“The media” aren’t contracting

Sometimes, when people hear what I do for a living, they ask me, “Aren’t you worried there won’t be any media left to pitch?”

No way.

There are more media than ever before. And even the “legacy” or “traditional” media are giving us more opportunities to reach their audiences. Here comes a specific example, but don’t get fixated on this one channel. There’s a bigger point here that I’ll drive home at the end of this article.

Every January I present to members of my Inner Circle “What Will Matter in the Coming Year – and What Won’t.” This past January I spent significant time on Facebook video, including Facebook Live. Sure, local TV is enduring big budget cuts and it’s harder than ever to get a camera to your events. But now every journalist – newspaper writer, blogger, or web producer – carries a camera. Right in their pocket.

Inner Circle member Sarah Snyder works at a university that hosts the National Orchestral Institute and Festival every year. She’s worked hard to develop relationships with the small cadre of journalists who cover that space. One of them is the classical music critic for the Washington Post.

Now, if Sarah were like many PR pros, she would complain about how the pool of traditional journalists to pitch is shrinking and that her bosses have unrealistic demands. But she’s not like most PR pros.

Instead, she’s constantly seeking new and better ways to get her organization’s messages in front of her audiences via venues those audiences trust and respect. So she started looking at “traditional media” in a non-traditional way.

She proposed several angles to her contact at the Post for this year’s festival. And one of them worked out so well that the critic ended up producing a Facebook Live feed of a rehearsal before the festival. To date is has more than 60,000 views.

“It was a ton of work,” Sarah says – 120 emails back-and-forth – “but it’s been a huge success!”

Even though Sarah also landed other, more traditional, coverage in the Post, she’s likely reaching a different group of people through the FB Live channel and sharing her message more broadly than she would have otherwise.

Where do you go from here? Maybe it’s not Facebook Live, but there is definitely a new channel that has emerged this year that your key audiences are paying attention to. If your media list is shrinking, you’re doing it wrong. Find new outlets that have emerged recently, and supplement your usual approaches with entirely new channels like Sarah did. She says:

“I love being an Inner Circle member because it challenges me to keep thinking about new angles or ways to put our story out there.”

If you’d like to find out more about the Inner Circle and get a free taste of what it offers, register here.