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“Right tool for the job” or “The medium is the message”
Given the rapidly changing landscape of media and media relations these days, if there were one piece of accumulated knowledge I could pass on to young PR practitioners — or young journalists, for that matter — it would be something along the lines of what my father told me decades ago, likely on one of those Saturday mornings out in the work shed at the back of our home: “Use the right tool for the job.”
In my media relations work, I’ve come over time to translate such advice to mean that one should use the appropriate media platform for communicating your message or that of your client — whether it’s to journalists or bloggers, it doesn’t much matter. There’s always a most appropriate media platform for communicating to a specific community. Of course, long before I figured that one out, Marshall McLuhan said it so succinctly with the phrase “The medium is the message,” meaning of course that the medium used invariably influences how the message is perceived.
As a journalist, I worked across multiple media platforms, writing sometimes in the morning about breaking news in a very brief, wire-service format; and covering it later that day in a longer newspaper piece, or even weaving the same news into a magazine feature with a longer deadline. The platforms were all very different and took into account their readership. But the lesson was simple, you would never file a 350-word breaking news story to a magazine editor, nor would you submit a 3,500 feature-length piece for a wire service editor. Right tool for the job!
In media relations, one would never submit a lengthy press release to a TV news producer sending out a camera team for an enterprise shoot for the evening news. Nor, these days, would one send to a blogger a social media-averse news release, that is, one that is not link-rich, with multimedia options, easy drop quotes, graphic images, bookmarking and social network sharing capabilities. Right tool for the job!
Increasingly, one also needs to pay close attention to the preferences of media practitioners — not just bloggers, but journalists as well — as to how they expect to be contacted. If they say on their voice mail to NEVER call them with a story pitch, you proceed to do so at your peril — and the possible peril of your client’s story. Some say only to contact them via e-mail (though we all know everybody’s email is packed with spam these days); others say only to contact them through social media; others say NEVER to contact them via social media. In all of these cases, it’s imperative that you use the right media platform to communicate with your targeted journalist or blogger.
In the ever-changing media world we live ...
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