What’s the Benefit of Newswire Distribution Anyway?

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By Chancelor Shay, Account Executive

If you’ve worked in PR for more than an hour, you’re probably familiar with “the wire” and services that help move your news across it. And whether you’re with an agency or working in-house, your clients or CEO are probably familiar with it as well. What they don’t understand, and even some PR professionals don’t get, is that distributing press releases over the wire typically does not drive meaningful coverage.

Gasp.

Bummer, right? I’m sure every PR pro would love to craft a magnificently worded and poignant key message-riddled news release and then simply press a button to have their news covered by every outlet reaching their target audience. But as it turns out, the media are in the business of making money by providing content their audience will value and your release announcing that there will be an announcement typically won’t cut the mustard—unless you happen to be Apple, the White House or Charlie Sheen.

With that said, wire services should be looked at as another tool in the PR pro’s toolbox that, when utilized properly, can still provide value to your client. Here are three tips for understanding why wire distribution may or may not be in the client’s best interest.

1. Relationships still rule

Each day, journalists receive hundreds of highly targeted and personalized pitches from PR professionals they’ve already developed relationships with. This provides them with plenty of potential content for stories. Unless your news is earth shattering or is a larger announcement from a global brand (Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Toyota), it’s highly unlikely that your impersonalized news release blasted over the wire will cut through the hundreds of tailored pitches the journalist received to spawn a story. If your client wants coverage, explain to them that the resources spent on wire distribution would be better used developing relationships with targeted journalists and working with them to develop something useful for their outlet.

2. Bigger doesn’t mean better with distribution circuits

Clients will often suggest they want their news distributed across a large circuit because they think the more outlets it’s sent to, the more coverage they’ll get. It’s our job as PR professionals to explain that wire distribution doesn’t work like a batting average, where the more opportunities at the plate you get, the greater likelihood you’ll get a hit. To the point above, where’s the value in sending the release to more journalists who will completely disregard it? Online outlets are no different. As PitchEngine Founder and CEO Jason Kintzler points out, you must also evaluate whether the downstream sites where your release is posted will be visible to your audience. Most likely the answer is that it won’t, but the value of those sites is...

3. SEO

That’s right, even if no reporter or buyer ever happens upon your news release hidden away on Yahoo! Finance, the mere fact that it’s posted to a live web page with inbound links to your website provides search engine optimization value for your news. This is especially important for industries where executive level decision makers are actively looking for news on industry trends, topics, players and rumors. Choosing your keywords strategically is essential to realizing the wire’s biggest benefit and there’s a definite science to why you’d choose one key word over its synonym, so do your research. Nobody knows exactly how the algorithms employed by Google and the other search engines work, but as long as you’ve done your key word homework and are following SEO-friendly news release best practices, you should be in good shape.

When some PR pros get the phone call from a client wanting to blast news over the wire, they feel like they’re walking the plank, but hopefully with these tips in your pocket, you’ll feel like you’re balancing on the wire.

Don’t Block Your Own Shot

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With newsrooms downsizing and the subsequent workload being shouldered by journalists lucky enough to retain their job, knowing a reporter's pet peeve could mean the difference between your news being covered or disregarded.

Here are a few journo pet peeves that you’ll want to be conscious of.

Sending a press release as an email attachment

As a PR professional, you have to assume every pitch you send is just one of over 250 emails a reporter receives per day. With this volume of emails, the two seconds it takes to open the attachment is two seconds too long and you can bet the house your email will be deleted. What’s more, attachments are known vehicles for viruses and phishing scams. They pose a real threat to everyone, but especially journalists. To increase the odds that your press release will get read, take the minute and a half to copy the text of your press release into the body of an email and format the accompanying image; it’s the golden rule when pitching.

Typos

Typos happen. However, make sure they don’t happen when initiating dialogue with literary professionals. These people spent countless hours, and big bucks, studying and perfecting their use of the English language. Overlooking simple rules – using “then” instead of “than” or mixing up “there” and “they’re,” for example – can be interpreted as careless. If you don’t care enough to get your press release right, why should a journo care to read it? Try thinking of all journalists as the fictional author Hank Moody from Californication, an individual whose personal mission it is to protect the written word. Proofread after you proofread.

Lengthy subject lines

Crafting your subject line can be a real balancing act. The key is to grab a reporter’s attention without your subject line getting cut off in their inbox by their email server. Typically, subject lines should be about 40 characters, including spaces. Write subject lines using the inverted pyramid model, placing less meaningful words, which may be cut off, toward the end. Emphasize the most important information, the attention-grabber, at the beginning of the subject line.

Late Friday pitching

Some argue that there is no best day to pitch journalists. With that said, journalists are people, too, and unless they’re weekend assignment editors for a news station, their weekend starts Friday at 5:01 p.m. It’s easy for journalists to disregard information over the weekend and when they’re cleaning up their inbox Monday morning, including your pitch in the list of highlighted emails destined for the trash folder is even easier. Unless you’re sending your news to a weekend assignment editor or a nightclub’s VIP manager, pitching on a late Friday afternoon should be reserved for breaking news necessitating an immediate release. Do yourself and your client a favor: get the news out earlier in the week and in the morning whenever possible.

