Who are journalists and where can you find them, locally? COVID leads to village mentality.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. Now, I've been running a PR agency for over 25 years and I've also been an entrepreneur. So I've built businesses using media relations and I've also helped clients build their businesses on media relations. And I'd like to just share my insights and experience with you. And today I'd like to just share about the the journalists themselves. You know, a key part of any public relations campaign is reaching out to the journalists, and often we just think of PR as being just sort of a generic media pool. Well, today I'd like to go a little bit deeper into where we can go if we actually need to find media. Now, I was chatting today to a property manager in London, and on this conversation, it laid to an interesting point. The property manager, her name's Anne, said that the people coming to look at the properties now as the lockdown is ending are looking to rent next to where they work. She said that the people that are now inquiring are not living further out. They want to move from where they currently live into town and to save the commute. Now, having just been on a train on Monday across the country, I can say that it's not a pleasant experience. You have to wear the face mask, social distancing, everything is shut, and so on. So it led me to thinking about the importance of proximity, that if we are now going to return to almost a village mentality where we like to live and work and play within the environs without the need to take a train or to drive or a plane. This is going to shift fundamentally the nature of public relations. Social media is fantastic in that it has no geographical boundaries, but for the same reason, social media is appalling because it has no social geographical boundaries. Now, we know that with platforms like Facebook and Google Ads, we can target the posts that we make by city and by demographic. It's very, very powerful indeed. But what about media relations? How are we going to start to get the word out if we've got a local business and that local business is going to cater now to people who may be living in the neighborhood, whereas in the past they may have driven from another town into your town or flown in from another place. So I wanted to look at if I was going to be doing public relations and media relations in an area where I live and work, how, how am I going to do that? One of the things I've seen and done in the past is very simple. It's signage. Signage on buildings, signage, for example, on bus stops, signage on the back of sitting down rest stops. So signage to some degree has almost been lost in this digital age, but street banners, posters in, in windows, these are things that we can do that are quite obviously not that expensive, and they are appealing to the people that are right next to our business. And that business could be a bank, It could be a restaurant, could be an office, could be an empty office or an empty apartment. So I think we're going to see a going back to making signs that people can see where they can then walk very close to actually take goods with them. Now we talked the other day about Google My Business, and and I found just today I had another email from them. I've got 150 views of my latest posts. Now, this is automatic because I've started to attach my Google My Business pages in Singapore and the UK to my Zoho Social Media Manager. So when I make a post on Facebook, it also goes out to Google My Business. So using local tools, Google My Business being a free and easy one to use, signage and banners But what about also looking at the media? Now, interestingly enough, there is a new network of hyperlocal news sites in the UK that's been started up by a chap called Carl Hancock, who was inspired to take up the project after being in the city, and he was one of the judges on The Dragon's Den, and a young computer programmer had launched the Nubbin Bridgewater, of all places, as a hobby whilst he was at the University of Cardiff. Now, Carl Hancock is actually one of the few people hiring journalists, and he's focusing his efforts on towns with populations of between 5,000 and 100,000. In other words, those, those cities or towns which are not served by the large regional titles like the Manchester Evening News, for example. So they're actually making what are effectively local newsletters, and he's signing, um, some 200 journalists, and he's got the, the aim of having some 700 news sites around the UK over the next 4 to 5 years. In Carl's opinion, he says that he thinks there's a demand for hyperlocal news without the intrusive advertising and pop-up surveys. Now, what's interesting about that, he goes on to say they want to delve into the community and talk to the people that really matter. Now, if we're running a business, a local business, which let's face it, most businesses are local, and the majority of businesses are 5 to 10 people. And under a million pounds. So actually Mr Hancock is onto something, I think. And of course originally back 100 years ago or so newspapers were local. There were newspapers like the Kentish Gazette where I appeared, which was originally just for Canterbury and was bought up then by the Kent Messenger that brought in Herne Bay and Whitstable and Margate and got the economies of scale of a few journalists and printing. And now it's coming back full circle. So it's interesting now to see that local media channels are going to start to, to pick up in the UK at least. And I had read about this trend in America, but there it was really about syndicated news with local advertising. But what's happening in the UK is actually local news with local advertising, so fundamentally different. Now there are a number now of sites which we can go to and find online. For example, there's one called the Resource Centre, which is for Brighton and Hove in Sussex, and they have about 800 local groups, and they include playgroups, environmental shops, residents' arts associations, and it's theresourcecentre.org.uk. And they have a place for you to contact them if you've got stories. There's another website which is actually by Wiki. It's wiki.openrightsgroup.org, and it's wiki.uklocalmediacontacts. And this was last edited in 2017. I'll include all of these in the show notes, but this is a free to use Wikisource, which will give you media contacts in the UK. There is another website called thelocal.com. Now, The Local is a news brand for— they call themselves modern pioneers who are looking for daily independent reporting from around Europe. So interestingly enough, they've got a .fr, so they've got a French. The head office is based in Sweden. But it appears to be manned by all manner of nationalities. Now, what they're saying here is, on their website, is that they want their news to be sourced locally and not delivered through the filter of a national or international news brand thousands of miles away. So what we're seeing is, in a way, a reflection of people feeling disconnected from what they're reading in their national, international news and wanted to get back to being local. Now, The Local has 7 million readers each month, and their profile apparently are well-educated and well-informed, and they're covering all manner of information— political, social, economic. And as we promote our businesses, The Local, thelocal.com, and you can find your local will have stories related to your town or your village, and the NUB news websites will be relevant to your local. And this is important because the media on the national titles are increasingly stretched, but also they may or may not have enough audience for your story in order to make it interesting for them to publish. Now, If you are interested in the sort of finding national stories or people like the BBC, on wikipedia.org there is