Tag Archives: journalists

It’s all about the “relationship”

Two businessmen shaking hands, close-upRaise your hand if you are sick of hearing “it’s all about the relationship.” When it comes to producers, reporters and bloggers, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that it all comes down to relationships. Yet, as many times as it’s been said, it seems no one talks about how to create those relationships.

Whether you are just starting out in PR, or you’ve switched focuses, media relationships can prove to be a tricky thing. How do you establish a relationship? How do you maintain the relationship? Furthermore, how do you prove you are an actual person rather than just a flack robot?

With such hefty questions to tackle, I thought I would poll our PRBC family to get their advice and perspectives on everything having to do with relationships. Continue reading

Cision Announces Agreement with Sarah Evans

Businessmen shaking handsAs you might have heard, Cision recently announced its new agreement with Sarah Evans, new media consultant and founder/moderator of the increasingly popular #journchat.

According to the press release “Cision will provide transcripts of every #journchat, the lively weekly Twitter chat for PR professionals, journalists and bloggers… It will work with her to produce white papers, webinars, conference and seminar discussions, and other thought leadership initiatives that explore the impact of online communications and new media.”

If you aren’t familiar with #journchat, every week on Twitter, the media and PR community come together via the hashtag #journchat, to openly discuss a number of topics and share ideas with each other. Continue reading

Stop Bashing Media Relations—More Important Than Ever

Elevated view of reporter holding microphoneI’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, somewhere along the line, the term “media relations” became such a derisive and reviled term within the public relations business. In the world of PR 2.0, Web 2.0 and everything 2.0, why have we suddenly come to the conclusion—seemingly as an entire industry—that media relations (i.e. the act of actually understanding and trying to help the media as a key function of PR professional’s job) is dead?  That now it’s all about bloggers, or reaching the hottest social media “influencers” and anyone else who can who has an online portal that has high enough uniques according to Compete or Quantcast. Continue reading

In-Depth Coverage: Hacks with Benefits

Businessman and woman smiling at each other in officeI am now single again, after more than a decade of marriage, and am realizing the benefits of being a single gal publicist in a tech PR world (the majority of these reporters being men). After all these of years of marital life, I had forgotten how much easier it is to pitch a story with a hint of flirtation in your voice. But do you let those flirtations go any further?

When I first began doing public relations, I was not at all comfortable on the phone pitching. Those were the days before email. We would fax out releases and were expected to follow-up every fax with a call. Continue reading

Christina’s Coffee Talk with Maria Perez

Maria Perez
Maria Perez

If you work in PR, chances are you’ve spent countless hours building a media list hoping that you have found the best contacts in a targeted outlet that would be interested in your client/product/service. Well, in ’92, a group of geniuses founded ProfNet. ProfNet is an online community of communications professionals made to provide reporters access to expert sources (Wikipedia). I, like many PR professionals, receive daily e-mails from ProfNet, with queries from journalists looking for experts or a specific service that I may be able to help them with. Now, this seems like a simple process, but I’ve always wondered what actually goes behind their closed doors. So this week, with the help of Maria Perez, director of news operations at ProfNet, we gain a little insight in to the ProfNet world and her position.

Continue reading