Speaker 1: Public relations should be approached journalistically. My name is Ken Harvey, and I've enjoyed a long career split between journalism and public relations. My multimedia textbook, Crash Course in Mass Communication, teaches the basic skills of both journalism and PR. In this presentation, I will explain why and how PR practitioners benefit by approaching their profession as good journalists. Think like a journalist. A PR professional is like a captive journalist working for one organization and writing stories only related to that one organization. Thinking like a journalist will help you achieve high-quality stories in other PR products. And learning to think like a journalist is also the best way to achieve and maintain strong media relations. It can make the difference between whether media professionals see you as an asset or an enemy. Interview like a journalist. You should interview sources within the organization and among the organization's key publics, such as clients and customers, to find and create good stories. Interviews have two primary purposes for journalists. First, finding out what there is of interest to write about. And second, gathering quotes and information with which to actually produce a good story. Finding a good story idea is as important as writing a story well. This is as true for a PR professional as it is for a journalist. In interviewing organization executives, employees, customers, clients, etc. actually serves as valuable research in preparing to create a PR plan. Interviewing individuals such as these can provide the same sort of information as would hosting focus groups, which is a popular form of PR research. The interviews can help you understand an organization's SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats around which you build a PR plan. In the process, the interviews can provide lots of great ideas for stories and other PR products. And finally, the interviews can provide the actual raw material, quotes, information, graphics, etc. needed to prepare effective stories. So what questions would you ask? Journalists always fall back on their five W's, who, what, when, where, why, and how. To me, the most important are what, why, and how. Why and how are particularly effective in drawing out details of value. Let's consider more specific questions you might ask stakeholders. For executives, how is the organization doing now? What are the organization's most important projects ongoing or planned for the future? Why are these so important? How will these projects impact the organization's clients or customers? How will they impact the organization itself? For employees, why do you work at this organization? How do you feel about your work specifically and the organization itself? What do you think the organization does really well? How do you think the organization could improve its products and services? What would you say is the mission of the organization? And how does its mission correlate with your own personal mission in life? What things of interest are you working on with the organization? What do you do outside of work, such as hobbies or community service? For clients, customers, investors, or donors, you might ask, why do you support or do business with this organization? Again, what do you think this organization does really well? How do you think the organization could improve its products and services? How do you think this organization compares with other competitors? There are many more questions you could ask, but I hope these few examples help you understand how asking questions, like a journalist, can help you understand the organization's SWOT, develop a PR plan to help advance the organization's relationships, provide good ideas for stories and other PR products and tactics, and provide good quotes and information to use in producing good stories. With all this information, now write like a journalist. In many cases, editors or news directors will be your gatekeepers who decide whether to use your stories in their newspapers, magazines, broadcast TV and radio news, or on professional news sites on the Internet. You should write like a journalist also because news style has been proven extremely effective. News readers in print and online are skimmers. They skim a story quickly to determine whether to read even a few paragraphs, and if they get bored, they quickly jump to another story. This has been true for traditional newspapers for more than a century, but even more true today with online media, where readers can jump instantaneously to any of millions of other information sources. Inverted Pyramid is still a style that meets the needs of such readers. All the most important and interesting information is at the top, so a skimmer can quickly capture the essence of the story and only continue reading as long as the story continues to meet his needs and interests. Learning to identify and emphasize the most newsworthy, interesting elements of a story is vital, and using good quotes from authoritative sources enhances your credibility. Let's review some of the key concepts of professional journalism. I don't think the entire world needs to copy Western journalism in every respect, but these three key concepts, I believe, are very valuable. They were developed in the hotly competitive free marketplace in America over the past 200 years. In a free marketplace, you have kind of a survival of the fittest scenario, where the best ideas usually win. These three key concepts that have survived the test of time and competition are 1. Organize to emphasize. What I mean by this is to find the most interesting or powerful information you have gathered from your research and give it emphasis in your story. We call that the whammy. You find the whammy and feature it in your first paragraph, the lead. The lead may take you as long to write as the rest of the story because it is so important. You want to figure out how to feature that most important, that most powerful aspect of the story, the whammy. In the crash course, we review many examples of different types of leads. They're all just different ways to emphasize the whammy. The most frequently used lead is the interview speech lead because it emphasizes what important thing a person has said in an interview or speech. Since many of our stories, whether in news or in PR, are based on interviews, the interview speech lead is very appropriate much of the time. How you can best write a lead is important to understand, and I cover that thoroughly in the crash course. 2. Simplify to clarify. Far too many people think that the bigger the words and the more complicated the sentence structure they use, the higher the praise they will receive for their writing. Perhaps this begins in primary school when teachers are trying to encourage us to expand our vocabulary and our grammar skills. However it begins, it is a very bad habit. Keep your writing simple. Journalism is written for the masses and for skimmers, so popular newspapers are typically written at an 8th or 9th grade level. The most popular writing on the internet has also been shown by research to be written at this level. But I have found that simple journalistic writing is even appreciated by academics with their much polished PhDs. It is possible to write about nuclear energy and quantum physics using 9th grade vocabulary and simple sentences. And the more simply you can explain complex content, the better a writer you are. And the more your writing will be appreciated by everyone, including the most advanced intellects, because all of us are in a hurry these days to understand and digest information. 