Five Good Ideas for getting journalists to call you back

Elizabeth McIsaac: The media has always been important in getting our message across. They cover our reports and they tell our stories, but it's never easy. There are times when our emails don't get answered. We don't get any traction even when we have an issue that we know is important. And then there are the changes in the media sector itself. Media today looks very different from 10, even five years ago. The traditional, or what some call “legacy”, media are laying off reporters or even shutting down altogether. Print editions are disappearing or, if they remain, are much smaller than before. But there's good news. There's newer types of media. They're smaller and they're laser focused, and today's guest represents one of those. What hasn't changed is that it continues to get harder to get a journalist to call us back. This is where Denise Balkissoon comes in. She's the Ontario Bureau Chief of The Narwhal, a nonprofit online magazine that focuses on the natural world in Canada. Today she will share with us her five good ideas on how to be smarter about our media relations. With her background in legacy and new journalism, including being the executive editor at Chatelaine and a columnist, editor and podcast host at The Globe and Mail, she's well-placed to do that. Denise and her team know what they're doing and they have a real impact and represent an important reminder of why we still depend on a strong media. Denise, welcome to today's Five Good Ideas and thank you for agreeing to be here. Denise Balkissoon: Thank you very much for having me. Elizabeth McIsaac: Let me start by congratulating you and your team on a great success. A few weeks ago, the premier of Ontario held a press conference and admitted that he and his government had been wrong about opening up the Greenbelt to housing development and that they would now reverse that decision. Many have pointed to the work done by The Narwhal and the Toronto Star in playing a critical role in making that happen, and it happened on the day when the Ontario Bureau of The Narwhal turned two, so this must have been a special moment. Denise Balkissoon: It was pretty surreal actually that it happened on our actual second birthday. I have been a journalist a long time and I think that this is probably the biggest impact that anything I've worked on has ever had. It's the same for many of the people who are listening to this today. We all work on these really hard issues all day every day, and sometimes it seems like it doesn't move forward and then all of a sudden there's this giant impact. It was really great. It was really affirming for me and for Emma McIntosh who worked on that story, and Fatima Syed who's the other Ontario reporter. It was pretty awesome. Elizabeth McIsaac: It's a pretty big achievement and it's an important reminder of why media is a critical partner for many of us in the work that we're trying to do to make change happen. Let's move to today's session topic. How can we get journalists to call us back? Where should someone working for a nonprofit start in making this happen? Denise Balkissoon: The first point is to know what you want and when you're crafting your pitch or your media release or whatever type of outreach you're doing, there are two main things that people probably want. One would be coverage of a specific campaign or an event, and that is time sensitive. It is very focused. It's very specific. You might have a specific idea or interview subject or something that you would like to see covered. And then the other is to have the various experts in your organization be someone that journalists think about when we want someone to speak to that topic. So my first tip would be figure out what it is you want and then craft your approach based on that. Elizabeth McIsaac: Knowing what you want is always important, but then there's more and less effective ways to get attention on that. We all think that what we're doing is really important. We all think that we're thought leaders in crafting the solutions. How do we pitch that, the research studies or the data or the reports? Denise Balkissoon: If you want your specific study mentioned in the week or the day of its release, think about what timeline the publication you're aiming for works on. So if it's a daily newspaper, you can probably give them a shorter timeline. If it's a magazine, timelines are much longer, and so you're going to need to give them at least a month, maybe two months. So make sure you're giving reporters enough time. So there are two watchdogs that reported on the Greenbelt. There was the auditor general and the integrity commissioner and their approaches were very different. But that was a super hot topic, so both got covered anyway. The auditor general told us what day it was coming out. We could prepare and make sure the reporters had time and they had moved everything else off their plate. Then she gave us an embargoed report, which meant that three hours before the public got to see it, reporters got to see it, which gives three hours to read it, write our skeleton outline of what we're going to do and prepare our questions. And so that’s a much more sane approach for us to do. It really makes us feel like we have our heads wrapped around what's in the report and the topic a lot better. The ntegrity commissioner report came out of nowhere. We heard murmurs in the morning that it was maybe coming out that day and then it dropped at one o'clock. Whatever plans you have that evening are now ruined because it's going to take longer to get it out and we're scrambling to ask questions while the public is asking questions on social media and the government's already responding and that kind of thing. So from those two approaches, especially if you are not the auditor general reporting on a topic that everyone is obsessed with, journalists really appreciate some time to wrap their heads around the material. Because the