Public relations and journalism complement and need one another in the world of communications. The goal of journalists, when working with public relations practitioners, is to make sure the “story” is interesting to their target audience. Building strong relationships with public relations professionals is key. On the other hand, public relations professionals’ goal when working with journalists is to help both their clients and journalists secure a story and try to communicate that story through someone else.
Nonetheless, it can be tricky to work with professionals in these two industries. One of the hardest parts of working with public relations professionals is to differentiate between a newsworthy story and a story with no substance. When pitching a story to a journalist, public relations professionals need to ask themselves if the story is truly newsworthy. On the other hand, the hardest part of working with journalists is that reporters are overwhelmed and busy. Public relations practitioners need to find a way of getting their attention and stand out from everybody else.
To make it easier to work with journalists as public relations professionals, you must do your homework (do the appropriate research), only reach out when you have a story that is newsworthy and make your pitches interactive.
How can you make a journalist read your story? Keep it short and sweet, have bullet points or short sentences (they don’t have much time to dive in so it must be interesting to stand out), have a clear definition of the 5W’s (who, what, when, where, why, how) and make sure the ‘why’ stands out.
If public relations practitioners and journalists didn’t work together, there wouldn’t be public relations agencies. Both fields value each other – public relations professionals need journalists to tell stories and journalists need public relations professionals for connections and networking. Ultimately, public relations and journalism are like a book, public relations is the words, and journalism is the pictures.