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Media Relations

The Definers Episode 3: Jessica McNellis and How Top Tier Media Happens

How do you get top tier coverage? Do you have a new product launch, partnership, funding, or are you making major strides for the future of your market and not getting proportionate recognition?

Jessica has more than ten years of experience creating and leading B2B public relations for companies spanning the healthcare, technology, legal, and sciences industries. A seasoned media relations professional, she’s earned clients’ interview and byline placements with notable business outlets, including The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal, and a myriad of regional and trade publications. She has a proven skill for connecting clients’ stories with relevant news and works with clients to ensure media placements are leveraged to further their message with target audiences through engaging content, social, and marketing materials. We ask her why some companies and their media relations succeed, and others fall short.

 

Chris Gale  00:02

This webcast is prompted by some businesses that have been coming to us to talk about top-tier media relations. There’s especially been a little bit of a surge in the last two months. What seems to be happening, as far as we can tell, is that with interest rates and what’s happening in the venture capital community, there are businesses that need to talk to a larger audience. They see top-tier media as the opportunity to do it because they’re looking at trying to extend their runway. There’s another set of businesses or investors as well. They’re coming to us, and their model helps protect them from that particular environment. Perhaps they are not leveraged, or something about their business means that this is a good time for them. While others might be struggling, they have an opportunity to invest if they raise awareness of what they’re doing. They’re built for this kind of environment where the cheap money goes away, putting the macro stuff to the side, and some folks are joining who do not necessarily come from the private sector.

Everyone’s coming to us saying, “Okay, how do you achieve that top-tier media result? We already have a PR firm, and they’re supposed to be the best in our particular industry, but they don’t seem to be able to bring us the kind of stuff we see you bringing for your clients. How do you do it? So, we decided to just publicly ask Jess McNellis, our principal here at Gale Strategies, how she does it, how we do it here at Gale Strategies, and how she’s done it through her career. There is a Q and A at the bottom. We would love to have your questions and answers. For former colleagues of mine going way back to grad school who might be joining this webcast, sarcasm is welcome, if you wish. So, Jessica, how do we reach top-tier media?

Jessica McNellis  02:08

Top-tier media is certainly a highly competitive space. At the end of the day, it’s often a game of reaching the right reporter at the right time with the right story. Oftentimes, companies focus their outreach efforts on sharing internal news that they’re excited about putting out there, like new partnerships, product launches, and new hires. Then they are disappointed when that doesn’t garner an immediate result in the top tier. If you’re looking to begin building top-tier relationships to drive a feature story in the long term, the best way is to insert yourself into the stories that reporters are already covering, they’re already writing about, so you’re leveraging your expertise to be a resource to them for the topics that are interesting to them. So, when we’re engaging with reporters from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, a lot of their coverage is often driven around breaking news headlines, what’s timely that day, what’s pressing, what’s happening right now, and tying your story into those timely news hooks.

For example, at present, the election and how each administration’s policies might impact businesses in your industry. Or how Covid at one time was the breaking news headline, and finding a way to talk about how what you were doing would impact the pandemic. Those breaking news headlines and finding a way to bring a fresh story, a fresh perspective, to these angles that they’re already saturated with is a great first avenue to build that relationship. Get in front of them, make your name more familiar to them, and build yourself up as an expert with the idea that, in the long term, they would see more value in some of the Internal news that you’re putting out like those partnership announces, product launches, and other bits like that. Tying your story to those timely news hooks and inserting yourself into the stories they’re already covering is a good first avenue to get a top-tier media hit where you’re included in that story. Then, driving forward a story where you are the headline is certainly more of a feat, but it is still possible in the top tier.

Chris Gale  04:08

Excellent. If I’m a Human Resources consulting firm or I am a law firm, and I have some engagement to announce, you’re saying the industry press might be interested. But if I want to get to the top tier, it’s got to touch a larger trend.

Jessica McNellis  04:35

Ideally, a larger trend. If you do a mini audit of many of the top tiers, oftentimes they aren’t covering partnership announcements unless it includes a household brand name that is appealing to everyone in their audience. Or they won’t cover a new CEO announcement unless it’s at a major corporation or someone coming from a major corporation that’s going to drive those clicks. But if you have a story that’s a new partnership announcement, and through this partnership, you’re going to be addressing this issue that’s important to a high percentage of their readers, the focus of the story could then be on that issue, that trend, with the nod to the partnership as one way that this is being addressed.

