Unless you’ve just been indicted for pouring toxic sludge into the city’s water supply, one of your PR goals is probably to raise your profile. One way you do that is to get news coverage.
But the news media have inertia; it’s much harder to get a whole new story moving than it is to jump on board a story that already has momentum behind it.
That’s why you’ll often see PR practitioners mulling over the day’s top headline and asking, “How can we get into this story?”
Part of the answer is to free yourself from the shackles of the obvious. Even a tenuous connection to the story of the day can be enough to get you some ink, provided you have an off-beat angle.
Hence this story in today’s Globe and Mail:
Robert F. Young ‚Äî a founder of Linux distributor Red Hat and now owner of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats Canadian football team, has offered Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs a quick way out of a lawsuit over the latest version of Tiger, Apple’s latest operating system.
The lawsuit, filed one day before Apple released Tiger, sought an injunction on behalf of TigerDirect.com, based in Miami, to stop Apple from using the word “tiger” because it infringes on its trademarked name.
[….] Mr. Young has offered to license the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ historical use of the word Tiger to Apple free of charge.
Clever. He found a story of keen interest to an audience he wants to reach — the tech sector — and an irresistible angle on it. Bam: he’s Slashdotted.
And that leads us to Steve Gilliard’s impassioned and brilliant defence of what some of us consider stupid news stories (in this case, the runaway bride story from the past few days):
If CNN basically covers this story all Saturday, it’s news. It’s not a debate. It is news, and malaria isn’t. Instead of wishing it wasn’t news, we need to subvert it. We need to discuss it in wider terms, class, race, sex. We need to bring depth to the debate. [….] If they want to talk about runaway brides, let’s talk about runaway brides, but intelligently, questioning the sex roles of men and women and the economic cost and pressure in a large wedding. There is fertile ground for smart people, but they have to seize the target and change the debate.
One of the great tricks of conservative pundits was to talk about ANY topic. No matter what it was, they had an opinion, got face time and then book deals. They saw this as fertile ground to extend the debate. We have to engage these issues and bring new perspectives on them.
[….] If you don’t have an opinion on the latest circus, your opinion on more serious matters will not count. You don’t have to spend every day repeating Eonline, but you have to understand the culture, even the vulgar parts, to change it. If you do not engage the debate at hand, you will become irrelevant. Even if the debate is not a big deal in the end. Walking away, as we did so many times before, is no longer an option.
