What a newsroom needs from you

Lesson 31 of 50Module 6 · Digital PR and earned media6 min read

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

Coverage is lost in the last ten minutes

The stage of a story where you lose coverage is rarely the pitch. It is the moment forty minutes before filing when the reporter needs a job title spelled correctly, a photograph they are allowed to publish, and confirmation of one number. If those things take more than a couple of minutes to find, the story runs shorter, runs without you, or runs with a competitor who answered the phone.

Everything in this lesson exists to remove friction at that moment. None of it is glamorous, none of it generates a link on its own, and collectively it does more for a digital PR program than any individual campaign asset. I have watched well-built stories die because a press page had a contact form with a five-day response time and no phone number on it.

One page, linked from the footer, at a predictable URL. It should contain, in roughly this order:

• A named contact. A person's name, a direct email address and a phone number that a human answers. Not a form. Not press@ with nobody watching it. If you are a one-person business, that person is you.
• The boilerplate. Two or three sentences describing what the organization does, written so a reporter can paste it into the last paragraph without editing. Include the founding year, the location and the scale in whatever terms are honest and public.
• Spokespeople. Names, titles, what each can speak to, and a link to a fuller bio.
• Images. Logo files, headshots and any relevant photography, with the usage rights stated.
• Facts and figures. The numbers you are willing to have quoted — employees, locations, customers, volumes — with an as-at date on each.
• Recent coverage and published research. Links to your own studies and to significant articles about you. This is the section that tells a reporter other newsrooms have already checked you out.

Keep it current. A press page listing a spokesperson who left two years ago tells a journalist exactly how much attention the organization pays to media, and they will draw the obvious conclusion about your data too.

Spokesperson bios that survive fact-checking

A bio exists to answer one question: why should a reader believe this person on this subject? Adjectives do not answer it. Verifiable specifics do.

Write the credentials a fact-checker can confirm — qualifications, years in the role, institutions, published work, certifications, court appearances, board positions, anything with an external record. State the subjects the person can and cannot speak to, because a reporter who knows the boundary is more likely to call, not less. Include how to reach them and the hours they are actually available, including whether they can do broadcast and from where.

Avoid the industry habit of describing everyone as a leading expert, a thought leader or a pioneer. Those words are invisible to journalists at best and faintly embarrassing at worst. "Has testified as an expert witness in fourteen cases involving domain name disputes" is worth more than any amount of leadership language, because it is checkable and specific.

Keep two versions: a short paragraph for pasting into an article, and a fuller page. Reporters use the short one; fact-checkers use the long one.

Images, and the rights question

Images are where preparation converts most directly into coverage, because an article with no usable image often gets cut or demoted, and picture desks work on shorter timescales than reporters.

Supply high-resolution files — genuinely print-resolution, not something scaled up from a web thumbnail — in a range of crops, including at least one landscape and one portrait. Photographs of real people, real places and real objects outperform stock imagery and abstract graphics by a wide margin. If your story involves a physical thing, photograph the thing.

State the usage rights in writing, on the same page as the file. Say who took the photograph, what credit line you require, and exactly what publications may do with it. If you are granting free editorial use, say so in those words. Ambiguity is treated as a no by any picture desk with a functioning legal process, and a magnificent image nobody is sure they can publish is worth nothing.

Charts and data visualizations follow the same logic with one addition: publish the underlying numbers alongside the graphic, because many outlets redraw charts in their own house style and cannot do that from an image. A redrawn chart usually still credits the source, which is the outcome you wanted.

The media kit and the fact sheet

For a specific campaign, assemble everything in one place and make it downloadable without a form. A form on a press asset costs you coverage from every journalist who is not willing to hand over their email to a marketing system, which is most of them.

A campaign kit typically holds the release or story summary, the full methodology, the data tables, the images with rights, the spokesperson bios, two or three pre-approved quotes, and the contact details. Name the files sensibly. A folder of items called final_v3_USE_THIS.jpg is a small insult to someone working at speed.

The fact sheet is the underrated part. One page, no marketing language, just the checkable facts: what the organization is, when it started, where it operates, how large it is, who runs it, and the definitions of any terms specific to your sector. Reporters covering an unfamiliar company use it to avoid errors, and avoiding errors is most of what they are worried about.

Embargoes, exclusives and how to run them

An embargo means you give journalists the story in advance on the condition that nothing is published before an agreed time. It exists because good coverage takes preparation — calls to independent experts, a chart drawn properly, an editor briefed — and no reporter can do that in the twenty minutes after a release lands.

Rules that keep embargoes working:

• Agree it, do not assume it. Ask the reporter whether they will accept the embargo before you send the material. An embargo announced unilaterally in an email is not binding and is regularly ignored.
• State the time with a time zone. Every time. This is the most common avoidable error.
• Give real lead time. A day or two for most stories, longer for anything that requires independent verification. An embargo of two hours is a countdown, not a courtesy.
• Send the complete package. Embargoed material with the data still to follow wastes the lead time you just bought.
• Do not break your own embargo. Publishing on your own site or social accounts before the lift time releases everyone else and destroys your credibility for the next one.

An exclusive is different: one outlet gets the story alone, in exchange for more prominent treatment. It is a real trade — you accept a single placement instead of many, in the hope that the single one is significant enough to be followed by others. It works when the outlet is genuinely first choice for the audience. It fails when you offer an exclusive to a title that then does not run it, and you have burned the news window waiting.

The named human who replies

If you take one thing from this lesson, take this. The most valuable press asset an organization has is a person who answers, quickly, with useful information, including when the answer is inconvenient.

That person needs the authority to say something without a three-day approval chain, or the news window closes while the legal review runs. They need to know what is confidential and what is not, so they can answer immediately rather than checking every time. And they need to reply to journalists they cannot immediately help — a fast "not my area, but try this person" builds more goodwill than silence, and costs a minute.

Organizations that get this right are covered more often than their news warrants, because reporters route around difficulty. When two companies could illustrate the same story, the one that picks up the phone is the one in the article. That is not a trick, and it is not something an agency retainer can substitute for.