One of the biggest challenges that business owners face is determining what about their businesses is newsworthy. The best way to create and pitch newsworthy stories is with assistance from a public relations firm. However, understanding how the media works and evaluates stories for newsworthiness can help the process.
How the Media Finds News
For starters, more than three-fourths of the news stories that traditional media outlets cover come directly from PR representatives or the businesses themselves. Journalists seek out the remaining news stories. Because of that, you have a decent chance that a journalist or media outlet will pick up your story if you feed it to them. However, you can increase your chances of exposure by ensuring that your story meets the criteria that media professionals look for.
The Criteria for a Newsworthy Post
For a media outlet to publish a story, it has to be interesting enough to justify releasing it. Producers and editors evaluate stories based on six criteria.
- Timelessness — Readers and viewers don’t want old news, so a newsworthy story is either current or new.
- Location — Stories that happen within proximity of the readers have more significance.
- Prominence — This consists of who is involved, such as politicians, business leaders, and celebrities that are interesting to the publisher’s readers.
- Future impact — This involves determining whether the story has future importance to people, subjects, or companies that the readers care about.
- Human interest — Heartwarming stories can pique interest even if they happen in other parts of the world.
- Shock value — Scandals, conflicts, and incompetence are almost always newsworthy and attract a lot of attention. In many cases, they go viral.
While these are all criteria that producers and editors look for in newsworthy stories, you don’t have to have all of them to get your story published. In general, the best stories meet at least two criteria.
Testing for News Relevance
Knowing what media professionals look for in newsworthy stories allows you to check for relevance. There are five tests that you can use to determine newsworthiness.
Passing for external relevance means that the story is interesting to the public. The story passes for personal significance if it’s a piece that you would stop to read. Next, having customer relevance means that consumers would care about or need to know the story.
The two final tests are journalist relevance and media relevance. Passing these tests means that the story is relevant based on the stories that a journalist or media outlet has written or published recently.
Like with the evaluation that media professionals use, your story doesn’t have to meet all of these criteria. Passing at least the two final tests and one other should mean that a story is newsworthy.
Competition Has an Impact
While using these criteria and tests to create newsworthy stories can help your story get published, there’s never a guarantee. Competition impacts whether stories are published or dropped. In some cases, stories are set aside until others die down in popularity.
Fortunately, you don’t have to create and pitch a newsworthy story on your own. GYC Vegas is a Las Vegas public relations agency that can put together the story and pitch it for you. Businesses have relied on this Las Vegas PR team for years.