Social Media Strategy | Online PR | Proactive Report | Sally Falkow

The Proactive Reports is a blog about social media strategy, shifts in media consumption and online PR trends

Sally Falkow - Social Media Strategist

The New Media Journalists

by

A thoughtful post from Gina Chen, a 20 year veteran journalist, lays out clearly how mainstream media newsrooms should use social media today.

Here are her six points:

  1. News must be immediate. Break the news on Twitter as it happens. Follow up with an immediate blog post that includes live video or audio.
  2. Publish on multiple platforms.  See Jackie Hai’s list of what student journalists need to know.
  3. Be connected.  Make all the people involved with the newspaper part of your community,
  4. Be interactive.  Every print story must have a web element that’s meaningful and extends the narrative.
  5. Be a curator of the news. Find, aggregate, give context and meaning to the news.
  6. Use crowdsourcing. Tap into your readers to find and report the  news.  Use citizen journalists and train them to deliver good content.

Since PR people have a symbiotic relationship with journalists, bloggers and journalists who ar ebloggers, we need to take  a good hard look at this list.

  • More and more journalists are on Twitter.  They are looking at news feeds, tweets, blog posts and comments to spot trends and find news ideas. Do you know how to reach those important to you?
  • Can you supply images, audio or video to a journalist for your story?  Every print journalist is tasked with bringing back short multi-media elements that extend the value of the story.
  • Do you now how to make these multi-media elements search friendly, so that if they get used you get visibility in the search engines?
  • Can you be part of their crowdsourcing?  How can you be a resource who adds value to their task?
  • Almost 60% of journalists say they want to be able to  find company news – even social media content – on the company website.  Do you have a social media newsroom?

Our media relations success has always been based on building relationships with journalists and giving them what they need.  If what they need changes, so does our job as PR people.

Are you a reliable citizen  journalist who can offer great content about your industry to journalists?

Image Credit: Quapan