In yet another piece of News That Isn’t Really News comes a recent report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
Pew asked more than 1,000 folks where they got “most of” their national and international news. In 2008, the Internet eclipsed print newspapers as their primary news source.
You can see more detail here in a New York Times blog.
Local news, however, is a different beast. For one thing, local publications don’t have a user-friendly (or even, in some cases, any) website. More significantly, however, local news is a much more intimate, day-to-day relevant resource than national and international news.
Optimism About Local News
While the future of major newspapers is cloudy, I am most optimistic about the fortunes of local publications that do a solid job of covering their own communities. From a PR perspective, it is crucial to recognize how to tailor news releases and story suggestions with that specific smaller geographic focus in mind.
For example, if you have five people, from five different communities in the same metro region who have benefited from a given company’s service, then the same type of story can be pitched to at least five (and sometimes even more) distinct publications.
Increasingly, this has been a most fruitful approach for our clients at Inside Edge PR. We regularly secure multiple “media hits,” each one of which is targeted to an audience that is actually in a position to take action that benefits the client (for example, becoming a new patient of a given practitioner.)
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Great point, Matt. It’s especially effective when you go the extra mile to include the essential background that a reporter will normally ask about a local profile subject–saving the editor or reporter some effort on that legwork and thus further encouraging him/her to do the story in this day and age of reduced newsroom staffing. You referenced this in an earlier post on press releases. What worries me is the continued number of local papers being discontinued by their corporate media owners. News this week of the Sun-Times’ shuttering of so many suburban Pioneer Press papers was incredibly sobering.