sends you queries from journalists you don’t know, allowing you to respond and pitch your angle for the story.

Until recently, the wholesale method has been dominated by ProfNet, a service of PRNewswire. ProfNet’s service is free for journalists seeking sources, but costs PR agencies and other practitioners hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to subscribe, depending on size. Nevertheless, legions of PR pros subscribe to ProfNet for the simple reason that it works.

ProfNet now has significant competition from HARO, or “Help a Reporter Out.” It’s the quirky service run by New York PR guy Peter Shankman, who started it as a Facebook group. But it has grown and grown, and now claims 33,000 members who receive Shankman’s daily emails with queries from journalists. Unlike ProfNet, HARO is free to both journalists and subscribers, with Shankman making money on it by selling ads on his emails.

So if you’re looking to beef up your access to media queries, check out ProfNet and HARO. And if you’re interested in more of the backstory about these two rivals, check out this in-depth article from AdWeek.

Pity the poor, misunderstood modern-day pirate. People think of them as swashbuckling outlaws of the sea, inflicting terror, swilling moonshine and saying things like “Arrr!”

“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” said Sugule Ali, spokesman for the Somali pirates who seized a Ukrainian ship full of weaponry last week. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

What!?!?

Yes, even modern-day pirates have PR flacks, apparently. When the New York Times dialed up the bridge of the seized ship, a pirate answered and then put Sugule on the phone, because “he was the only one authorized to speak.” A 45-minute interview resulted in the much-read story, “Somali Pirates Tell Their Side of the Story.”

[Note to lazy corporate flacks and spokespeople: #1 rule -- be available!]

Some other misconceptions that were cleared up through the interview [complete text here]: (more…)

Do you put your press releases on a wire service, or do you email them directly to the media? Do you post them on your web site or blog? Do you use one of the traditional PR wire services — Business Wire, PRNewswire or Marketwire — or newer distribution services such as PRWeb?

A media colleague mentioned in passing that he relied mainly on emailed press releases, not wire services, and that got me thinking, so I wanted to ask the Catching Flack audience for some input on the changing nature of press release distribution. Please vote and feel free to chime in with your insights into press release distribution by leaving a comment.

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The Wall Street Journal is right in the thick of the Crisis on Wall Street and the $700 Billion Bailout — “it’s like a post-9/11 atmosphere. People are eating and sleeping this thing every day,” says Don Clark, deputy bureau chief of the Journal’s San Francisco bureau.

But the current crisis isn’t the only big change roiling the Journal. Press baron Rupert Murdoch took over the paper and its Dow Jones siblings last year, and he’s not one to sit around. And of course, the growing dominance of the Internet over print as a means of communicating news and information is having a big impact too.

For starters, Rupert drove a long overdue revamp of the Journal’s web site, making it much more modern and user-friendly, and introducing new features like “community” discussion groups and the ability to comment on articles.

He has also pushed for the paper to cover more non-business news, though it’s still focused on serious news like the California budget stalemate, not fluff.

At a PRSA San Francisco media breakfast last week, Clark outlined some other changes: (more…)