ARRLWeb: PIO Handbook

PIO Handbook · Table of Contents · Introduction · Chapter 1 - Getting Started · Chapter 2 - Know Your Role · Chapter 4 - Building Media Relationships · Chapter 5 - The News Release · Chapter 6 - Interacting With the Media · Chapter 7 - Breaking News · Chapter 8 - Electronic Media · Chapter 9 - Talking Up Ham Radio · Chapter 10 - Writing for Magazines · Chapter 11 - Extending PR Into the Community · Chapter 12 - Putting it All Together · Resources · Referenced Material · View Entire Manual (271,968 bytes, PDF file)

"The Media" is an overused term which conjures up this image of a monolithic beast feeding on a never-ending stream of news stories. While there may be some truth to this image (especially the appetite part), a more fitting image is the cartoon of the small fish eating a plant, with a line of ever-larger fish behind it, each waiting to eat the next-smaller one. For our purposes, though, this media "food chain" is good.

Before we "meet the media," though, let's take a look at its basic "food" -- news itself.

News, in its most basic definition, is anything important or unusual that happens, especially anything that can directly affect the lives of the people reading, watching or listening to a particular news source. And the more people affected, the bigger the news is.

People ask why there's so much bad news in the papers. Mostly because something that goes right usually isn't news. If you go to work in the morning and get there on time, in one piece, that's not news, that's normal.

If you get into an accident on the way to work, that's news to your family and co-workers, but not to too many other people. If you're part of a 20-car pileup and 20,000 people are late to work because of it, that's real news.

A newspaper that's full of only bad news won't sell. So most editors are actively looking for "good news" stories to balance out some of the bad. If your story is important or unusual, it also qualifies as news.

The public service provided by hams during emergencies is important. The fact that we communicate via radio waves in the age of the internet is unusual (use this to our advantage).

One other type of story that often makes the news -- even if it isn't especially important or unusual -- is the interesting story, what journalists call a human interest story.

Most of the time, ham radio activities in and of themselves aren't news, especially beyond a local area. However, you can get ham radio into the news by showing how hams are involved in a local or national news story, or by looking for a human interest "angle." We'll cover these in more detail in later chapters.

If a ham contacts the International Space Station, that's news in that ham's home town. If a current or former astronaut comes to your town and talks with the space station, that's statewide news and good material for some of the TV news magazine shows. If there's a breakdown in NASA's communications system and ham radio is the only contact the crew members have with earth -- and a ham in your town is at the center of it -- you're on the evening news and in newspapers across the country.

OK, now let's "meet the media." Remember the fish-feeding analogy. There is no huge beast called "the news media." In fact, the word "media" is actually a plural noun, and you should say/write "the media are" rather than "the media is..." There are several categories and even sub-categories within the news media. Let's start with...

The bottom of the food chain in the newspaper category is the local weekly, followed by regional daily newspapers (Hartford Courant, Baltimore Sun), specialized national newspapers (Education Week, Baseball Weekly), national daily newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post, USA Today), and while not newspapers themselves, the wire services (Associated Press, Reuters and United Press International). Wire service stories are sent to newspapers and broadcast stations across an entire state or nationwide.

Here is an actual wire service story put out by the Associated Press when hams in New Jersey celebrated the 150th anniversary of the invention of the telegraph.
It most likely began as an article in a local weekly or daily newspaper which was picked up by the AP New Jersey bureau and run statewide, then picked up by the national "A" wire in New York and run nationwide.

This category includes local neighborhood newsletters, company newsletters, regional magazines (New Jersey Monthly), specialized national magazines (Road & Track, QST, CQ), and general national magazines (Time, Newsweek, Women's Day, McCall's).

Here, you start with local radio & TV stations, including local cable stations, moving up to regional radio & TV stations and the national radio & TV networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox), including cable and satellite channels (Discovery Channel, Nickelodeon, The Learning Channel).

This includes just about every news source reachable via the internet, from a local radio club web page to websites of traditional media outlets and so-called "new media" sources that are found only online.

Each of these categories has a different set of criteria for determining what's newsworthy. Generally speaking, the larger and broader the audience, the greater the number of people who must be affected for a story to be considered "news."

Here's how the media "food chain" works, starting with local weeklies: The folks at the regional dailies read the local weeklies and pick up stories of broader interest. The regional dailies share their stories with the wire services and are read by people at the metropolitan newspapers and broadcast stations. They, in turn, pick out stories of even broader interest to share with their audiences. Finally, the people at the networks and the national newspapers read the wires and the metropolitan newspapers, and they watch and listen to local newscasts -- and THEY pick out stories of very broad general interest.