things you’re putting out are complicated and there's a lot of data and a lot of expertise in there, and so as an editor I would want to make sure that I have time to get the right reporter on it. We probably have a couple of general assignment reporters still maybe, but you want the reporter whose beat this is to be doing it. So number one, give us some time. Number two, be available for follow-up questions. There's been times where I see a press release that is intriguing and then when I send the communications coordinator a couple follow-up questions and they either don't have the time or the capacity or maybe sometimes the interest to really help me flesh out what the story is. Your release is top level for us and then we may have more questions to figure out, Is this a new story? Is this a feature? Is this a big bucket where we want to send out a photographer for a day? It's fair to be honest about your capacity. If you didn't expect that you were going to be fielding five questions for me today and you don't have the time, then that way I can figure out if maybe it's something that I am going to drop, but the press release is just the first start. We might need more before we decide whether it really works as a story for us. Elizabeth McIsaac: I'm just going to take us back to media relations 101. What's the difference between a press release and a pitch? Denise Balkissoon: A press release is more general. It's probably drawing attention to an event or a specific piece of research or a report. You're hoping that people will cover it. You might have some ideas of how you want them to cover it or what types of stories might work, but it's much more general. A pitch is more specific. We will get pitches about a specific area or an event, like if someone's sending scientists out to a certain wetland or if there's a clearing of an ash tree that's been infested and that might be an opportunity for us to take pictures. A pitch is much more specific. You're essentially saying this is what I think the story is, whereas a press release says, here's some really interesting information that I think you might be interested in, and so a pitch probably falls into the first bucket, which is a specific type of coverage that you're hoping for. Whereas a press release is more, we have this information, we have this expertise, and please think about us when you're talking about that area. Elizabeth McIsaac: So a larger broadcast versus a customized opportunity. It's not just about knowing what we want. What do we have to consider next? Denise Balkissoon: Then there's also what your contacts want. By your contacts I mean specific journalists. So the number one pet peeve for me, and is probably on most journalists’ top five, is getting my inbox full of things that are irrelevant to me. I have been at a lot of mainstream publications and I'm still getting releases about arts, about fashion and makeup, which I'm super interested in, but I'm not writing stories about anymore, and that really is very frustrating. It definitely seems like clogging my email box. I do not like it. It's also not going to be effective for you. So who are the reporters that handle the stories that you are targeting? Who are the editors that handle those? Make sure that what you're sending us is relevant to us because it does make us grouchy and over time we might not even open your email even if you move to a different job. I've known lots of people who move from job to job, and I actually remember the ones who have been useful to me at previous jobs and now if they're in a different field. I still remember what it was like to work with them. So don't annoy me to the point that I'm not opening your emails five years later. Elizabeth McIsaac: So on the email, what do you put in the header to get your attention so that you're not annoyed, but you're curious? Denise Balkissoon: Well, you could put report, you could put pitch, you could put data so to give me a bit more information about it. Be as specific as you can. So in the bucket of emails where it wouldn't annoy me, but it might not be relevant to me, I get a lot of environment pitches from other places in Canada and I only assign stories about Ontario. That's fine. I can forward them to my colleagues, but I might let them sit in my inbox for a couple days before I do that, whereas if it's says Ontario or an Ontario city or town, I'm more likely to open that. The part that you think is the most unique, be really specific. Don't say, “Ways to make your house more climate friendly.” Say, “New technology to reduce the cost of flood-proofing your basement.” The second one is much more specific, and I know right away that if I have someone working on a flooding story, this might be relevant, whereas I'm working on climate proofing every single day. Elizabeth McIsaac: That really takes us to your idea number three, which is be specific and clear. People sometimes have embargoed reports and that's a way of giving you the time to get up to speed and to be able to treat the topic well. What's your advice on managing an embargoed report? Denise Balkissoon: The first thing is that the reporter needs to agree to the embargo before they see it. It's a courtesy not to report on an embargoed report that we haven't agreed to, but especially if it's a super hot topic. If you're sending in a report to a bunch of reporters and saying, this is embargoed. They're all thinking, well, is CBC going to respect the embargo? Is The Star going to respect it? What if I'm the only one that respects it and they do it first and your embargo is done. Number one, get people to agree to it ahead of time, but it is great. As I said, it gives us time to wrap our head around it, to formulate our questions, to figure out who we might want to speak to other than you, to see if we can find real people that are affected by this topic. So, yeah, an embargo is actually really great for something that's complicated, but let's make sure we all agree on what