GUIDELINES FOR ENGAGING WITH THE MEDIA

1. Accept that there are costs and risks involved in dealing with the media, but understand that the benefits far outweigh them. Of course there are risks (a fear that your work will be distorted and unfairly presented is the most significant) and there are costs (of which the greatest is time). The risks are, for the most part, pretty minimal – as long as you follow some fairly basic rules – and the costs are much less than many imagine.

2. Realise you are in charge. There isn’t one homogenous thing called The Media. The needs of TV are different to radio, which are different again to the press. Then there’s the difference between doing live interviews and pre-recorded ones, or between presenting or commentating or advising. You can pick the type of outlets and outputs with which you are most comfortable. If you fear freezing live on air, then don’t do live interviews; insist on pre-records, where you can stop and start again if you are unhappy with your answer. But if you have a particular concern with how your words will be presented and you worry about your message being distorted, then live interviews, whilst more scary, will give you extra control.  If you really fear being distorted, then don’t broadcast or brief at all; if you just write, you control every word. If your concern is gaining unwelcome attention, brief journalists on an off-the-record basis, with nothing attributed to you.

3. Understand that different media has different needs, different costs, and produces different benefits.

4. Be willing to start small.

5. Make sure your work is accessible. Journalists don’t have access to stuff behind publisher’s paywalls – and even if they did, they mostly don’t have the time to read a full length 30 page article to work out which bits matter to them. If you are an expert in, say, government relations and a journalist is looking for an expert in government relations ,how easy will it be for them to find you and to work out whether you could help them using Google? If the answer is ‘not very easy’, then don’t be surprised if they don’t contact you. Make sure that you have a free-to-view, easily understandable, summary of your work online. If the full article is behind a paywall, you can still write short blog posts summarising it, explaining what you’ve found, or how it connects to wider debates as long as Google can find that easily. In short, don’t write anything without putting a summary online somewhere, somehow.

6. Be proactive. Don’t just sit and wait for journalists to come to you. If you have things to say which relate to issues of the day (and if you don’t, what is the point of your work?), then promote your work to them. As well as formal press releases, a social media presence is now essential. Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are all easy ways to disseminate your work as are direct emails to journalists with whom you’ve built up relationships . This will help move your engagement with the media on from providing reaction to disseminating your work and changing the way the subject is reported or discussed. There’s a myth that journalists aren’t interested in this sort of stuff. It’s rubbish. Journalists love being able to report things that are counter-intuitive or which help explode some myth. You’ve just got to get it in front of them in a way that is useful.

7. Be responsive. You need to react to the media agenda and understand their needs. In dealing with the media, you need to be willing to be flexible and adaptable. A journalist who contacts you about a topic will need the information quickly, probably the same day. The caravan moves on. Technology makes this easier. Skype provides good enough quality for most radio outlets, and blogs and websites allow you to collect summaries of your material in one place, where it can be seen easily. Once you build up a reputation, journalists will go direct to your website for material they need, without bothering you.

8. Build up relationships. Email journalists who write about things that relate to your work (‘enjoyed your article on X, if you write about it again, you might find this useful’), enclosing a short summary of your findings. (Unless they specifically ask for it, there’s no point in sending them full articles or similar). Sure, most won’t reply. But some will. Building up relationships with journalists will help in the future in getting your work out to them – they are more likely to read something sent to them by someone they know and trust – but it also makes it more likely they’ll report your work in ways you’ll be happy with. Contrary to the stereotype, most journalists aren’t out to stiff you – any misreporting of your work is more likely to be accidental than deliberate – but an on-going relationship with them makes even accidental misreporting less likely.

9. Don’t worry about hostile questioning: Many people often fear that any encounter with a journalist will be like an interview, in which they will collapse under relentless hostile questioning. The truth is that most journalists will handle you with kid gloves. They’ll mostly be giving you softball questions, to get the best answers out of you. Unless your subject is extremely controversial – or you are being very provocative in how you are presenting it – you are really very unlikely to have a journalist try to kick lumps out of you.

10. Headline your findings. When briefing journalists you should start with the payoff: what you’ve found and why it matters, and then and only then (a bit) on how you did it. If you are putting together a briefing note, for example, the findings should not be longer than a page of A4, in bullet points or similar, and in easily understood jargon-free English.

11. They’re interested in what we know, not what we think. Journalists have lots of people who can give them opinions. The reason they are interested in us is because we are experts in government relations, because we know things they do not. Indeed, that is our only real authority to be taken seriously on the subject. This doesn’t mean we can’t have views – but they need be driven by what we know or can prove. For the most part, the reason the media are interested in us is because we are assumed to have something we can add to the debate. That ‘value-added’ element is key, and should drive how we try to contribute to the debate.

12. Be clear about what you want to say. This is standard media training advice – but it’s the standard because it’s true. If you are doing any broadcast media – or being interviewed for a briefing – make sure you have thought about what it is you need to get across before the interview starts. And keep it short and punchy.

