What is News?

A reporter I know once wrote that he was thinking of putting a sign on his desk that said: “Caution—press release crossing.”

He went on to say that “herds of road kill masquerading as news releases cross my desk every day,” but that only a few catch his attention, making him stop and take a second look.

His experience is not unique. The mainstream media get hundreds of press releases each day. A news editor I know gets over 300 e-mails a day, just by herself.

In this blizzard of press releases, how do you make sure yours gets noticed?

For me, it all boils down to one simple thing: Send news. But was is news?

  

One definition of news is the old Dog-Man Principle, which goes like this: 

“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

In other words, news is something unusual, something that doesn’t happen all the time or every day. It’s not routine, run-of-the-mill, common-place.

Or, as Kirk Lapointe, former editor of the Vancouver Sun put it:

“Planes take off and land every day. We only cover the ones that crash.”

The definition of news I like is this:

Does it tell my readers, viewers, listeners something they don’t know about something they care about?

This is the kind of question an editor asks when he or she receives a press release. Let’s take a closer look at it.

Does it tell my readers, viewers or listeners.

For a press release to attract attention, it must have a local angle—something that connects the story to the people served by the media outlet.

Does it tell my readers something they don’t know.

The press release must contain new information—something that people don’t know. Otherwise, why report about it? What is the new thing you want to share with them?

Does it tell my readers something they don’t know about something they care about.

The first question an editor asks when getting a press release is: Who cares?

Of course, you care about it. So does your organization, the volunteers or the beneficiaries. But why should anyone else care?

And why should the editor or news director who gets your press release? They are the first ones you have to convince to care.

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Giving the media something their readers, viewers or listeners don’t know about something they care about is the first step in keeping your press release from becoming road kill.

In future posts, I’ll look a closer at various aspects of news, such as the local angle, human angle, impact, prominence, controversy, timeliness and hard versus soft news.  

When Looking for Communication & Marketing Solutions, Are You Quirky Enough?

Quirky is the name of new company that builds products dreamed up by amateur inventors.

Slap-dash doodlers from around the world are invited by Quirky to send ideas for overcoming common challenges and problems—no matter how strange, weird or fantastic those ideas might be.

Every week, the Quirky community votes on the best ideas. The winners are sent on to engineers, who turn them into real products.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT, calls this new way of coming up with solutions to real problems “combinatorial innovation.”

“There are tons of creative ideas out there," he said. "The greatest thing about digital technology is that it’s easier than ever to get lots of eyeballs looking at our biggest problems.”

What does this have to do with non-profit groups?

When we are faced with communication and marketing challenges, we usually turn to the same people and places to find answers—people just like us.

This can work, but it also can be limiting. Since we are only asking insiders, we can tend to end up with only inside answers. 

The beauty of Quirky is that solutions to problems come from different and unexpected places, giving us different and unexpected answers.

Being outsiders, they can see things in fresh, new ways—ways we might never think of.

To use a hockey analogy, by inviting different people to take shots we would not only get more shots on goal, we would get shots from unexpected shooters and surprising angles.

I recently did a version of Quirky when I invited the Executive Director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra to speak to a group of church communicators. 

At first glance, we have little in common. But we both face the same challenges of reaching out to new audiences with old messages. Our time together was inspiring and informative.  

Social media is a big help in this area. When faced with a communication or marketing challenge, we can use it to relay a request to thousands of people. Who knows what kind of answers we might get, and from where?

We just have to be quirky enough to ask.

Click here to read Finding the Next Edison, an article about Quirky from Atlantic Online.

  

How to Keep Your Press Releases Out of the Spam Folder

A few years ago, Winnipeg Free Press humour columnist Doug Speirs became fed up with the barrage of pointless press releases that daily fill his inbox.

In a column titled “Could you make those news releases any less funny?”, Doug noted that “almost every day, as regular as clockwork, news releases about incredibly obscure things in incredibly obscure places are emailed to my computer by public relations companies I've never heard of.”

Why do they send this stuff to him?

“Simple,” he stated. “I'm on the top-secret, computerized list of select journalists, a group whose membership is strictly limited to people who are currently alive.”

Normally, he deletes these e-mails without reading them. “But not today. Today, I'm all over them.”