embargo means before you send it over. Elizabeth McIsaac: While we're being specific and clear, we still want to be compelling and we get wrapped up in this notion that bad news is more interesting than good news. Is that true? Denise Balkissoon: This is a conundrum because people say they want good news, and I would like more good news, but the fact of the matter is what we call “solutions stories” in the environmental sector often do not get the same readership as bad news or emergencies. It could be evolutionary that we're supposed to be scanning for threats all the time. It is frustrating. It's frustrating for me when we run solutions stories or happy stories and they don't get the same clicks as something terrible. I'm sure it's very frustrating for people that are doing research and are having small wins and big wins to make that kind of story more compelling. That's the kind of story where I think you definitely want a human in the center of it. You want a human who has maybe solved a problem so that there's still some tension there about this risk or this problem that they're always facing. The ten times that their basement flooded before they came up with this technology or something like that. It's an interesting thing, especially in the environmental sector. Climate news can be so doom and gloom and I would love to be giving people hope, which does exist and solutions which do exist, but I don't know that we figured out exactly how to get people to read it. As much as people say that the news is too depressing and they want happier things, they don't always actually behave that way. Elizabeth McIsaac: So there's a good nugget in there too. And we hear that a lot about bring people into the story because people like to read about people and should we have those kinds of contacts eady to go when we start reaching out to media so that we can make that connection for you? Or is that something you want to drive yourself to find the people's part of the story? Denise Balkissoon: Oh, we would love assistance with it, especially because with more marginalized or vulnerable communities, it can be very hard to build those relationships. And so if you have built them and are willing to build that bridge, that's very helpful. I know that it's very tricky because people's privacy is important, especially when they are vulnerable or perhaps stigmatized in some way, and it's a very sensitive area for journalists and media relations. When I say know what your contacts want, also know who your contacts are, know who the journalists are that do the type of reporting that you like and that you respect and that you think is valuable. Because you don't want to take someone who is unhoused or who is a refugee or who has had a hard life and connected them with a reporter and then end up with a story that you feel exploited them, and then you feel that, number one, you haven't achieved your media goal, but you've also put someone in a bad situation. I totally respect that and I've seen that happen. It's good to know who the reporters are that you want to talk to. And I also say, and it's counterintuitive for me as a journalist, but feel free to say no. If you don't like someone's work, if you don't respect their outlet, if you don't think that they're going to do the story or the person justice, that's your call as a communications person, and I think that you will get more satisfying results for yourself with that. So yes, we really, really appreciate when organizations can help us build those relationships or at least point us in the right direction. But I think good journalists also understand how complicated that can be for you, and if there's a journalist who doesn't respect how complicated that is, that's probably a red flag. Elizabeth McIsaac: We're often afraid to say no to a journalist because maybe they'll never call us back, but if you're not sure, if you're not confident that your story will carry the way you want it to, that you can and maybe should have reservations. Is it ever appropriate or common to say, I'll do the interview, but I want to see what you write first or is that just not on the table? Denise Balkissoon: I'm actually dealing with that right now and the answer is I don't know any journalist who is ever going to send a draft of a story to an interview subject or a comms person and ask them to okay it because then it becomes a press release and we have different roles. Hopefully my industry has become more smart about what we call trauma-informed reporting and the sensitivity of certain subjects and certain groups. Magazines, which are thin on the ground, have traditionally had a fact-checking process where someone who is not the reporter calls each of the subjects and goes through the facts to make sure they're right. That job at a news organization is usually done by the reporter. A good reporter, not on a short daily news story, but on a feature and on a complicated feature, is probably doing that anyway. It's definitely fair to ask for a fact checking call, especially if the story is very sensitive or very complicated in terms of science or something like that. And what that would entail is the reporter calling you, going through the story and going through every fact. Quotes are a tricky thing. One of the problems is that we don't speak the way that we would like to hear ourselves. It's just a bit of a pain to have someone look at their quote and it's full of “likes” and “ums” and that's how humans actually talk, including me, and then they want to fix it, and then it doesn't sound natural anymore because that's not how people talk. So that's one of the basic reasons that we don't do that. And then there's also that often people don't like how they come across or they would see what someone else said about them and they don't like that and they want us to change that, and there's absolutely no way we're going to do that. So that's why we don't let people see things. But we will go through the facts and we