 

Chris Gale  05:25

Excellent. If I don’t have the big-name element, can you give me an example from some of the media results you’ve brought across in terms of a larger trend that a piece of news can fit within?

 

Jessica McNellis  05:44

An old company I used to work with was in the edtech space. During the pandemic, there was certainly a lot of news and concern around the education sector about whether students were falling behind in the remote education space. Schools were struggling. Teachers were struggling. Administrations were struggling to provide kids that same level of education even though they were doing it through a screen and not getting that same one-on-one attention. So, we had put forward this edtech company to talk about their program to drive more advancement in math, specifically. So, it was very niche. We could focus on that broader trend of students falling behind, while here was an education technology that could specifically address this problem.

That alone might not be enough because I’m sure those reporters covering that topic were getting an influx of pitches from every single education technology company that came out of the woodwork. They were just sifting through them, trying to determine what’s different, what’s new, and what works. So, they really leaned into providing data and collecting data on how students were progressing using this technology as a point to bring forward to the top-tier reporters.

Then, as a second piece, they also had a really interesting founder story that had previously been overlooked in their PR efforts. They had a founder who had been a teacher in charter schools for 10 years and had worked on curriculum. She had also gone to MIT and had this amazing background that she was putting together to create this technology. She had been working at the teacher level, saw an issue, and shifted to create a technology that could create that change. So, we leaned into that human interest piece about the founder, some of those teacher stories, and then also the data piece and how it actually works. We’re not just saying it works anecdotally. It was tried and true at these schools, even if it was at a smaller scale at that stage.

Chris Gale  07:56

If someone doesn’t hire a PR firm, how can they figure this out for themselves? Because I think we’ve all had conversations on the PR side with clients who say, “I have this amazing story.” Is there a way of reading the news to discern what those trends are, that you might have something contrarian, that your news might have something contrarian to say about this larger trend, or to figure out what is the top-tier-worthy part of what you do have?

Jessica McNellis  08:39

Reading those target publications that you’re looking to be featured in, see what type of news they’re covering. See what reporters are covering that news. You can often read between the lines to see what type of criteria they’re looking for. Sometimes that’s a financial criterion. They might not cover deals or funding that’s under a certain value. They might only cover things that check certain boxes that they can pitch to their editors. So, trying to read between the lines and figure out what pieces of the puzzle you might need to bring forward to them can be done just by regularly reading their coverage and getting a feel for their writing and their stories that they’re often picking up.

A second piece to that would be, if you read a story and you think, “I could have said this, my competitor was quoted, and I have the same point of view. I could have been featured here as well.” Then you try and pitch yourself to that reporter. The old story has now already been told. They’ve already written it. It’s no longer new, timely, and novel. You have to bring them something unique. What’s your unique perspective that you’re able to bring to that story? What’s something fresh that they haven’t already covered? Because the likelihood that they’re going to cover the exact same story in the exact same way with the same perspective from a different person is unlikely in this current news environment. I’m looking at what they’re covering and then trying to have an eye for what’s missing from that story, what might have been overlooked, that might not be on their radar yet and would be interesting to their readers.

Chris Gale  10:11

You’ve described a lot of ways to look at news and how it might be relevant to a larger storyline. You’ve talked about reading the news. You’ve talked about reading target publications. You haven’t talked yet about who you know. I think people tend to come to us and say, “What connections do you have top-tier reporters?” Is it the connections that you have with the media or the quality of the story you have in terms of how it taps into these larger trends?

Jessica McNellis  10:55

It’s a common misconception in the PR world that if you have a high Rolodex of reporters, you are just able to call in a favor, and they will write a story featuring your client based on that relationship. I would say I’ve never seen that to be the case. Certainly, having a high Rolodex could be an indication that you are good at building reporter relationships. But, at the end of the day, reporters are looking for the right story for their audience. They also have editors who oversee them in some capacity and determine whether a story can go forward or not. The idea that having a relationship with a top-tier reporter is going to instantly result in a feature in the exact messaging that you want is a little bit unrealistic. Reporters are always putting the story first.

I would say a much better quality to be looking for when you’re vetting PR firms or when you’re looking to do this on your own is just having the story and having the capability to build that reporter relationship. Reporters are often also bouncing around to different positions and different beats. So having one reporter one year that is your tried and true, that’s able to cover all of your news, might move another year to a separate publication, or start covering an entirely different industry, and you’re going to have to work from scratch to rebuild with whoever has taken over that beat. Building reporter relationships is a high priority when seeking out PR firms. Does the firm have someone who can do that from scratch without any inroads – just an email – and shape that story for you, look at your business, see the connection between your business objectives and your story, and how they tie into the publication’s news cycle and what’s interesting to their readers?

