Your Relationship with the Press

The press and electronic news media are in the business of presenting news and otherwise useful information, not of giving favorable free coverage to whoever requests it. The best way to establish an excellent relationship with the print and electronic press is to make yourself a resource for news and to present your stories or story ideas to them in a "news" or "feature" context. How to do this is shown in the pages that follow. Of course, the more news or features you provide to the press, the more valuable you will become, and the more likely it will be that even your lesser stories will get favorable attention. You may even become a source that the press will contact for interesting filler materials when the "hard" news is "light" (sparse).2 Much more important, you will want the press to know you as a reachable and especially honest source of fact and opinion about your organization. That's an invaluable reputation to have earned when raw news, without interpretation, can be harmful to your interests. The opportunity to present your side, in context, when a story first appears, is immeasurably more valuable than a dozen after-the-fact correctives (as targets of "dirty politics" have learned to their sorrow).

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