Who are journalists and where can you find them, locally? COVID leads to village mentality.

Today, I'd like to talk about journalists. A key part of any public relations campaign is reaching out to the journalists. Often, we just think of PR as being a generic media pool. Well, today I'd like to go a little bit deeper into where we can go if we actually need to find media. I was chatting today with a property manager in London. This conversation led to an interesting point when the property manager said that the people coming to look at the properties now with the lockdown over are looking to rent next to where they work. She said that the people inquiring are not living further out. They want to move from where they currently live into town and to save the commute. Having just been on a train on Monday across the country, I can say that it's not a pleasant experience. You have to wear the face mask, social distancing, everything is shut, and so on. It led me to thinking about the importance of proximity, that if we are going to return to almost a village mentality, where we like to live, work, and play within the environment without the need to take a train, a car, or a plane, this is going to fundamentally shift the nature of public relations. Social media is fantastic in that it has no geographical boundaries. But for the same reason, social media is appalling, because it has no social geographical boundaries. We know that with platforms like Facebook and Google Ads, we can target the posts that we make by city and by demographic. It's very, very powerful indeed. But what about media relations? How are we going to start to get the word out if we've got a local business which is going to cater now to people who may be living in the neighborhood? Whereas in the past, they may have driven from another town into your town or flown in from another place. I wanted to look at, if I was going to be doing public relations or media relations in an area where I live and work, how am I going to do that? One of the things that I've seen and done in the past is very simple. It's signage, for example, signage on buildings, on bus stops, on the back of rest stops. Signage, to some degree, has almost been lost in this digital age, but street banners, posters in windows, these are things that we can do that are, quite obviously, not that expensive, and they are appealing to the people that are right next to our business. That business could be a bank. It could be a restaurant. It could be an office. It could be an empty office or an empty apartment. I think we're going to see a return to making signs that people can see where they can walk very close and actually take goods with them. I spoke about Google My Business the other day, and I found out that I got 150 views of my latest posts. This is automatic, because I attached my Google My Business pages in Singapore and the UK to my Zoho Social Media Manager. So when I make a post on Facebook, it also goes out to Google My Business. Using local tools, Google My Business being a free and easy one to use, signage and banners are helpful, but what about looking at the media? Interestingly enough, there is a new network of hyperlocal news sites in the UK that's been started up by a chap called Karl Hancock who was inspired to take up the project after being in the city. He was one of the judges on the Dragon's Den. He is a young computer programmer who had launched the Nub News in Bridgewater, of all places, as a hobby whilst he was at the University of Cardiff. Karl Hancock is actually one of the few people hiring journalists, and he's focusing his efforts on towns with populations of between 5,000-100,000; in other words, those cities or towns which are not served by the large regional titles like the mainstream news. They're actually making what are effectively local newsletters. He's signing some 200 journalists, and he's got the aim of having 700 news sites around the UK over the next 4-5 years. In Karl's opinion, he says that he thinks there's a demand for hyperlocal news without the intrusive advertising and pop-up surveys. What's interesting about that is he goes on to say they want to delve into the community and talk to the people that really matter. If we're running a local business which, let's face it, most businesses are local, and the majority of businesses are 5-10 people and under a million pounds, so actually, Mr. Hancock is onto something. Originally, 100 years ago or so, newspapers were local. They were newspapers like the Kentish Gazette where I appeared, which was originally just for Canterbury, and was bought up then by the Kent Messenger that brought in Herne Bay and Whitstable and Margate, and got the economies of scale of a few journalists and printing. Now, it's coming back full circle, so it's interesting to see that local media channels are going to start to to pick up, in the UK at least. I had read about this trend in America. But there, it's really about syndicated news with local advertising, while what's happening in the UK is actually local news with local advertising, so they're fundamentally different. There are a number of sites which we can go to and find online. For example, there's one called the Resource Centre, which is for Brighton and Hove in Sussex. They have about 800 local groups. These include play groups, environmental shops, residents, art associations, and you can contact them if you've got stories. There is another website, which is actually by Wiki. It's wiki.openrightsgroup.org. This was last edited in 2017. This is a free-to-use wiki source which will give you media contacts in the UK. There is a another website called thelocal.com. The Local is a news brand for, they call themselves, modern pioneers who are looking for daily independent reporting from around Europe. The head office is based in Sweden, but it appears to be manned by all manner of nationalities. According to their website, they want their news to be sourced locally and not delivered through the filter of a national or international news brand thousands of miles away. What we're now seeing is, in a way, a reflection of people feeling disconnected from what they're reading in their national or international news, and wanting to get back to being local. The Local has 7 million readers each month, and their profile apparently are well educated and well informed. They cover all