Chris Gale  12:45

So, if Gale Strategies, bizarrely enough, was to hire a public relations firm, the reporter relationships and connections are important. But are you saying that it’s sort of a lagging indicator of the quality of the work? In other words, the media relations of the quality of the work that the PR firm is doing is less about their connections, but rather that they have connections because of how they do the media relations.

Jessica McNellis  13:12

Exactly, I would say connections are a good peripheral indicator that a firm is good at building relationships. But, oftentimes, the person that’s going to have an interest in your story could be someone that you’ve never reached out to before or have no connection to. Being able to shape that story and make it interesting to a reporter, make it something that they’re opening in their inbox and asking for a follow-up interview about, is a much more important skill than seeking out PR firms. It’s better than someone who has existing relationships that they can turn to in hopes of facilitating a story.

Chris Gale  13:49

I know that you’ve done work in the nonprofit sector in New Zealand. Is that an illustrative example? You’re not a media relations person embedded in the New Zealand media landscape, but you achieved impressive results in an entirely different sector or news environment than where you had worked previously. How did you achieve that? You didn’t have any connections, but you achieved top-tier, high-quality results. How did you do that?

Jessica McNellis  14:21

That goes back to the point about working on your skills of building relationships. When I was working with the nonprofit in New Zealand, they had a list of top broadcast targets and top-tier New Zealand publications that obviously I had no inroads with. So, we just did the initial work of looking through their stories and what types of stories typically get published in those outlets and tried to draw that line. They had a really interesting human element. They had a beautiful nonprofit story that drove a lot of public interest and had a lot of public impacts. Even at the mid-level, they had a government impact that previously wasn’t being addressed in the media. So, we leaned into that and started to build those relationships.

Once reporters got on the phone with their founder and heard their story, it was an easy road from there. That would be an example of having no existing relationships to work off of and just having to shape a story that aligned with those publications’ audiences. It’s proof that if you have the right story, it does not matter if you had a pre-existing relationship. I could say the same for you at each stage of your career. Chris and I worked together in a past life at another agency. Oftentimes, we were working in different regional markets that you’d never touched before or were working with reporters or lawyers in different countries that you were trying to play catch up on what was relevant to that media market. Oftentimes, that coverage was not a result of having a preexisting relationship with a reporter. It was having to quickly build a relationship with a reporter and align their story with the reporter’s coverage.

Chris Gale  16:11

Anybody who has questions, please fire away, especially if I’m not getting to a question you have on your mind. Most companies come to us, and they want to be in the Wall Street Journal. They’d like to be quoted on something. They’d like to be seen as this source of information. What everybody wants is an article in the Wall Street Journal saying you’re doing this or that thing because it’s presumably amazing. I hear you describing a matching, what sounds like matchmaking. Where, in that New Zealand example, was the thing that they thought they wanted to share with reporters and the thing that reporters were most interested in. Did you need to ask more questions to orient yourself on something else? Did you have to ask certain questions? What were those questions that were uncovered in that or another instance to find the thing that is both interesting to the reporters and useful from a business or organizational mission perspective?

Jessica McNellis  17:57

In that case, what they brought me on for was to get the media coverage around events that they were hosting locally. The top-tier media doesn’t often publish headlines about an event being hosted that’s a little bit self-promotional. It would be something that might be on some sort of an event board or a calendar somewhere, but not a headline. So, we did do the deep dive to say, “Okay, you’re hosting this event, but why are you hosting the event? What are some of the deeper issues behind it?” We ended up digging deeper into why this nonprofit was started, this bigger community issue, some of the stats behind how it was impacting everyone locally, and the opportunity for people locally to get involved through this event and become part of the organization in a way.

So instead of leaning into pitching a story about how they were hosting an event and, if a top-tier reporter wanted to cover that this event was being held, we honed in on how the story was a deep underlying issue that’s impacting the community. The community can get involved in XYZ ways. There is also this event happening this weekend, which makes it semi-timely to cover it now, and then the final stories usually ended up being about this broader issue with a mention of the event, which is what they still wanted. They wanted to get news about the event out there, but the headline was never going to be the event. We just wanted to make sure that the event got noticed in the media. It ended up driving a lot more engagement publicly too, because people were more interested in the piece of the story that they could see themselves in, which was, “How do I get involved? How do I help create change?” Whereas, you know, if they’d spotted a headline about an event across their inbox, they might disregard it. They wanted to see themselves in that story. They were able to see themselves in that story and see how they could make an impact. It continued to spiral from there. We were able to drive even more top-tier immediate interest because people were now talking about it.

