Why Media Relations?
How It Works and Why It Matters to Minority Business Owners
What Is Media Relations?
Media relations is about securing and managing relationships with journalists and the press. This leads to organic news coverage and high-impact visibility.
Unlike paid media and advertising, media relations means pitching newsworthy stories that journalists want to cover. It’s a two-way street that benefits you and the media.
What It Means to Be Newsworthy
Vérité House Founder Aleah Hordges worked as a TV journalist for years, and she’s the current anchor of Good Morning Cincinnati. Simply put, we know what a good story looks like and how to tell it.
Bombarding and inundating journalists with generic and baseless pitches won’t get you anywhere. However, many PR and media relations firms make that mistake every day, by not getting a response back and burning those relationships in the process.
Strategic media relations means:
Coming up with interesting story angles that relate to your business, industry, or expertise
Pitching those stories to the right departments at the right media publications
Building solid relationships with journalists so they’ll pay attention to your pitches
Staying ready so you don’t have to get ready
Journalists take their jobs very seriously. They’re committed to delivering accurate, relevant news to their audiences. You need to think like a journalist to get regular coverage, and that’s where we come in.
Thinking Like a Journalist
Imagine you’re a TV reporter for a local news station, and a business owner pitches a story about hiring a new VP of Marketing. Would you cover that story? Of course not! Nobody cares.
Finding that newsworthy angle requires outside-the-box thinking. Each media outlet, TV show, journal, podcast, and radio station has its audience, priorities, and editorial values. Therefore, we need to target them strategically.
What does it mean to pitch strategically?
A lifestyle program might feature a chef from a local restaurant during International Food Month
An evening newscast may want to hear how inflation is impacting your business
A digital journalist could interview you about how a new labor law affects your business
A podcast might want a FemTech business to break down a new reproductive health technology for everyday listeners
A radio show may want a luxury travel agency to discuss a new scholarship geared toward first-gen travelers
Media relations is about understanding the news cycle, current events, and trends locally and nationally, and finding the right times to pitch relevant and impactful stories to specific outlets and journalists. This is how you position yourself as an industry thought leader, someone the press considers a go-to expert, dominating the media space over your competitors.
Reading the Room
Frequency and timing matter as well. Never pitch the same journalist relentlessly, and hold off when breaking news (like a natural disaster) dominates local headlines. These are a few tricks of our trade.
Media Relations for Minority-Owned Businesses
It’s no surprise that America’s newsrooms lack diversity, and even the most well-intentioned journalists have their own implicit biases. That’s just part of being human.
Whether they mean to or not, reporters and news directors tend to overlook marginalized groups. When they do cover our communities, we’re either shown when it’s convenient (to commemorate an annual holiday or tradition) or in a negative light that doesn’t reflect reality.
Our country has a rich tapestry of businesses run by people from all backgrounds. Latino, Black, Asian, and Indigenous business owners make up 38% of non-employer firms, and women now own 39% of U.S. businesses.
It’s time to shift the narrative. It’s time to empower our communities by telling our story that often goes unnoticed and accurately reflects the work we’re doing, along with the contributions we’re making.