political, social, economic. As we promote our businesses, The Local will have stories related to your town, or your village, and the Nub News websites will be relevant to your local. This is important, because the media on the national titles are increasingly stretched, but also, they may or may not have enough audience for your story in order to make it interesting for them to publish. If you are interested in finding national stories or people from BBC, on wikipedia.org, there is a list of BBC news reporters and news readers. Some of them have got their contact details, but you can also reach out via bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/enquiries. This is actually the main media putting out for you a place where you can find them. What I like to look at is the media themselves. If we are interested in a particular magazine, especially in a niche, for example, in farming, in agriculture, in manufacturing, or in plastics, these vertical trade titles and your consumer titles will all list somewhere a media contact. In my view, there is no better way to build a media list than to go to the media you're interested in and find those media contacts. Increasingly, almost always, the media put their contact details on the site or a Twitter handle. Many media and magazines will include what they call a masthead, which is a list of journalists, often at the back of the publication if it's a print one. Sometimes on the inside front cover, there will be the details of the editor and the publisher. The media will also share their LinkedIn profile. One of the things that I do now if I'm looking for a journalist is I will look for them on LinkedIn. It's not so great if they have a more common name, and some journalists don't use LinkedIn, but certainly, the freelance publications, the freelance publishers, and freelance journalists will be looking for stories. And so, they'll be promoting themselves and making themselves available. Of course, you can use sites like journolink.com, which says it has 10,000 journalists. You can use Cision, Prowly, or ResponseSource. These ones all ask you to pay. More importantly, they might give you a big media database, but realistically, how many media are you going to talk to? These are very good if you're running an agency and you need to reach out to a different cohort of media everyday or week. But for most of us with our businesses, we might have a top five or 10 or maybe 15 media. It's easy to find those and build them into an Excel spreadsheet and keep a list of stories that they've been running and then reach out to them. There's a website called Anxiety Culture with a list of media contacts, mainly the BBC and the Guardian Independent. And on there, they've published all those main media outlets' contact details along with the pitch that if you're upset with what they're writing, you could tell them by looking at their contact details. It may not be the best way to complain, but it certainly gives you the contact details for free. There's also another useful one called media.info. They have some 7000 media titles. It's actually run by an Australian company, but it's worldwide. What's interesting and a little bit different to the models like Prowly and Cision is the difference here is that the media have listed themselves. They list what they're interested in and they display their contact details. So, if you want to know about the media, there are a number of ways that you can do it. You can go to the titles you're interested in and use the masthead to find them, you can go to social media and find them, you can go to LinkedIn, or you can use these databases, some of which are free and some of which are paid for. If you're also interested in finding out what the journalists are writing about regarding your industry, you can go, in the UK, to the pressgazette.co.uk. This is, if you like, the industry newspaper, or one of them, where journalists are featured, what they're writing, where they're moving, and any other aspects of being a journalist. The other place that you can look for journalists or find out more about journalism is the National Union of Journalists, which was founded in 1907 in the UK. It's the biggest journalist union in the world. In 2016, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published a survey. I thought it would be interesting to share this with you, because we sometimes feel that journalists must be these well paid run-about people who are highly sought after and are sort of celebrities in their own right. The reality according to this Reuters study is a little bit different. They say that most journalists entering the trade today will have a bachelor's degree, probably a master's degree, but they'll also be white, most probably, with a one-in-five chance of earning less than 19,000. In other words, 20% of our journalists earn just about the living wage. Forty-five percent of journalists are female, and they are less well paid than their male counterparts, and we've seen this in the BBC recently. So ironically enough, this libertarian values defending institution has been very sexist. But also, it is not fully representative of the racial mix that we have in the UK. I'm not sure about in other countries, but black Britons are just 0.2% percent of the media pool, and yet they are making up 3% of the UK population. This report shows that more than half of journalists work online, and that the proportion working in print has fallen from 56% to 44%, and those working exclusively online receive less pay than those working in print. It's showing that more and more are moving online, but they're earning less. They're well educated, but it's also a killer, because if you think about it, as we send our pitches to the media, journalists produce 50-60 or even 75 stories per week. It's a phenomenal work rate for these journalists, who are often young and underpaid, but very academically qualified. In the UK, 94% agree that they should adhere to a code of professional ethics, but most of them believe it was justified to pay for confidential information when it's in the public interest. This compared with only 5% of American journalists who felt that they should pay for confidential information. Furthermore, 81% in the UK said they would use confidential information without permission compared to 58% in America if they believed it was in the public interest, so the UK is still defending press freedom. According to labor statistics, there are 64,000 journalists registered in the UK. In America, according to the census, in 2011, there were only 46,000 reporters nationwide, but that had gone down to 32,900 by 2015. In America, the number of people who are qualified or claiming to be full-time journalists seems to have actually gone into decline. As we think about the media and the pitching, let's just remember who it is that we're pitching to. They're most likely very well educated, and they're most likely not very well paid, according to their education. They're probably white and middle class, and if they're women, they're earning less than their male peers. So before you think about sending a press release, in general, to a wide audience, let's look at how our businesses and our lifestyles post-COVID may become more local, as I mentioned about the property agent saying that the people looking to tenant this flat in London are now looking to save a commute and to live near where they work and to walk to work. If this is the case then, actually, our PR job should get easier, because there are people like Nub News creating local media again and our stories will be more compelling to those local media if they have an "And, But, Therefore" as I discussed previously.