TJ Walker explains why "interesting" can't be measured precisely and how reporters decide what matters. He uses an oil refinery explosion to show that journalists care about cause, fault, and danger, not corporate reassurance.
Chapters
Jerome is a student in my online media training course and writes in and says, TJ you give us a general rule of thumb that a media message needs to be interesting. How do you know if something is interesting that seems a bit vague, fuzzy? Well, you're right, Jerome. It's not something that you can just measure or put on a scale. You do have to know, in part what the media follows in the past. What have they covered? And you had to make some judgment call. And that's why it's important to read the media. Any media outlet that's likely to cover you, you need to be familiar with them and in general familiar with how they cover news. So, for example, if you have an explosion at an oil refinery and all of a sudden the local action news reporters coming out for the 6 o' clock news, you just know that that reporter is not going to be interested in your message of safety for our employees is our number one priority. That's not an interesting message, because in the history of local TV news, that message point has never gotten into a final edited story. They want to know, how did this happen? Who's at fault? Are people in danger in the community? When is it going to be put out? All sorts of other stories. So it is somewhat subjective. You're absolutely right. If it were easy, anyone could do it. That's why you need to personally follow the news that affects your industry. And if you're not doing that carefully, well, then you do need to hire public relations executives, whether outside PR firms or in house counsel, to guide you through this. Because if you try to push a message into the media that they find inherently uninteresting, they're not going to put it in the story. And that's when you leave them scrambling to find something more interesting. And there's a good chance that that's not going to make you look good, that it's going to be unfavorable to you. So it's an incredibly important part of the messaging process to weed out any message that you think reporters won't find interesting. But it is essential if you want to be successful.