Acknowledging these pet peeves won’t guarantee your press releases will get read, but ignoring them pretty much guarantees they won’t.

Newspaper column born from social network

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Today I helped launch the San Diego Union-Tribune's "Social Media Monday" column in its business section by authoring its first weekly installment. (I shared tips for local businesses trying to grow their following on Twitter.)

But how did I get such an opportunity? After all, authoring a social media column in the market's major news daily is pretty sweet.

The opportunity was all the result of my social network, and I thought it would be fun to show how that worked:

• June 2008: Get on Twitter. Figure out how it works. Make friends.


• March 2009: When Twitter friend @tawnypress in Orange County offers up her ticket to hear @chrisbrogan speak at @bryanelliott's SoCal Action Sports Network event, I go. I enjoy meeting and learning from Chris Brogan as well as hanging out IRL with another OC Twitter friend @kirstenwright. But I also meet @ronploof. Ron is an author, blogger, storyteller, and speaker who helps executives understand the business of new and social media. I stay connected with Ron through Twitter but also subscribe to his blog. Ron shares great insights and advice, which I often ReTweet or post to Facebook to share with my network. It's really good stuff.


• May 2010: Ron suggests I take his place on a social media panel at Cal State Long Beach's Journalism Day since he has a conflict. It's a fun experience, and I enjoy meeting the other folks on the panel including OC Tweeter and blogger @tednguyen. A former Orange County Register reporter, @mcdiana a.k.a. Diana McCabe, is auditing the panel, and we connect after the event on Twitter.


• June 2010: @mcdiana becomes a business editor at the San Diego Union-Tribune, with a focus on the interactive side of the paper's business reporting. We share advice and observations on running in San Diego, among other local tips.

When it's time to kick off her idea for a "Social Media Monday" column, I come to mind. Why? Because in 2009, @tawnypress Tweeted that she had an extra ticket to an event, and I went. Because @kirstenwright Tweeted that she would be there too so I wasn't going alone. Because @ronploof and I connected there and then stayed connected via our shared social networks. This led to a shared mutual respect which resulted in a speaking opportunity that led to a column opportunity.

See how that works? It might sound like a lot of work or a long time to work, but it's just one example of the many great connections and opportunities that social networking activities have produced for me and my business.

If you missed it, here's the column:

How to grow your Twitter network

Welcome to the San Diego Union-Tribune’s first installment of Social Media Monday, a new weekly feature that helps businesses and consumers understand how to use social media tools to their best advantage. This week's tips come from Julie Wright, president of (W)right On Communications, a San Diego public relations agency. She frequently speaks and consults on social media best practices. (Find her on Twitter at @juliewright).

SOCIAL MEDIA MONDAY: Building quality connections

The social networking site Twitter has allowed me to make new connections at a pace that I could not possibly have achieved in person or, as they say on Twitter, IRL (in real life).

This ability to connect with others so easily is a seductive feature of online social
networks, but they are not simply about collecting followers. It’s the quality of your connections that makes your social network valuable...: https://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/sep/26/quality-of-connections-content-can-help-grow-your/

Don't let by-lines pass you by

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If you work with the media, you need to pay close attention to by-lines.

By-lines tell you who wrote the story you are reading. The Economist has a policy of no by-lines, but that's the exception to the rule and is supposed to reflect that every article in that magazine is the work of the entire masthead.

A PR professional has to make note of what kind of stories each reporter follows or produces. We approach the Sunday morning paper a little differently than the average reader.

While this practice seems so obvious to me, a number of times I've been in conversation with a journalist and brought up a story they wrote that I remembered and found interesting.

Their reaction is often surprise. They so rarely get direct feedback from their readers. Most feedback these days appears to be via online comments--and much of that is ranting, complaining or name-calling.

So the next time you read an article and appreciate the content, information, angle or the writing style, drop the author a note. Their emails are usually at the end of each story. He or she will surely appreciate the feedback, and it may lead to a relationship with that writer too.

Part 1: Pressures of Publishing in 2010

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The last 18 months have been hell on journalists and, therefore, to a lesser degree, on media relations professionals too. To adequately explain what late 2008 and 2009 have been like in our field, we’ve got to start with the journalist’s view. Hence the two part approach to this post.

In 2008 and 2009:

• Journalists feared for their jobs. Therefore, they wanted only to cover the most compelling stories. (To understand what a compelling story is, see our last post.)

• Journalists were forced to cover more beats. One columnist we work with had his column frequency and coverage area doubled, was assigned obituaries and asked to contribute regular human interest profiles. Another had to produce streaming video product reviews for the paper's website while blogging and producing daily business news coverage.

• Journalists had less space to cover stories. Page counts shrunk in print publications and with them coverage opportunities became tighter too. A story that might have merited coverage two years ago now literally had nowhere to run.