13. Ignore the pompous and the prigs. You will, sadly, still find people who will denigrate engagement with the media, and/or excuse their own lack of engagement on the basis that their work is just ‘too sophisticated’ for the media. In a very small handful of cases it may indeed be true that their work is so brilliant and abstract that it could not sensibly be broadcast to others. Mostly, however, such comments are a mask for their own insecurities and jealousies. Such people are usually not very bright, and are working on stuff that’s pretty dull, and it is safer for them to engage in pointless academic circle jerks with other dull people than to engage with the wider world. 

14. Don’t underestimate journalists. Journalists are not stupid or lazy; they are mostly very sharp and incisive, but they are generalists and they work to time constraints most of us can barely imagine. Don’t patronise them. They will cut through blather and front pretty quickly.

15. Persevere. This won’t happen overnight. And, whatever advice you’ve been given, and however carefully you’ve followed it, things probably will go wrong on the way. You’ll do a duff interview. You’ll not be happy with the way a journalist writes your work up. You’ll get an angry letter from a listener who’s heard you on the radio and disagrees with you. But so what?

16. Be prepared to say no. Just because you want to help doesn’t mean you have to do whatever the journalists wants. If you’re just too busy, then say no. To begin with, you might want to say yes more than no, just to build up experience and contacts, but after a bit you’ll soon find yourself saying no more than yes, which is the correct ratio. And if you are at all uncomfortable about what the journalist is suggesting, say no, regardless of how prestigious the outlet.

17. If someone knows more about the subject than you do, then pass the journalist onto them. Once journalists – especially producers – have your details in their database, and know that you are reliable (by which they mean the sort of person who won’t soil themselves with fright when the microphone goes live), then the invites will soon start coming thick and fast. Many of them will be on subjects you know little or nothing about. These are usually best declined anyway – why go on to the media to discuss something you know nothing about? – but especially if you know of an academic who specialises in the area. It’s not a good experience watching someone else appear on TV commentating on something about which you, and not they, are the expert – although even worse is when they pass off your work and findings as their own. So it’s a fundamental 0courtesy to defer to them, and tell the journalist that they should speak to Dr Y instead. Sometimes the journalist won’t want to do that – either because they’re right up against a deadline and need something soon or because they’ve tried Dr Y once before and they did indeed soil themselves. Insist. 

18. Don’t treat it like an add-on. If you see engaging with the media as a troublesome extra, something that takes you away from your ‘proper’ job, then that is exactly what it will become. Instead, see it as an integral part of what you do: you research something and you tell the world about it. Obviously, there is a trade-off involved – and time spent dealing with the media cannot be spent doing something else – but if it means that over the course of your whole career you publish slightly fewer papers but you disseminate what work you have done much more widely, potentially to an audience of millions, then that is surely a trade worth making.

19. Enjoy it. It will be fun.

Do's and Don'ts When Dealing with the News Media

When pitching your organization's story to news editors, there are fundamental do's and don'ts that you should follow.

Do's

1. Do introduce yourself to different media editors, journalists, and freelancers by sending them an email note or by inviting them out for coffee or lunch. Bring along some background information or a few pages from your website to explain what your organization is all about.
2. Do follow up after the meeting with thank-you note, mentioning that you will be in touch as appropriate. This is important to set the stage for future dialogue.
3. Do let them know what your goals are and what special events, news, or programs you have coming up.
4. Do send out news releases by email about two weeks in advance, when you have a special event planned. Send a follow-up email a few days later. Phone again at a convenient time before the event to suggest a possible meeting or interview at the event. The bigger the event, the more advance notice should be given.
5. Do tailor your pitch for the needs of each medium. For example, set up plenty of photo opportunities for television media, human-interest stories for print, and interviews for radio.
6. Do give them the name of someone who has a personal experience to tell. Remember that the media loves a good story. Real life stories engage readers and makes for better copy than just statistics relating to Linux and open source.
7. Do ensure that you or your designated spokesperson is available for interviews at a moment's notice; otherwise much of your efforts will be in vain. Both of you, of course, should do your homework and rehearse questions and answers in advance. You should have facts, statistics, and anecdotes in your head, ready to use.

Don'ts

1. Don't send out a pitch or news release with vague, general statements. Your story has to show not tell, and you must convince the editor to cover the news that promotes your organization rather someone else's. Getting editorial coverage is fiercely competitive.
2. Don't ever tell the media what you want from them. Instead, ask them about the kinds of stories they're looking for, or if there are any other reporters in their newsroom who would be interested in Linux and open source. By learning what they want, you can tailor your communications to get what you want.
3. Don't underestimate the importance of less prominent media like community newspapers, cable TV, trade journals, and special-interest newsletters. Look at the entire spectrum of news media for different angles.