a list of BBC News reporters and newsreaders. Some of them have got their contact details, but you can also reach out on bbc.co.uk to the Media Centre/enquiries. So This is actually the main media putting out for you a place where you can find them. Now, what I like to look at is I like to look at the media themselves. And if we are interested in a particular magazine, especially we're in niche, for example, in farming, in agriculture, or manufacturing, or in plastics, these vertical trade titles and your consumer titles will all list somewhere a media contact. In my view, there is no better way to build a media list than to go to the media you're interested in and find those media contacts. And now increasingly, almost always, the media put their contact details on, on the site or a Twitter handle. So many media magazines will include what they call a masthead, which is a list of journalists. Often at the back of the publication, if it's a print one, sometimes on the inside front cover, there will be the details of the editor and the publisher, for example. But they'll also have LinkedIn profiles. So one of the things that I do now, if I'm looking for a journalist, I will, I will look for them on LinkedIn. It's not so great if they have a more common name, and some journalists don't use LinkedIn, but certainly the freelance publications, the freelance publishers and freelance journalists will be looking for stories. And so they'll be promoting themselves and make themselves available. Of course, you can take places like journo-link.com, which says it has 10,000 journalists. You can use Cision or Prowly or responsesource.com. These ones all ask you to pay. But more importantly, they might give you a big media database, but realistically, how many media are you going to talk to? So these are very good if you're running an agency and you need to every day or week reach out to a different cohort of media. But for most of us with our businesses, we might have a top 5 or 10 or maybe 15 media. It's easy to find those and build them into an Excel spreadsheet and keep a list of stories that they've been running and then reach out to them. Now there's also, uh, one person who set up a website called anxietyculture/mediahell, and they put a list of media contacts, mainly the BBC and The Guardian, Independent. And on there they've published all those main media outlets' contact details along with the sort of pitch that if you, if you're upset with what they're writing, you could tell them by looking at their contact details. So it may not be the best way to complain, but it certainly gives you the contact details for free. Now there's also another one, quite useful, called media.info, and they have some 7,000 media titles, and it's actually run by an Australian company. So it has worldwide, and what's interesting and a little bit different to the models like Prowley and Cision is the difference here is that the media have listed themselves. And so the media then are listing what they're interested in and have updated their contact details. So if you want to know about the media, there are a number of ways that you can do it. You can go to the titles you're interested in and use the masthead to find them. You can go to social media and find them. You can go to LinkedIn, or you can use some of these databases, some of which are free and some of which are paid for. Now, if you're also interested in finding out what the journalists are writing about, about the industry, you can go in the UK to thepressgazette.co.uk. And this is, if you like, the industry newspaper, or one of them, where journalists are featured, what they're writing where they're moving, and any other sort of interesting aspects of being a journalist. The other place that you can look for journalists or find out more about journalism is the National Union of Journalists, which was founded in 1907 in the UK. It's nuj.org.uk, and it's the biggest journalists' union in the world. Now, in 2016, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published a survey, and I thought it's interesting to share this with you because we sometimes feel that journalists must be these, you know, well-paid, uh, you know, runabout, uh, people who are highly sought after and sort of celebrities in their own right. The reality, according to this Reuters study is, is a little bit different. Most journalists entering the trade today, it says, will have a bachelor's degree, probably a master's degree, but they'll also be white, most probably, and has a 1 in 5 chance of earning less than £19,000. In other words, 20% of our journalists earn just about the living wage. Now, if they're a female journalist, and 45% of journalists are female, they are less well paid. And we've seen this in the BBC, of course, recently. They're less well paid than their male counterparts. So ironically enough, this libertarian values, uh, defending institution has been very sexist. But also, it is, uh, not fully representative of the of the racial mix that we have in the UK. I'm not sure about in other countries, but Black Britons are just 0.2% of the media pool, and yet they are making up some 3% of the UK population. Now, this report showed that more than half of journalists work online, but the proportion working in print has fallen from 56% to 44%. And those working exclusively online receive less pay than those working in print. So it's showing that more and more are moving online, they're earning less, they're well educated, but it's also showing— and this is a killer if you think about as we send our pitches to the media— that the journalists are producing some 50 to 60 or even 75 stories per week. So So it's a phenomenal work rate that these journalists, often young, underpaid, but very academically qualified. Now in the UK, 94% agreed that they should adhere to a code of professional ethics, but most of them believed it was justified to pay for confidential information when it's in the public interest. Now this compared with only 5% of American journalists who felt that they should pay for confidential information. Now a further 81% in the UK said they would use confidential information without permission compared to 58% in America if they believed it was in the public interest. So the UK is still defending press freedoms. Now according to these Labour statistics there are some 64,000 journalists registered in the UK. Um, but in America, according to the, uh, the census in 2011, there were only 46,000 reporters nationwide, but that had gone down to 32,900 by 2015. So in America, the number of people who are qualified or claiming to be full-time journalists seems to have actually gone into decline. So as we think about the media and the pitching, let's just remember who it is that we're pitching to. They're most likely very well educated. They're most likely not very well paid according to their education. They're probably white, middle class, and if they're women, they're earning less than their male peers. So Before you think about sending a press release in general to a wide audience, let's look at how our businesses and our lifestyles post-COVID may become more local. As I mentioned about the property agent saying that the people looking to tenant this flat in London are now looking to save a commute and to live near where they work and to walk to work. If this is the case, then actually our PR job should get easier because there are people like Nub News creating local media again, and our stories will be more compelling to those local media if they have an and, but, and therefore, as I discussed on yesterday's podcast. So thank you so much for listening. I hope this has been useful, and if you'd like to know more, please come to our website, eastwestpr.com, and subscribe to Cognition, our newsletter, which goes out on a weekly basis. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. Thank you.