• And, of course, journalists did lose their jobs in layoff rounds and many of the press contacts we'd made over the years were downsized.

In this environment, (W)right On Communications simply worked harder and smarter to give our clients' stories the edge.

In 2008, we began adopting more social media strategies to find additional avenues to deliver client messages and help our clients engage with their audiences and stakeholders. We watched as traditional reporters and columnists joined Twitter and Facebook and news media began to embrace real-time social media tools to break news and encourage reader participation and commentary. (In that regard, the trends weren’t all bad – given a different set of circumstances, this would have been pretty cool. But the triple threat of Craigslist, media fragmentation and decimated advertising budgets took a lot of the fun out of it.)

Our support of traditional media relations continued, however, with a greater than ever emphasis on best practices.

What are these best practices you ask? At their heart, they’re consuming traditional and social media in frequent and large doses. We read a lot! That means blogs, newspapers, and magazines as well as journalists on Twitter and Facebook. This is how we know who’s writing what, what’s new with who (or, er, with whom), and what they’ve been writing about lately as well as what they are likely to write about in the future. In addition to this, we’ve had to stay on top of trends in our own industry, first and foremost, but our clients’ industries as well.

Such research has always been necessary to produce results for our clients, but never more so. It’s not just the current economic environment. It’s also the low barriers to entry in the PR profession--from easy leads via HARO to easy and cheap press release distribution via PRWeb. These tools as well as more expensive but convenient databases like Vocus and Cision that allow people to send thousands of emails with the push a button mean that journalists are receiving 400 emails or more a day—and many to most of them are either completely outside of the journalist's beat or perhaps in their beat but containing no real news.

So, yes, sticking to best practices is, unfortunately, the way to stand out and serve the last journalists standing.

And, no, 2009 was not an easy year for media or PR professionals and 2010 may see some small improvement, but for those who haven’t cut corners and have kept their skills, knowledge and relationships fresh, the outlook is much brighter.

Stay tuned for our part two post, in which we acknowledge more of the perils of our industry.

San Diego media on Twitter - Part II

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I originally drafted a list of San Diego media professionals on Twitter via the San Diego Metblog that I also write for. It has become the most popular blog post on that site because it's information people want.

More journalists and media personalities have joined Twitter, so I have drafted an update here and included the original post below.

Note that some of the additions are because of a new online breaking and local news source, San Diego News Network which launches March 18:

@sdnewsnetwork - News from SDNN
@sdtips – Travel editor for SDNN
@carondg - Food editor for SDNN
@sdradio – KGB radio reporter
@ericcollins - Channel 6 weekend news anchor
@culturelust – KPBS FM news reporter Angela Carone
@michellemowad – San Diego Business Journal real estate and development reporter
@mjdavis – leads strategy and interactive at SDUT
@joshkopelman - publisher of Dining Out San Diego
@krdavy - editor of the North County Times
@tkarnold - editor of Home Media Magazine
@sdmetblogs - citizen journalism site



ORIGINAL POST - "San Diego Media Takes to Twitter"
By juliewright February 26th, 2009 @ 8:04 AM

Whether you call it real-time conversations or microblogging, Twitter is a tool that San Diego’s media are picking up and putting to use. You can follow individual reporters or on-air personalities in San Diego as well as subscribe to Twitter news feeds:

Media Tweeps
@dodgemedlin – San Diego Union-Tribune assistant news editor
@RickyWhy – San Diego Union-Tribune local government editor Ricky Young
@ninagarin – San Diego Union-Tribune ‘Street’ reporter Nina Garin
@jimtrageser - North County Times reporter
@drolland – San Diego CityBeat editor David Rolland
@ericwolff – San Diego CityBeat reporter Eric Wolff
@catherine739 – NBC 7/39 anchor Catherine Garcia
@carondg – San Diego Foodstuff blogger, freelance food, travel and tech writer Caron Golden
@lcaloh – KPBS convergence editor Leng Caloh
@culturelust - KPBS arts and culture producer Angela Carone
@tmack01 – KNSD 7/39 photographer
@helenchang – San Diego News Network business editor (launching in March)
@michellemowad - San Diego Business Journal real estate reporter Michelle Mowad
@Hula933 - 93.3 FM AJ’s Playhouse personality Hula Ramos

San Diego News Feeds on Twitter
@sdut - San Diego Union-Tribune
@utstreet - Union-Trib’s Street section
@sdbackyard - Union-Tribune’s SD Backyard community social media news site
@nctimes - North County Times
@sdcitybeat - San Diego City Beat
@kpbsnews - KPBS FM news
@nbcsandiego - NBC 7/39 News
@10news - KGTV 10 News
@sandiego6 - San Diego Channel 6
@SDSU_NewsTeam - San Diego State University news / media relations
@UCSDNews - UCSD news / media relations
@bizsandiego - BizSanDiego
@sdbloggers - SDBloggers.com

If you’ve got other local media or newsfeeds on Twitter to suggest, send them to @juliewright. And thanks in advance for any contributions.