W e are used to say that we are flooded with news. But how much news does a major daily newspaper like Il Sole 24 Ore contain every day? Or Tg1 Rai? The press office activity is measured precisely with this kind of news.
Every day, we filter thousands of news only to focus on a few of them: the press office activity is about overcoming filters and offering the relevant information about a certain product or company brand to the public.
Media Relations and the Press
News are constantly relaunched by news bulletins, aggregators, blogs, social media, influencers, but the actual number of news items covered every day by the main news sources – newspapers, radio, TV, press agencies – is very limited, as it can be verified reading a newspaper or watching a news site or a TV news program.
On average, Il Sole 24 Ore, the most important Financial Newspaper in Italy, contains a hundred news items per day, ranging from political and economic current affairs to finance and regulatory updates. The Corriere della Sera homepage, one of the most read news sites in Italy, has no more than 70-80 national news items. Tg1 Rai’s 13.30 news programme has 7-8 news items, often accompanied by several reports.
The press office activity is confronted with these numbers and these spaces, what we call ‘media relations’, because it operates through the building of direct relations with Italian journalists, in order to accredit itself as a credible supplier of news concerning client companies.
This is quite different from the undifferentiated dissemination of press releases, inexorably destined for journalists’ spam boxes.
What is a press office
The press office is responsible for managing and channelling the flow of news about a company or institution to the media.
This requires media relations professionals – often journalists – to build correct and mutually trusting relationships with their referrers in the editorial offices, who don’t like to be seen as a channel for company promotion.
Journalists are only interested in unpublished and fresh news, not concerning the ordinary management of a company or entity for instance. To find out if a fact is a news, it is not enough to summarise it in a press release: you need a press office specialist, who knows the media universe very well and who supports the company in selecting information of potential interest to the press and formatting it in line with journalistic standards.
What does a Press Office do
Once these three preliminary steps have been taken, media accreditation, identification of the news and journalistic formatting, the most suitable tool for communicating the news must be identified.
This could be press releases. A press release is a short informative text built like an article: a news item, a headline, a subheading, an opening paragraph framing the news and a series of information to contextualise and deepen the news.
If the news has a particularly high relevance, the press office may decide to organise a press conference, i.e. a meeting reserved for journalists and authors operating on the web (bloggers and influencers), in which it tells the news and makes itself available to answer journalists’ requests for in-depth information.
In alternative, it is possible to reserve the news for a single media outlet, for example by proposing an exclusive interview.
In order to monitor the outcome of the media relations activity, a press review service is used, which makes it possible to detect all the articles – print and online – or radio and television reports that have picked up the news after the issue of a press release or after a press conference.
Which press office
Press offices are not all the same, and relying on an unskilled partner can be dangerous and counterproductive as the chat shown here between a communicator and a journalist demonstrates.
The communicator sends a simple message of esteem to a journalist with whom there is a good professional relationship. The journalist takes the opportunity to tell his displeasure at the press office’s lack of knowledge of the basic rules for hiring journalists.
The chat is authentic, only the name is disguised to protect the journalist’s identity, and this is one of the many conversations on this subject that happen when contacting journalists exasperated by the lack of professionalism of so many supposed communication experts.
Five criteria for choosing your press officer
Making sure that your press officer knows his job is not difficult. Here are five simple criteria to check whether you are dealing with an efficient press office:
1) Ask to see examples of articles, related to other clients of the agency, published in newspapers of national relevance.
2) Ask who write press releases: many press offices ask directly to their clients to write the press releases and this denotes a total lack of experience in media relations management.
3) Ask how press releases are distributed: be wary of those who promise to send your press releases to thousands of journalists: it means that they know neither the mechanisms for spreading press releases nor the journalists – usually very few – who might be interested in you and your products or services.
4) Ask if coverage of online publications, which have a great relevance in circulating your brand on Google, will be guaranteed through a Digital PR activity.
5) Make comparisons and do not rely on service costs that are far below the market average.
Stampa Finanziaria has long experience in the Financial Press office work in the B2B sector: contact us for an opinion, advice or a proposal to support your communication activities.