3. Attribute to Verify Unlike many PR practitioners, you should attribute almost everything you write, just like a professional journalist would. I know that is not always the journalistic practice around the world, but I believe it should be. No matter where you live in the world, if you attribute essentially everything in your story, whether you are a journalist or a PR practitioner, it will have more credibility. People will believe it more. The fact that you can name specific authoritative sources. So whether you are a journalist or a PR practitioner, it is important to attribute, to give your sources, the mayor said, the scientist said, the business executive said, etc. Here are some public relations examples. I am providing two ways to write several different PR products. So read example 1, then example 2, and decide which is better and why. Which version has the bigger impact? Which do you like the best? So first, here is example 1 of a press release. Stop the video to read it. Here is example 2 of a press release. Again, you can stop the video. Another product that many PR practitioners use is a Q&A, question and answer sheet. So again, look at example 1 and then example 2. Which do you think is best and why? We also, as PR practitioners, have to prepare executive biographies. These are usually available online and frequently distributed with news releases. So again, here is example 1 and example 2. Think over both and decide which you think is more interesting or has a bigger impact and why. Now let's go back and look at these again. Between the two examples of press releases, the one I hope you prefer is example 2. What you should have noticed if you read closely is that example 2 had attribution. Example 1 had no attribution besides the contact information. It doesn't say who provided this information. Many news releases come out like this. It is not that unusual, but it is not the best practice. Example 2 gives the attribution so it has greater credibility. Example 2 is also much more likely to be accepted by professional news editors or news directors because it sounds more professional, more like a journalist. For a PR practitioner to get his material into print media, on the air, or into professional news websites, he has to get past that journalistic gatekeeper. Now look at the two Q&As. It's basically the same thing. Example 2 comes with specific attribution and follow-up contact information for each question. This second approach is not common. I have never seen a Q&A with attribution in actual practice. However, as I have pondered this now that I am outside the profession, I have concluded that it would be much more useful to a journalist and much more credible to a non-journalist to provide attribution. Now in real everyday practice. The PR practitioner is frequently a ghostwriter for company executives. The PR practitioner may request some emailed thoughts about these questions from the executives and other top authorities, but he may write most of it himself, and may screen and respond to all of the follow-up emails sent to the email addresses provided. But to give a Q&A to a journalist with specific information and email address would make it much more powerful and credible, and more likely to be used by a journalist, and as I said, much more credible to the non-journalist as well. Attribution equals credibility. And now look at the executive biographies, examples 1 and 2. This is a little different. It is not just a matter of attribution. Example 1 is a real executive biography directly copied from the Disney website. Example 2 I just made up, so the facts are not accurate, the quotes are not correct, I just made them all up. So my apologies to Disney. But the point of Example 2 is that it is written more journalistically in every way. Yes, it has quotes and attribution, but it has much more. It is written in inverted pyramid style, and emphasizes a whammy in the lead that will attract readers. For some reason in the real world of public relations, can there actually be a real world in public relations? I'm not sure. But for some reason in the real world of public relations, practitioners think it is okay to write a boring executive biography. Go to the internet and Google executive biography. The Disney example is not unusual. It is the norm. And Disney is a multi-billion dollar corporation that can afford the very best PR practitioners. But I see no excuse to write a boring anything in PR. Several things may happen because of a more interesting and journalistic executive biography as Example 2. First, if a journalist read an executive biography like Example 2, it might occur to him, wow, this person might make a good feature story. So you will get news coverage from it. Example 1 would rarely cause that kind of response. Two, even if you don't get any additional news coverage, it is simply more readable for whoever reads it. An employee, a supplier, a government official, people from any of the organization's key publics will respond better to Example 2 than to Example 1. Three, the executive may be invited to speak at a national conference, perhaps, because somebody was impressed with what is in the executive biography. Four, customers and clients are more likely to do repeat business with an organization directed by executives whose biographies make them sound more professional, more interesting, more human. Five, employees will feel more pride to work for an organization if the biographies make the executives appear more honorable, interesting, trustworthy, caring, whatever. Prospective investors who read Example 2 are more likely to invest. There are all kinds of good things that can happen as a result of Example 2, and essentially nothing will happen because of Example 1. It's a very boring story. So in my way of teaching and preaching public relations, as a PR professional, you should act like a journalist almost all the time. You should think like a journalist, interview and write like a journalist. Journalistic interviewing will help you find good stories and better understand your organization's challenges and opportunities. Thinking like a journalist will help you work more effectively with news media professionals, both traditional and online. And journalistic writing will most frequently lead to better, more readable, more interesting, and more powerful PR products. There is never an excuse to write a boring copy. Everything you write should be interesting. You should look for a whammy in every story, every article, every report that you write. You should always look for the most interesting aspect and give it emphasis, highlight it in the very first sentence, and then build from there. And you should attribute, just like a journalist as well, to achieve higher credibility with news professionals as well as with other readers. For more help in becoming a successful communications professional, visit www.virtual-university.us and subscribe to my multimedia crash course in mass communication.