What followed was a funny column about how Doug called these companies to see why they thought Winnipeggers should be interested in their products. You can read his column here.  

Of course, these businesses didn’t actually send Doug those press releases; they hired PR companies to do it for them.

If you are doing communications for non-profit organizations, you know about these PR companies.

Not a month goes by that I don't get a couple of e-mails from them saying they can help me reach thousands of journalists.

It's true;they can reach that many journalists. The only problem is that most of them have no interest in my press releases.

I have first-hand experience this as the freelance Faith Page columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. 

Like Doug, my name is also on that secret list of writers who are alive.

I don’t get as many junk press releases as he does, but the ones that come my way get the same treatment: I promptly delete them.

But getting your press release deleted, or just being made fun of, is better than what happened to over 300 people who sent junk press releases to Chris Anderson of Wired magazine in 2007.

In a post titled “Sorry PR People, You're Blocked,” Anderson said “I’ve had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam, it's PR people.”

“Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching.”

He posted this warning: “I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that. Everything else gets banned on first abuse.”

Not only that; Anderson posted the e-mail addresses of all offending people, organizations and PR firms who had sent him misdirected press releases in the previous 30 days.

“If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it—turnabout is fair play,” he stated.

What followed was a list of over 300 e-mail addresses. 

When it comes to media relations, nothing turns off a reporter more than getting junk from people who should know better. 

If it’s worth my time to read, then it’s worth your time to find out what I write about.

It's a good media relations strategy, and a simple courtesy. It might even help you make the news. 

An Unskippable YouTube Ad

You know those annoying YouTube ads--the ones that pop up before you can watch your video?

Like with banner ads, which almost nobody clicks on, almost nobody watches YouTube ads all the way through, either. (94 percent skip the ads, according to one report.)

I know I don't watch them. But I did watch the new five-second ads from Geico, the U.S. auto insurance company.

Those YouTube ads usually run for about five seconds before you have the option to skip them. That's what most people do.

Why do people hit skip? Many reasons, but the most important being that advertisers fail to grab your attention in those crucial five seconds.

Cleverly, Geico found a way. Click here to see for yourself.

Equally cleverly, so did Nail Communications. You can save a puppy's life by not skipping their YouTube ad. Try it for yourself. I bet you save the puppy's life.

Those of us who work in the non-profit sector seldom have the resources needed to make or buy ads on YouTube. But the principle still holds: If you want people to read, watch or listen to your messages, you need to grab their attention early--and quick.

Just like Geico did.

Banner Blindness, or Why So Few People Click on Online Ads

Do you suffer from banner blindness?

If you said yes, don't worry. Most people do.

What is banner blindness? It's a condition where people fail to notice banner ads on websites--much less click on them.

For those who buy advertising, including non-profit groups, banner blindness is an important issue.

It's doubly important for non-profits, since we have so little to spend on ads. 

Which is why buying banner ads on websites seems like such a good deal. Compared to print ads, they cost a fraction of the price.

The only problem is that they don't seem to work.

According to Infolinks, a digital advertising company, 86% of visitors to websites don't notice the ads. Of those who do notice them, 50% never click on them. 

Or, as Solve Media puts it, you are more likely to win the lottery, become a U.S. Navy Seal, or climb Mount Everest than click on a banner ad.

So why don't banner ads work?

One reason is they don't attract our attention. We see them, but we don't "see" them.

This is partly because they are small, and there are lots of them. With all that clutter, they just don't catch our attention.

Plus, that's not why we came to the website in the first place. We came there because we needed information, not to buy a product or give to a charity.

In 2007, Jakob Nielsen studied eye patterns.  His research concluded that banner ads simply don't work.

In an article on his study, he "confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad."

At all levels of user engagement, he wrote, "the finding is the same regarding banners. If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done and aren't diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they're not going to look away from the content."

And even when viewers noticed a banner ad, they usually didn't remember the advertiser's logo or name.

The best way to engage viewers, he found, is to make the ad look like content--so-called "Native advertising."

"The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it," he said.

What does this mean for non-profit groups? 

First, be careful when offered great deals for banner ads. They may not be worth it.

Second, if you offer the media what they need and want for their websites--news--they may gladly use it on their as part of their regular content.

