PR Rainmakers know they can do everything right, and still fail to make news.It is a fact of life. Accept it now.
All news is affected by whatever else happened that day. All news is relative.
Newspapers have only so many columns to fill. The TV news has only so many minutes to devote. Even Web sites have only so many slots to fill with news of day.
Even on a slow news day, more copy is thrown away than is ever used. More emails are deleted than followed. More faxes are trashed than considered.
There is also a hierarchy to news, especially in mainstream media. Breaking news will supplant soft news, such as features and analyses. News of broad interest will supplant news of specific interest; for example, a tornado that wipes out your downtown area will likely push a suburban school board meeting to back pages, if not out of newspaper entirely.
You can arrange most visual, most intriguing media event possible. But if City Hall is burning down at same time as your event, then that is where news cameras are going to go. The news demands it.
We all know what happened on Sept. 11, 2001: Two passenger jets slammed into World Trade Center, while a third crashed into Pentagon and a fourth was forced to ground in a Pennsylvania field.
Just think how many important and interesting news events were chased out of news media on Sept. 11 and during weeks that followed – not to mention all of soft news features and media events that were canceled.
So how do PR Rainmakers handle this reality? By leaving nothing to chance.
In others words: Always have a Plan B.
Keep time window for your media event as open as long as is reasonably possible. If you arrange for a media event to last only one hour, then you severely limit media’s ability to attend. You may force media to choose between your event and breaking news. If you force that choice, you will lose. Keep window open for at least three hours. If participants (such as CEO), balk at this idea, ask them bluntly: “How badly do you want to be in news?” The media are in control of whether you get coverage, not you.