October 2008

With more demand for placements in big-city newspapers, getting your story covered is no easy feat. Nevertheless, PR professionals can continue to find fertile ground for their messages and keep their company or clients prominently in the public eye. The solution: more intense focus on media outlets that serve smaller communities.

No doubt, small-town media are under pressure, just like their counterparts in larger cities. But with big dailies offering little competition, the Internet unable to truly "go local," and businesses needing to draw a local audience — weekly community papers and small-market dailies aggressively concentrate on news that residents care about but can't find elsewhere.

Applying the Formula

Paul Davis, publisher of Alabama's Tuskegee News, has said that "community newspapers are doing quite nicely, thank you, because they have not forgotten their mission, their responsibility to their readers." Successful local newspapers, he added, "will learn that it's contents, period. It's better LOCAL stories, better writing, better editing and better graphics. In short it's what people want to know, packaged in a creative way." (As some big papers commit suicide, The Rural Blog, 8.7.08)

Employing Davis's guidelines, here are some thoughts on how to work with community news outlets to deliver your message to your audiences.

1. Expand your database. Community news outlets need stories focused on local concerns. Many are relatively healthy and uniquely valued by their local communities. Add them to your media outreach program.
2. Localize your message. Your client doesn't have to be from down the road to have their messages resonate with a small-town audience. Without that local hook, however, you must work even harder to show why what you have to say really matters.
3. Create content with a shelf life. Weekly papers, in particular, are interested in well written, common-sense lifestyle, financial, how-to and other service features, which aren't as time-sensitive as straight news announcements.
4. Chains reinforce your message. A community weekly with a circulation of 10,000 might be part of a chain of weeklies with a total circulation of 100,000. If your news is of wide enough interest, it has a better chance of making it into the common pages that go into all of the chain's outlets, thereby maximizing exposure in that geographic market.
5. Monitor and measure wisely. Make sure that the service you choose to monitor coverage in community outlets actually tracks that category of media. And while you're at it, be sure to measure your results to see how you're stacking up — after all, measureing your results is just as important when you're working with community publications as it is when you're pitching big dailies or other outlets with large audiences.

Opportunity Knocks

The durability of small-market news outlets that are tightly linked to their neighborhoods provides opportunity for communicators willing to dig in and learn what these publications and their communities value. They go by new names (hyper-local and citizens' media) and old (small dailies, weeklies, community newspapers). For communications professionals, however, the different names translate the same: Meet the needs of these small media, and you meet the needs of your company or clients.