Carefully targeted direct mail, personal phone calls, or visits would be much more appropriate. The key to media relations is to remember who the ultimate target audiences are and to select the media that provide the most effective ways of reaching them. Try these five ways to build media relationships. There are countless approaches and techniques that public relations practitioners can use in working with the media. The five broad elements discussed here are just one of many equally valid ways of conceptualizing and organizing a wide range of media relations activities.
Media relations can generate media coverage.
Although many journalists pooh-pooh the importance of public relations practitioners' leads and claim that the news media come up with their own story ideas, content analyses of major mass media seem to belie this. They consistently find that a high percentage of news stories originate from public relations input. Other smaller and more limited studies focusing on other media and conducted at various times during the last two decades reported anywhere from 35 to 75 percent of the analyzed media's editorial content came directly or indirectly from public relations sources. When public relations practitioners remember to look at their goals and interests through the eyes of the media and the media's audiences, and when they use these insights to relate to the media people with whom they work, media relations is one of the most effective ways to enhance an organization's public relations. As a means to an end, media relations is a cost-effective way of reaching large and varied audiences, and insofar as those audiences are relevant to the organization, it pays big dividends.