Monday Morning Media Minute

By Jerry Brown, APR
www.pr-impact.com

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill was famous for saying “all politics is local.”  All news is local, too.

So, at least one Denver TV station led its Sunday evening news with the story of a Colorado resident winning the first-ever U.S. medal in the Nordic combined competition at the Olympics.  And Canada is celebrating its first-ever Olympic gold medal won on Canadian soil.

Every story can be localized.  Localizing yours will increase your chances of turning it into news.  A few thoughts about that:

• Do you have a local angle that ties into a global story already making headlines?  Then you have an opportunity to take advantage of the story already making news to turn your story into news.

• The more locations you can include when localizing your story, the broader your reach.  State Farm has gotten tremendous coverage for years with their annual 10-most-dangerous-intersections list.  There’s a built-in “local” story in every community that has an intersection on the national list.  State Farm localizes the story even more by doing state versions of its list.  Newspapers that ignore the national version because it doesn’t include any intersections in their readership area run stories about of the list for their state.

• Localizing a story is about more than geography.  It’s also about shared interests.  Is there an angle to your story that will interest golfers?  Senior citizens?  Teachers?  An ethnic or professional group?  If you can tailor your story to focus on the interests of any sizeable group, chances are there’s at least one reporter who writes for and about that group.

• You can “localize” a story by finding an exotic angle.  When a Seattle-based chain of coffee stores opened its first store in Tokyo, the Seattle Times ran a story about the local company expanding to Tokyo because there’s something exotic about that.

• You can also do the reverse of localizing, using local folklore or local color to entice reporters in distant cities to write stories local reporters would ignore.  Travel magazines do this all the time.

That’s my two cents’ worth.  What’s yours?