What makes a story a journalist will run

Lesson 28 of 50Module 6 · Digital PR and earned media5 min read

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

The six news values, in plain terms

Newsrooms do not use a formal scoring system, but editors everywhere apply roughly the same set of judgments. Learning them is the cheapest thing you can do to improve a digital PR program, because it lets you kill bad ideas before you have paid for them.

• Timeliness. Is it happening now, or does it explain something that is? Yesterday's data is not news; yesterday's data that explains today's event is.
• Proximity. Does it affect this outlet's readers where they live and work? A national figure broken down by city is six local stories instead of one national one.
• Conflict. Is someone opposed to someone? Conflict includes disagreement, litigation, competition, regulation and counterintuitive findings that contradict what people believe.
• Novelty. Is it the first, the last, the largest, the only? Genuine firsts are rare and journalists are good at spotting fake ones.
• Human interest. Is there a person in it? Numbers do not have faces; the story is the person the number happened to.
• Magnitude. How many people does it affect, and by how much? A change that touches a hundred people is a trade story, one that touches a million is a national one.

A story usually needs two or three of these to run at all, and something exceptional on at least one of them to run somewhere competitive. An idea that scores weakly on all six is not a story you have failed to explain well. It is not a story.

Write the headline first

The single most useful discipline I know in this work: before you commission the survey, buy the dataset or brief the designer, write the headline you want the outlet to publish. Not your headline. Theirs — in their house style, in their word count, on their section front.

If you cannot write that headline, you do not have a story yet, and no amount of production budget will conjure one. If you can write it but it is boring when you read it aloud, the finished campaign will be boring too. If writing it forces you to state a claim your data will not actually support, you have found the problem early and cheaply, which is the entire point of the exercise.

Then ask the harder second question: what is the second paragraph? A headline with no second paragraph is a statistic, not a story. The second paragraph is usually where the human, the conflict or the consequence lives. If you cannot supply it, the reporter has to find it themselves, and most will not do that work for a pitch from a stranger.

What a journalist's day actually looks like

People pitch as though a reporter is sitting at an empty desk waiting for interesting email. Here is a closer approximation, and it explains most of the silence you experience.

The day usually opens with a conference or news meeting where the desk agrees what it is covering. By the time that meeting ends, the day's stories are largely allocated. The reporter then spends the bulk of the day on those stories: calls that do not get returned, documents that arrive in the wrong format, a source who will only speak off the record, a subeditor asking for a hundred words fewer. Somewhere in there is a filing deadline that does not move.

Email arrives continuously throughout. A reporter covering an active beat can receive hundreds of pitches a day, most of them irrelevant, many of them clearly sent by software. Triage is brutal and happens in the subject line. A pitch that survives triage gets perhaps five seconds of the first paragraph.

So your email arrives, almost always, at the wrong moment — in the middle of someone else's deadline. That is not a problem you can solve by writing more persuasively. It is a problem you solve by being relevant enough to be worth a second look, short enough to be read in the gap between two calls, and by understanding the rhythm: early in the day before the desk fills up, early in the week rather than Friday afternoon, and never during the hour before a known deadline. These are tendencies, not laws — broadcast, weeklies, trade monthlies and rolling news all run on different clocks, and knowing which clock your target is on is part of the job.

Things that are not stories

I am blunt about this with clients because the money saved is real. The following are, on their own, not stories to anyone outside your company:

• A product launch. Unless the product creates or ends a category, it is a listing at best.
• A rebrand or new website. Nobody outside the building cares, and saying so in a press release invites ridicule.
• A hire. Trade press may run a board-level appointment as a paragraph. That is the ceiling.
• An award you entered and paid for. Journalists know how those work.
• A partnership announcement. Two companies agreeing to work together is a fact, not a development.
• A survey of a few hundred people about something nobody disputes. This is the classic failed digital PR campaign, and Lesson 6.3 explains exactly how it collapses.
• Your CEO's opinion about the future of the industry. Opinion is only publishable when the person is already an authority the audience recognizes.

Some of these become stories with an additional ingredient. A hire is a story if the person is leaving a competitor under contested circumstances. A partnership is a story if it reshapes a market. A product launch is a story if a regulator has questions about it. The ingredient is almost always conflict, magnitude or genuine novelty — which takes you straight back to the six values.

Building a story out of what you already have

Most organizations have more story material than they think, and it is usually sitting in three places.

Operational data. Anything you count as a matter of routine may be a proxy for something a journalist cares about. Booking patterns, search volumes on your own site, claim rates, delivery times, cancellation reasons. Aggregated properly, these describe behavior nobody else can see.

People with real expertise. Somebody in your organization knows something technical, specific and hard to acquire. That person is a source, and sources are how reporters build ongoing coverage. Lesson 6.4 covers how to make them findable and useful.

Things you do in the physical world. Events, sponsorships, facility openings, restorations, community projects. These have proximity and human interest built in, and they generate the kind of local and trade coverage that is far easier to earn than national placement.

Start with what you have and find the news value in it. That is the reverse of how most campaigns are planned — pick a topic, commission a survey about it, hope — and it produces better work because the story is grounded in something real before anyone writes a pitch.