How to decide what is newsworthy?

Wow, what an amazing interview I have for you today. So this is a little free part. I recently did a direct booking master class all around PR with the fantastic Megan from Rural Roots. So what I've done is I've taken apart the one hour video that we did and I've got three little videos and podcasts to share with you and today is going to be one of those videos. This was real action taking podcast and I would love everybody to pay special attention to what we're going to be talking about. If you want to find out more, head to booster.co.uk podcast. You can go to the YouTube channel, you can go to Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcast you can go and check out video, audio, blogs, etc. Everything's@boostly.co.uk podcast massive. Thank you to Megan for doing this and I will be back tomorrow with another episode. As always, but again, for now, please keep attention, pay attention, make notes, but most importantly, take action as we talk about PR marketing and how it can help you generate direct bookings and not to spend any money doing so. It's funny because again, I think right now journalists, especially when it was in 2020, they were looking for good news stories because everything was so bleak. And so hosts that were able to pivot the business. I'm thinking of a host right now in Turkey who bed and breakfast owner who during the pandemic couldn't open the actual bed and breakfast but has started to do paintings and she got local press. That was a good news story. Host couldn't do a business pivot and it's a good news story. And I think again, if you've got some good news, it's worthwhile to share. And I think this is the problem and it's always the, it's always the trick is that you want to reach out to newspapers, you want to share your good news, but you don't want it to come across as too salesy because it's all where you send an email to a journalist and say, oh, this is fantastic, we're doing X, Y and Z. And it always comes back to saying, yeah, sure thing, here's the sales team.

Yeah.

So how do you decipher and this is, I know this is something that you teach and you know, we're definitely going to get people to go to the website where they can find out more. But how do you decipher what is newsworthy or what should actually not go to a journalist and what should stay on your blog, your social media, etcetera what's like the tipping point and how do you judge it if you've got any recommendations?

That's a really tough question because, I mean, there are some times when I thought, oh, I don't think that I'd make a huge news story, but we'll send it out anyway and it gets some really great hits. So there's a few factors into that. Obviously it's what else is going on locally if you're looking at the local press, because if they've got the space for you, they'll put it in. Obviously, if it's something that's quite small, that's going to just affect your followers or the people who interact with you on a regular basis, then that's much better suited to your blog and social media. And to be honest, any news I'd always recommend putting on your blog because it's going to help with your SEO and all those sorts of things that I don't really know that much about. I just know it helps. But being able to differentiate between sort of a news story and what's not, I mean, it's all news. It just depends on which platform you put it on. And I think one of the things we're really advocating this year is you are the media. So actually you need to be telling your own story as much as relying on the press or the media to tell it for you because you've got the it's all at your fingertips now you can. Before, people had to rely on traditional media to tell their stories, whereas now with your blogs, your websites, social media, all of those sorts of things, you can tell any story. And actually one of the brilliant ways that this works is sometimes you can put something out on your social media and the local press might pick it up themselves. So they'll see that you're doing that and come to you and say, can we write about this as a story? So I would never ever just, you know, wash over something and think, oh, it's not important. I think it's really, really vital. I mean, key news stories tend to be, you know, if something's new from a local interest point of view, are you creating employment opportunities? Are you raising money? Is it a charity event? Is it going to, how is it going to impact people? Locally is always, you know, really, really vital to local news stories. But as you say, good news stories as well. They love good news stories. Anniversaries. We got a good piece in our local press recently because of the five year anniversary and all those sorts of things really, I just wouldn't wash over anything.