May 10, 2011
Journalists, PR, and digital media: What works?
Although many journalists don’t like to admit it, PR people often play a key role in good journalism. Increasingly, these interactions happen via digital media channels, from e-mail to social media. A new white paper explores what’s working, and what’s not, in how journalists and PR people connect online…
MyPRGenie, a social media newswire, recently surveyed over 2400 journalists about their digital media habits and preferences for finding story ideas, researching stories, and connecting with sources. The report on this survey (available for download after you provide some info about yourself) is intended for an audience of PR pros, but it offers intriguing insights for and about journalists, too.
About 55% of responding journalists said they “follow” or “friend” corporate communications or PR pros on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. About the same percentage also said that social media is “an acceptable channel of communication with sources and their representatives.”
Despite growing social media connections with PR pros, an overwhelming majority (about 94%) of journalists prefer to receive press releases by e-mail. Also, about 70% prefer to be “pitched” (a more individual approach to suggesting a story than a press release) via e-mail.
According to this survey, only 1.5% of journalists reported a preference for getting press releases from distribution services such as PRNewswire—but consider this in light of the fact that MyPRGenie focuses on offering social media PR services, which compete directly with traditional wire services.
Perhaps due to journalists’ preference for e-mail, MyPRGenie strongly recommends that PR pros publish weekly e-mail newsletters, not just press releases. This allows organizations to reach a wider audience than journalists with their news. But e-mail newsletters also “can go viral on journalist networks. Journalists can recommend your newsletter to their friends and they may subscribe to it,” said the report. (The survey did not ask journos whether they subscribe to e-mail newsletters, however.)
Somewhat surprising: Only half of responding journalists said they consider links to sources to be a vital component of press releases.
About half of responding journalists complained that PR pros send irrelevant pitches via social media. It’s unknown whether this is better or worse than the relevance of pitches sent via e-mail or other channels—but since social media can be a highly interpersonal environment, it’s possible that irrelevance in this setting might seem more annoying.
Most journalists (about 62%, according to this survey) use Facebook in their reporting—yet only 36% promote and share their stories on Facebook. Similarly, 56% or journalists use Twitter in their reporting, but only 26% promote or share their stories there. This might suggest that journalists are more interested in using social media as a listening post; or that journalists are reluctant to self-promote.
Journalists who are interested in promoting or sharing their own work via social media might try this tip that the report offered for PR professionals: publicly bookmark and tag your stories in social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Diigo, or Reddit.
“Social bookmarking helps search engines with categorizing [content] and determining [its] relevance to keywords. It is driven by folksonomy—voluntary tagging by an online community of users. These activities also facilitate the building of communities of people who share common interests.
“...Social bookmarking also provides the benefit of making you more visible on the internet. [Content] that is bookmarked get indexed quickly by search engines. [Content creators] rank highly for the keywords with which [their content is tagged]. Social bookmarking helps you get more inbound links—an integral part of every search engine optimization plan.”
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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