Why content is still king in good PR

As a former journalist , I’ve come across my fair share of pointless press releases that would never in a million years make it into the paper. You know the type. A blatant piece of self-promotion or a tedious release that has absolutely no news value whatsoever.
It really makes you wonder what on earth that company’s PR team were thinking about sending this stuff out. Or, what is probably the case, the public relations department doesn’t know what it is doing. There is one school of PR practitioners that journalists really hate – the type who think their job is simply to keep saying nice things about their clients. Wrong. While there is undoubtedly a place for good news stories – especially these days – the basic point remains that if you want to get publicity for your client, you have to have a story to tell in the first place.
The best PR people are those who think like journalists. Newsrooms in Scotland and across the UK are under more pressure than ever to produce more content with less staff. The advent of social media and the need to upload quickly onto the internet means reporters are drowning under a tsunami of information and are having to churn out stories at breakneck speed.
This means that intelligent PR operatives have the chance to be a real friend and resource to reporters. Rather than wasting their time firing out the sort of self-serving guff that has spike written all over it, good public relations consultants can make life easier for overworked hacks by giving them proper stories – preferably backed up with a decent picture.
That means good PR people need to manage the expectations of clients and have the courage to tell them that some of their ideas are simply too boring to get any coverage.
News and information is being distributed through a bewildering array of digital and traditional platforms, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that content is still king. It’s surprising how many PR professionals haven’t got that.
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