Chris Gale  20:01

What you just said was fascinating to me because I have been doing media relations in the government space, but I’ve never done media relations in the nonprofit space. The private sector seems to be constantly up for self-promotion, especially companies selling products. Even in the nonprofit sector, reporters are like, “Yeah, I know you want to write the story about how great your organization is, but we’re not going to do that.” Is there anything that organizations can do in either selecting the story they want to say or enhancing the chances that it airs increasingly on a feature about them and who they are?

Jessica McNellis  21:17

I think it is still trying to do that matchmaking behind the scenes. One example that’s popping to mind is a recent client that we worked with that had a few pieces of news coming out. The piece that they thought was the most noteworthy, that they thought was going to get the most attention was this rush in new customers and new leadership announcement. Internally, I’m sure that was the most exciting element impacting their organization. Then when we were reading through the different announcements, we realized the announcement that was likely to drive the most attention with the media was a piece of research that’s coming out that aligned with what a lot of people were talking about in the broader industry space. It provided statistics that could help prove that point that reporters were starting to toy with. Once we were able to have those conversations, it did drive a lot of attention for that client. Their research was something internally that they thought was important and they wanted to get out, but they didn’t realize that it would be the hook that would be the most interesting to reporters.

It’s easier talking to reporters when you’re able to talk about a story that they’ve already been peripherally talking about or have completely missed and can share data and promise more data to come and offer interviews with expert sources. They were able to be more of the headline because the entire story was about their research. It was hard not to have them be the focus in that instance. But that would be one example of finding the right story within your organization. Something that you might have shelved as just a press release to put on the website might actually be the center stage story that you need to be pushing out to the media. And the story that you thought would be the big headline news might be something that they’re not interested in covering.

Chris Gale  23:18

My final question relates to after The Wall Street Journal feature occurs. What’s your advice on not being caught in a situation where it’s like, “Wait, we’re in Wall Street Journal!” and then nothing happens?

Jessica McNellis  23:47

I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the top-tier media hit is the end of the line when really it just sparks a whole second part of your PR campaign. When you’re looking at top-tier media publications, many of those are blocked behind paywalls. So, while they do reach a wide audience, if you’re trying to have a specific audience within your network read it, the likelihood that they have a subscription is slim. If they have one, have they happened to have logged on that day? Or happened to have read your article when it was being pushed that day or before it got buried in the next day of coverage? Paywalls minimize the eyes that are on that story. To make the most of it outside of the story beyond publishing, you really want to push it on social media, have people within your organization pushing it on social media as well, with their own context, and share on your website, whether that be in a news section or even including the logo on your homepage. People who are quickly bouncing to your website can see that you’ve been credentialed by a top-tier media publication. If you have newsletters or communications that go out to your audiences, your investors, and other stakeholders, you should be featuring that in those newsletters so that they’re getting eyes on that.

At a more micro level, use the top-tier appearance as an excuse to reach out to prospects or clients or partners, to have that one-on-one email touchpoint. There are a million other ways you can repurpose it. Whether it be submitting for awards or when you’re at an event, have printouts or QR code channeling back to it. The expectation that you’re going to get top-tier media coverage, and that’s the end of the road, and there will be this influx of interest from whatever party you were trying to catch the eye of, is certainly unrealistic in the sense that there is a whole part two that lasts weeks.

This topic is probably the subject of a webinar for another time. Also, you can leverage media to get more media once you’ve been credentialed somewhere. You can use it to hopefully get the attention of more media. It continues in a non-stop spiral to continue to drive that engagement.

Chris Gale  26:05

We’re at the end of time. I love where that finished. We can follow up with members of the audience who might be interested in more. That art of achieving the media result starts when you’re planning the media activity and leads to how you’re utilizing it afterward. That method of spending money on media relations to get the most value out of it is, I think, interesting.

Maybe we can have a further conversation about that or include some additional team members on how to get the full value out of the hopefully successful media relations dollars you’ve spent to reach the top tier. Thank you everybody for joining.