A story that affects only your home town will be likely to be covered by the local weeklies, but not by NBC Nightly News -- UNLESS it illustrates a trend in society and can be used as an example. How would NBC find out about your hometown story? Two ways: the "food chain" described above or ... somebody (you) tells them about it!

Who decides what runs and on what basis? At a newspaper or magazine, the decisions are usually made by one or more editors; at a radio or TV station, the titles might also include producers or news directors.

Fact of life: The contents of a newspaper or newscast are selective... and subjective. You have either a set amount of space or a set amount of time, and you nearly always have more material than you can possibly use. So you have to choose. The criterion they all use is something called news judgment. Here are the questions most often used in making those choices:

How does your story compare with others competing for the same space or time, in terms of importance or interest?

Let's take a closer look at the different areas within a newspaper, magazine, or broadcast that may offer opportunities for publicizing amateur radio. We'll start with the print media. This category actually includes quite a variety of slightly different printed media. You need to expand your thinking a bit to appreciate the array of options available.

Newspapers, for example, consist of a number of sections and cover everything from local to international news. Newspapers contain sports articles, feature stories, advertisements, want ads, editorials, letters to the editor, advice columns, "how-to" articles, obituaries, comics, puzzles, and more. Many of them contain supplements and magazine sections and publish Sunday editions.

The point is that newspapers are not monolithic wholes but consist of a great many parts, some of which present excellent opportunities for you to get your story in print in other than a straight "news" context, as discussed above.

The only item they have in common, of course, is that they all rely on the printed word. Because they do, you need to reduce your message to words, present it with a natural "angle" which makes it interesting and perhaps plan to supplement it with one or more photographs. Try to get your story there two or three days before the date when the event will actually occur.

Magazines are quite similar in that there's more than one approach. Most magazines consist of a mix of feature articles, often written by freelancers (you?), and columns, generally written by regular contributors, often called Contributing Editors. Even if you can't land a feature article, you might get your story covered by one of a magazine's columnists.

As with newspapers, you need to consider that the radio and TV media also consist of parts. Their news programs cover everything from international to local news and many "news" programs routinely include feature sections which present opportunities for covering a story on a local Amateur Radio event like Field Day. Some stations have "news magazines" which, like their print media cousins, offer similar opportunities. The advice on timing discussed in the print media section above, applies equally well to the electronic media, although here, because of the more cumbersome logistics involved in assigning camera crews, for example, two or three weeks' notice may work a lot better.

Editors tend to know a lot more about things like parades, bridge collapses, political campaigns, automobile collisions and the like than they do about Amateur Radio. Lace your efforts with some information educating them about the basics of Amateur Radio.

In making your presentation, for example, you may want to supplement a Field Day story idea and request coverage with a good quality audio tape as possible background sound from the prior year's on-air operations to provide a "feel" for the event in the editor's mind. You could also consider adding "still" photographs to further help him visualize the story's potential and capture his imagination.

And, if you have not planned that far ahead, tape some current on-the-air activity and use that, along with some still photos of a few typical radio shacks.

Cable TV offers additional, and sometimes easier, ways of getting your story out to the public. Some cable systems have full-scale local news operations that you'd approach in the same way you'd approach a local TV station. Virtually every cable system provides one or more "access" channels for community programming. These channels are the "price of admission" that the cable company pays for having monopoly access to your town or neighborhood. In most cases, cable systems provide free training and use of their studios for community groups wanting to produce programs.

An often-overlooked cable programming resource is cable radio. While text-based cable programming is most often accompanied by a rebroadcast of selected radio stations, some systems lease the audio channels to cable-only radio stations. Often, these cater to specific ethnic groups or other small communities.

The Media Game is Rick Booth's insightful article on developing publicity.
Click here to read it.

Internet

While newspapers and magazines use printed words and still photos, and broadcasters rely on the spoken word and (in TV) live-action video, internet websites offer the possibility of using any or all of these "modes," to use a ham term, plus interactive features such as live "chats" and links to additional information sources. Today, it's hard to find a daily newspaper, broadcast station or even community organization that doesn't have at least a simple website. See what's out there in your community and what possibilities they may offer in spreading the word about amateur radio.

Now that you have a general idea of what makes news, what makes up "the media," and how news decisions are made, it's time to look at how you can make use of the media resources available in your community.

PIO Handbook - Chapter Three -- Telling Your Story