Why not buy a paper today?

I did some training last week with a PR agency on pitching techniques - the agency wasn't getting the national coverage it wanted for a particular client, and needed some tips.

I get a lot of approaches from PRs with ideas for Guardian supplements that no longer exist, or for pages that have long been cut from newspapers (and magazines). I even get pitches for magazines that have closed. This, my PR friends, is the peril of relying solely on online media databases.

Here's an interesting exercise for anyone who wants to get more national coverage: allocate a newspaper to each person in your team. Every morning for a week, buy all of the newspapers.

You should notice that the papers have regular slots which are built into their flatplan. That's because newspapers are businesses - they don't reinvent the wheel every day, but instead plan around a fixed format that rotates on a weekly or monthly basis. There will be regular pages, but also within those pages you'll see particular interview slots, Q&A format boxes, product round-ups, real life features, experts comment, news stories and features.

I suggest drawing up a simple chart showing which pages (and slots) regularly run in each paper, on which day. Then use the chart when pitching. Rather than sending your press release to the newsdesk where it will likely be ignored, send it to the editor for a specific page, and suggest the specific slot you think it would work for.

And if you don't learn anything new, at least you'll improve your Sudoko scores.

Comments

[Galina]

great idea, but buying papers every day could be quite costly, why not just checking newspapers' web-sites?

[Sally Whittle]

Good question - and the difference is that not all newspaper websites include all the content from the paper (some Guardian and Mail content is never online, for example) and also content going up online doesn't always correspond to the printed section in terms of organisation or timing - it may appear in a different section, or on a different day.