A new insight: One step closer to coverage

By Iris Weerdenburg
Friday, September 13, 2019

Are you working as a PR professional? Are you interested in how to increase your chances of getting your information picked up by the media? And do you count ‘quality outlets’, such as NRC and Volkskrant, as your main target? Well, if you answered ‘yes’ to all of those questions, I would like to recommend you to read this blog. It might refresh your view on your daily work activities.

The news hole

One of the biggest challenges within the field of PR is to get the attention you aim for. Specifically, you want your message to be picked up by the media. But as discussed in every first class of PR, there is a ton of news that could be covered by the media, but only a small part actually gets through that so-called ‘news hole’. (Not familiar with this fundamental theory? Click here).

Previous studies

Therefore, many researchers tried to find answers to the question on, as a PR professional, how to increase your chances of getting covered by the media? One example is a study by the Norwegian media theorist Allern, who argued that there is more commercial value in constructing newsworthiness in your press releases through emphasizing particular aspects (‘news values’) over others, depending on what type of outlet (e.g. popular vs quality newspapers) you want to reach. The idea behind this conclusion is that these different types of outlets have a different identity and target audience, so they have different ‘values’ they’re interested in. Moreover, a follow-up study by two Dutch professors, Boukes and Vliegenthart, showed out which particular values to apply for the different types of outlets.

"The distinction between popular and quality outlets is not so profound. 

Think in terms of online and offline media!"

Quality versus popular outlets

Like the articles above, most research within this topic focuses on the differences in how to reach out to these different types of outlets, with a main focus on the popular versus the quality sort. Another approach for this kind of research comes from two Czech scholars, who’s article focusses on how these outlets use different sources. This research advocates the expected: popular newspapers are more likely to use social media as their source, while quality outlets focus more on traditional sources. The underlying reason for this is that social media sources have been argued to be used mainly for ‘soft news’ topics and contribute to sensationalism, thus fitting better with popular newspapers content wise. In other words, if your focus is to get covered in popular outlets, use your social media accounts wisely. If your focus is on quality outlets, focus on the more traditional ways of doing PR. But… Is this really (still) the case?

A new insight

A recent study by two professors at the University of Amsterdam shed a new light on the theory as mentioned above. They concluded that the difference between quality and popular outlets is not very pronounced, with the latter only making slightly more use of social media sources. According to these authors, the main focus should be the distinction between online and offline media and how these types of media use their sources. More specific, they found a clear pattern: online outlets rely on social media sources way more often than offline media.

So… What’s next?

Do you, as a PR professional, have a message that you want to get picked up by the media? Specifically, do you have information you want to get covered by quality outlets? And do you, so far, presumed that the best way to reach those outlets was via traditional PR methods like press releases? Then maybe this blog has changed your mind. Based on this recent research, we would recommend you to approach your social media accounts as a source for the online (quality) outlets. In other words, do not only sent a press release through mail, make sure you post the core (including an image) of the message on your social media accounts. In this way, you reach out to both the offline and the online channels of a certain outlet.

Why is this important?

As we all know, online news has become more and more important nowadays. Specifically, traditional forms of news such as TV and print became less important in the last five years while online news consumption is now the most used news source by 78% of Dutch citizens. Therefore, make sure that you focus on how to reach out to these online media. How? We hope this article gives some direction: go social!

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About the author: Iris Weerdenburg fulfilled her bachelor’s in political science at the University of Amsterdam. During this period, her interest in the field of communications grew because of her work experiences at a PR-office and a communications department. Therefore, she decided to do her master’s in political communication, also at the University of Amsterdam.