Help A Reporter Out
There’s a terrific website called Help a Reporter Out, otherwise known as HARO. The tagline is “everyone’s an expert at something.” Publicizing peoples’ expertise is one of the ways that my agency has helped clients to obtain PR coverage over the years so we follow the media leads provided by HARO and pitch when there’s a good fit.
A work-obsessed triathlete named Peter Shankman started this site as a service to connect people like me who do PR with journalists who need information to write their stories. You can go to http://www.helpareporter.comand sign up to receive daily e-mails with tips on what reporters are looking for in terms of contacts and information. There’s a whole comunity of HARO PR people and journalists now who are tied together by this site which also has a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. The whole concept reinforces to me how PR has gone social in the past several years, and how we as PR people must stay connected to what’s happening in these online communities to find leads on stories and find the right people to pitch our stories to. Continue reading
A Picture Equals a Thousand Words
One of the important things I learned early in my PR career was the power of great photographs. My PR mentor, Chip Carey, taught me to always try to include a photograph with a press release for the media. Sometimes that slowed me down (and those of you who know me know that I don’t like to be slowed down at work!), because I had to look around for a good photo, and back in the day, I had to make duplicates (sometimes by myself in our own darkroom!….talk about time consuming!)
I am now more convinced than ever that a great shot adds enormously to a press release. Sometimes, particularly in dealing with travel editors, having a great image means the difference between a cover story in the travel section or being buried in the back of the section. Or sometimes it means your story being placed above the fold rather than below the fold. And obviously when dealing with television news, they need great video. When pitching a story to a TV news editor it’s important to describe what the visual images will look like. TV people thrive on images, not on words alone. Continue reading
Are we human beings or human doings?
I’ve been listening to the worldwide ‘webcasts’ by Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle called “A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.” It’s a 10-part series on Monday nights that broadcasted its final segment this past week. I downloaded the whole series on my iPod and have listened and watched attentively….usually while doing something else like driving my car, riding the stationary bike or traveling across country in a plane. It’s been fascinating. Continue reading
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