What a decade in newsrooms taught me about asking them for coverage

For ten years my job was to decide what was news. Then, almost overnight, my job was to convince the people who decide what is news that the thing I was working on qualified. I had not expected the second job to change how I thought about the first. It did.

The easy part was the phone book. People assume that the hardest thing about earned media is access: knowing whom to call, getting them to pick up. Coming out of a newsroom, I did not have to beg, borrow, or steal contacts. I had sat in the morning meetings. I knew which desks were short-staffed on Fridays and which reporters actually returned emails. More than that, the people I was now pitching had known me as someone whose stories were factual and fair, and that reputation travelled with me across the line. When a journalist trusts that you will not waste their time or spin them, the conversation starts in a different place.

The research on this is interestingly mixed, and I think it is right. Journalists rate former colleagues who move into communications as more expert and more likely to understand what they need, but not automatically as more trustworthy.1 That matches my experience. The background gets you the meeting. What you do in it decides whether you get the next one.

What I had not understood from inside the newsroom was what it feels like to be the story rather than the storyteller. I went to work for an organization that was in the news most weeks whether it wanted to be or not. I used to joke that we could sneeze and someone would write it up. That was closer to the truth than I liked. And it changed the simplest task in media relations, the invitation, into something that needed thinking about. You could invite a reporter to cover a launch and know that they might arrive with a different story already in their notebook. So you become careful: which outlets, which events, which week. Not because anyone was doing anything wrong, but because when an organization has its own public narrative, every event is a chance for that narrative to be advanced, whatever the press release says.

Journalism was, in my experience of it, honourable and truthful. I still believe that. I also learned that being on the receiving end of it, honourably and truthfully, can be hard.

Here is the dichotomy I have never fully resolved. Journalism was, in my experience of it, honourable and truthful. I still believe that. I also learned that being on the receiving end of it, honourably and truthfully, can be hard. You find yourself asking, before a scrum or a stage, what they will ask today and where the trap is, and then feeling slightly ashamed of the question, because you know these people and you know they are simply doing the job you used to do. The protectiveness is real. So is the respect. Holding both at once is most of the work.

Part of what makes it hard is structural, and I understood it better once I was on the buying side. News organizations are businesses. Most are owned by companies that need audiences to sell advertising, and I was now buying that advertising, so I knew exactly what the audience numbers were for. The incentive to make a story sharper, more conflicted, more clickable is not a failure of character. It is the economics of the medium, and it lands on whoever happens to be in the frame.

It is also, uncomfortably, us. The most consistent finding in a generation of research on news is that audiences say they want positive coverage and then choose the negative story when it is put in front of them. In lab studies, people click the negative headline regardless of what they tell the survey.2 Physiological measurements across seventeen countries show stronger reactions to negative news than positive, more or less everywhere.3 The newsroom is responding to a demand, and the demand is human. That does not make it feel better when the negative story is about something you built, but it does make it less personal.

And yet. If you have ever worked a local news desk, you know there is a soft spot, and I do not say that cynically. On a slow day, a reporter with a hole in the rundown will run a story about an organization doing something decent: a portion of proceeds to a food bank, a partnership that puts kids on a stage, a business that stayed open through a hard winter for its neighbours. Not because it sells, but because it is true and it is theirs to tell. The research supports this too. In the standard taxonomy of what makes something news, “good news” appears on the list in its own right, alongside conflict and surprise.4 The soft spot is a news value.

That is the practical lesson for anyone trying to get local coverage, and I give it to every client. Journalism is not there to sell your product; it will resist being used that way, and it should. But it will tell a story about your product doing good, which is the whole premise of earned media. Find the charitable angle, the community partnership, the person whose life is different because of the thing you made, and you have given a reporter something they are allowed to want.

There is a bigger reason to lean that way than getting ink. People are tired. The Reuters Institute's annual survey of news audiences around the world finds a steady rise in people who avoid the news altogether, and the most common reason they give is that it makes them feel bad.5 A whole movement in journalism, usually called constructive or solutions journalism, has grown up in response, arguing that reporting on what is working is not soft but rigorous, and that audiences reward it.6 Good-news-only outlets have found a following. None of this means the hard stories should go untold. It means there is an appetite the mainstream does not fully feed, and an organization that chooses to be a source of it is choosing well.

I was never in journalism to sell papers. I was in it to tell the stories of people who could not easily tell their own, and I tried, when I could, to find the version of the story that gave someone a reason to hope. I have not changed my mind about that on the other side of the notebook. If anything I hold it more firmly, because I now know what it costs to be the story and how much difference it makes when the person writing it went looking for the good.

Strive for greatness, by all means. But always strive for good.

Sources

  1. Sinaga, S., and Callison, C. (2008). Credibility of PR practitioners: The impact of professional journalism background on trustworthiness, expertness, and homophily evaluations. Public Relations Review, 34(3), 291–293.
  2. Trussler, M., and Soroka, S. (2014). Consumer demand for cynical and negative news frames. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 19(3), 360–379.
  3. Soroka, S., Fournier, P., and Nir, L. (2019). Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(38), 18888–18892.
  4. Harcup, T., and O'Neill, D. (2017). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18(12), 1470–1488.
  5. Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Robertson, C. T., Eddy, K., and Nielsen, R. K. (2022). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2022. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
  6. McIntyre, K., and Gyldensted, C. (2018). Constructive journalism: An introduction and practical guide for applying positive psychology techniques to news production. The Journal of Media Innovations, 4(2), 20–34.