Which isn't to say you shouldn't buy website ads. If you think it is right for you, and will reach the intended audience, you should give it a try. 

Just don't be surprised if the viewers you are trying to attract have banner blindness, too.

Got Whimsy? It Can Help You Make the News

Tom Butler was a consummate public relations professional.

Butler, a Vancouverite who died in 2013, understood what the media needed in a story, and was often able to deliver it to them.

A Globe and Mail article following his death told about some of the ways he was successful in attracting media attention.

He brought astronaut Neil Armstrong to Vancouver to open a revolving restaurant atop a Vancouver high rise with the slogan: “The restaurant that soars halfway to the moon in the night sky over Vancouver was opened by a man who went all the way.”

He invented the world belly flop championships at a new hotel to publicize its new swimming pool.

To promote another hotel on the Vancouver waterfront, he had a long-drive golfing competition off the roof.

He took a beaver from the Stanley Park zoo to New York and Los Angeles to promote Vancouver tourism.

As the article put it, Butler, a former reporter, “had a nose for news and a sense of fun. He knew whimsical stunts would be an antidote to the grey news of the day."

It was this spirit of fun that helped him garner media attention for his clients.

“Whimsy," he wrote, "is the soft underbelly of the news desk. Every editor and news director from London to Louisville has the same daily imperative to include a story that lightens the day’s news—that gives something to feel good about, a counterbalance to the woes of the world.”

If you pay attention to the TV news, you know that almost every broadcast ends with an uplifting story involving cute animals or children—or both. 

Radio news and newspapers also like to include something light in their line-ups.

It’s as if they are saying: “Sure, the world is a crappy place. But maybe this will make you feel better.”

For organizations involved in serious causes, this can seem like an impossible task. What’s uplifting about global hunger, mental illness or cancer?

But you don’t have to look very hard to see stories that brighten the spirit and can brighten the day.

It might be people who are overcoming great obstacles, donors who go above and beyond to help someone else, or a person who manages to smile and laugh despite a disease.

For a news director desperate to lighten the broadcast, such stories can be a godsend.

It can also help you break out of the mould with reporters. If all they see is a steady diet of press releases about need and desperation from your organization, they might stop reading what you send. After a while, it can all look the same.

To paraphrase the well-known milk ad, you need to ask: "Got whimsy?" If you do, it could help set your organization apart, and help you make the news.

Are You Smarter Than a 7th Grader? When Writing, Maybe You Shouldn't Be

A popular TV show asks adults if they are smarter than 5th graders. The assumption is they should be.

When it comes to writing for the general public, maybe that's wrong—by a couple of grades, or three.

Studies in the U.S. show that the average American reads at the grade 7-9 level. I have no reason to believe it is any different in Canada.

Newspapers know this; they are typically written to the grade nine level.

Popular novels by people like John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Stephen King are written at the grade seven level.

Romance novels are written at the grade five level.

Thoughts about reading levels came to mind last week when a well-respected Canadian NGO sent me a press release.

It wasn’t easy to read. It had long sentences and paragraphs, and lots of  big and complex words.

Curious, I put it through a readability test. Sure enough, it wasn’t just me: It got a grade level of 18, or “very difficult to read.”

In order to understand it, you’d need to be a college graduate, or above.

Which is fine, if this organization is targeting college graduates. But since it aims to serve and reach the general public, it has a problem.

It’s tempting to get all in a huff and decry the state of literacy today. But that won’t get us anywhere.

It’s much better to write so that people can read and understand what we are trying to say—especially if we want to enlist their support for our important causes.

Better to remember the advice of George Orwell: Never use a long word if a short one will do. Or Mark Twain, who said the following to a young boy seeking advice about writing:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; and don't let the fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.”

Twain’s books, by the way, are written at a fifth-grade level. He didn’t do so bad.

This post, by-the-way, comes in at between grades 5-7, or very easy to read. 

Here are some websites where you can check the readability your organization’s press releases and other materials:

Readabilityscore.com 

Readability Formulas 

For further reading:

Education Expert Says College Freshmen Read at the Grade Seven Level 

American High School Students Are Reading Books At5th-Grade-Appropriate Levels: Report

Know Your Readers (Plain Language Network)