ADMN 245 Media Relations

Each student will find a current news release and review it keeping in mind news values and the importance of events. Students will critique their media release and identify three strengths and three weaknesses of the release – can be listed in point form. Students will then rewrite their News Nelease in order to improve it.

Also, since this is a practice assignment, you can be creative when you rewrite it:

• What kind of event and venu, related to your announcement, might draw media?
• What kind of famous people could be invited to speak at the event?
• Is there a time of year when your event would get more attention by “piggybacking” on a holiday or other event?

• Read Chapter 4: Media Relations in our textbook FN Communications Toolkit,2015
• Media relations means getting the mass media--journalists--to cover your organization.
• There are also “news values” that you can use to get the media’s attention. In your experience, what sort of things does the media tend to cover?
  • Timely
  • Geographical
  • Magnitude
  • Unusual – human interest
  • Famous people
  • Conflict
  • Change…
• Your media event probably won’t be violent or have conflict, but they can still be interesting enough to get some free media coverage
• Remember our PR saying: Advertising you pay for; public relations you pray for

• The way we invite journalists to news events is traditionally the News Release
• News releases have a standard format, including
  • Logo,
  • Media Release
  • For immediate release and date (unless embargoed)
  • Headline and dateline,
  • Lead paragraph that has five Ws (who, what, where, when, why)
  • Quotes from key people