Helpful Tips for Getting Local Media Coverage

World Usability Day 2007 (WUD) is November 8, 2007. It will feature over 225 events occurring simultaneously in over 35 countries worldwide. Our focus this year is on healthcare. Our goal is to have media coverage of each of these events. UPA and the WUD Planning Committee, in collaboration with PR firms worldwide, will work to achieve this goal. As part of our team, we need your help on the ground to ensure strong coverage for World Usability Day and to promote awareness of the importance of making the services and products important to life easier to access and simpler to use.

In order to accomplish this, we need all local event organizers and participants to reach out to local media and inform them of their scheduled WUD events and activities.

We’ve created some helpful tips and we hope that you will share your own best practices with the WUD 2007 team as well.

Strategies for Developing Media Coverage

Start at home. Be sure to have news items in your own organizations’ newsletters, intranet, website and other channels of communication. This includes the newsletters of your employer, as well as professional chapters

Create calendar listings. If you are a regular reader of a specific calendar of events, chances are that your information will be useful to its editor. Most calendar sections make it easy to send in your listing. Be sure to respect the length and style of your target calendar. Understand the people who want your story. In your regular reading, watch for reporters who are writing about similar topics, and send a brief item to them, if possible, referencing that story. Reporters’ e-mail contacts are often attached to the story. If not, you can usually find contacts on the publication’s website. You will find that information, on most sites, by going to “About” at the very bottom of the home page, then, “Contact Us,” and then “Editorial Staff.”

If you need help finding contact information for a reporter whose work seems appropriate for your story, your employer’s own public relations staff may be the easiest place to look. See more tips on finding contacts at the end of this item. Please send e-mails only to individuals, not to a list. Do not send to more than one recipient, or with bcc addresses. Most publications have very rigorous spam filters.

Send press releases as imbedded text, not as an attachment. Most publications have spam filters that will remove attachments. Always provide a local point of contact, particularly for local news sources.

Please don’t call to follow-up unless you are personally acquainted with or (friendly) with the reporter or editor. Reporters and editors are very busy, especially at major publications. Most will not acknowledge receipt of information; they will just use it – or not. Unwanted follow-up phone calls can have an undesirable effect. Exceptions to the “Don’t call us” rule often include suburban weekly newspapers and morning news shows. If you have a spokesman willing to make a personal appearance on short notice, most morning show producers will be receptive to a few voice mails or follow-up faxes.

It can be a good idea for media contacts to get the same information from more than one source. If you are sending a press release to a specific individual, you can send a copy to Caryn Saitz at: caryn@worldusabilityday.org and the same press release will arrive a few days later from Creative Strategic Solutions and the WUD 2007 planning committee.

Finding great contacts can happen in many ways. You can use resources close to home, in your company’s, organizations, local directories and more. Or, there are many different contact databases available – Bacon’s which is the most expensive and mondomedia.com. You can usually find a copy of Bacon’s in a main library in any major city. The online version is much more user-friendly. Many companies have access to Bacon’s quality-online databases through their PR departments. It’s usually better to use these types of databases to get contact information for a reporter you’ve already identified in your regular reading.

Lexis-Nexis by Credit Card gives you a keyword search for free. After registering with your credit card, you can do a free keyword search. You’ll get a listing of search results with article title, publication name, date, often the name of the reporter, and a line or two of description. You can get the full text of any article listed for $3 plus sales tax.

Get a copy of WUD 2007 initial press release. You can download it here. Feel free to forward the press release and use it as a guide. If you have questions or need help, please email or call Executive Director, Caryn Saitz, caryn@worldusabilityday.org 617.905.5691.

If you need help with any of these approaches, send a request to: caryn@worldusabilityday.org. We’re here to make your life easy!