11. Creating a Sense of Trust between Journalists and PR Professionals

Gregory Galant is the cofounder and CEO of Muck Rack, Shorty Awards and Saw Horse. On the 2^nd day of Praxis 2019, I had the opportunity to listen to Galant’s keynote address on, “Creating a Sense of Trust between Journalists and PR Professionals”.  

Gregory began his address by stressing on the point that it is extremely important for PR professional to find the right journalists for their story. According to Gallant, academic subject matter experts, CEOs and PR professionals make the best journalists.  He also highlighted the difference between consumer preferences in India and the US. Accordingly, English language Indian newspapers have a wider reach offline than online reach. Facebook and Whatsapp are the most widely used social media and messaging platforms for news in India. 

Gregory also gave an overview of journalist preferences and behaviors. Facebook is the social media network that journalists plan to use least next year. Journalists get their news from online newspapers followed by Twitter. One reason for this is journalists love Twitter as a news source. Hence, Brands should focus on Twitter from a corporate communications view. 

Gregory provided some actionable tips for PR professionals to deal with major challenge facing the media. According to Gregory, lack of personalization is the main reason why journalists reject relevant pitches. Hence, it is important to form a personal relationship with them. One of the ways this could be achieved is by following them on social media. 61% journalists will usually or always consult a company’s social media before reporting about them. Hence a PR Professional should invest in his/her social media presence and build strong relationships with journalists. He also provided interesting insights such as, 78% of journalists like when PR professionals follows them on social media platforms. At the same time, PR professionals should never pitch to them over Twitter.  

Throughout his presentation, Gregory presented his arguments with the help of data and exclusive research of journalist preferences and behaviors in 2019 (based on Muck Rack’s State of Journalism Report 2019). For example, 58% journalists think company PR professionals are the most credible source.  According to data, two third of the populations feels that publishers, platforms should do more to address disinformation problem in India.

Finally, Gregory provided a few tips on building better relationships with journalists. They are as follows:

1)     Pitch journalists via 1:1 emails between 9-11 AM and with a length of 2-3 paragraphs. It is important to keep your pitch within 3 paragraphs. This helps to increase the conversion by 61%.

2)     It is important to research before pitching. The pitch should be something that journalists would typically cover or are at least interested in. It is also important for the PR professionals to know the hook, which will keep the journalists interested.

3)     Determine the journalists and outlet’s credibility before reaching out. Use resources like NewsGuard and Muck Rack outlet pages to determine trustworthiness.

4)     At the same time, it is also important to share their articles since they keep track how much a story is shared and the engagement on the piece.