will — sometimes, again, it really depends on the reporter and the type of story — go through the idea of the quotes, even if we don't say the exact quote. We're not going to do that for every news story, but certainly a story about sexual assault, for example, that's increasingly common. For more sensitive topics, a reporter should be willing to make sure that the subject is comfortable with the story before it comes out, whereas if we're talking about a politician or the CEO of a big company, no. No. Those people do not get as much leeway. Elizabeth McIsaac: I hadn't heard the term trauma-informed journalism, but it makes perfect sense. Those are the right kinds of guidelines that we want to look toward. We have a pitch. We're at the point of launching it. The person I reach out to, I think they're going to be interested because I've done my homework, I know my contacts, I know what they're interested in, I'm ready to go. Now what? Denise Balkissoon: Timing is very important based on when you are hoping to get coverage. If you have a specific timeline based on what the journalist's timeline is most likely to be, the more time the better. Although too much time means people can forget about you, which is super frustrating. If you're pitching product for Christmas, you're going to have to be pitching magazines in September, whereas you probably don't want to pitch newspapers until November. And so you may be sending out the same thing to different people at different times. Follow-up is very important, especially if your original email is valuable, then I'm less likely to be annoyed by follow-up, whereas when I get to three follow-ups about something that is totally unrelated, that is frustrating, but it never hurts to follow up at least once. As much as you've been specific about the reporter, you can also feel open to sending it to who you think the section editor is, keeping in mind that they get a greater volume of things, so they're less likely to respond, but they might end up also forwarding it to the reporter. And if the reporter sees it and they know their editor's interested, that again drives up the chance that you'll get some coverage. Elizabeth McIsaac: You've used email consistently through your descriptions of how to reach out. There was a period of time when Twitter was Twitter, before it was X, when some journalists used DMs on Twitter or other social media platforms to look for stories or connect with people. Is that still happening or should we really focus on good old-fashioned email? Denise Balkissoon: Social's falling apart, so it doesn't hurt to contact people on different platforms. The amount that I use social has shrunk dramatically, and I think that's a detriment, to be honest. I think that I am getting news from fewer sources, and that's not great because all this sort of gate keeping that has happened with legacy media social, when it works, it means that people have greater access to journalists and journalists have greater access to people, and it's not just big organizations that have muscle talking to each other. So I do think it's a detriment, but I also think it's probably just a point in time, but right now it's collapsing. Twitter's just more lies than truth right now. Facebook and all Meta products like Facebook, Instagram are actively cutting off Canadian news, so email is probably back to being the most reliable. Feel free to message people in other places, but who knows if they see it, who knows what's even happening. Elizabeth McIsaac: What you're saying speaks a lot to the power of relationship. Actually, if it's transactional, if I just send you an email out of the blue, you don't know who I am. I think my work is important, but I'm an unknown quantity. How do we start that process of building a relationship with a reporter? Denise Balkissoon: It goes back to knowing who the reporters are that cover what you're interested in or what you're focusing on and how good they are at it, especially if you're trying to gain a reputation as a subject matter expert versus get attention for something very specific. It's great to keep in touch. It's great to give feedback on stories that the reporter has done. Useful criticism is welcome and also positive feedback is really welcome because reporters tend to get a lot of negative feedback. There have been times where I see an email in my inbox and it's interesting and I think about it for so long, and it's not until months later that there's an actual occasion for me to get in touch. If you have some flexibility with your timelines, that's great. Just because someone doesn't respond doesn't mean that they haven't noticed. The University of Waterloo Climate Impact Centre send out really great press releases that on one hand showcase the specific thing that is of interest today, but also set the stage that this research centre knows a lot about this particular topic. And I glanced at and read their press releases for many months, probably over a year before I eventually wrote a story where in my head I was like, oh yeah, well Waterloo probably has someone who can talk about this. And then they did end up in one of my stories. So keep the long view because we are all very busy, but that doesn't mean we aren't interested and sometimes it's just a matter of when the right time is and when the right story is. Elizabeth McIsaac: For nonprofits, many of whom have just been about the business of getting their work done and now they have a reason to engage the media because they're trying to launch a campaign, are there tips for starting from scratch when you don't have any media contacts, like you're really just getting started? Denise Balkissoon: It probably goes back to reading the news or following the news if it's broadcast. Just because you haven't reached out to someone before doesn't mean that you don't know what it is that they are interested in or what it is that they cover. The follow-up is always good. Learning as you go along. In the past couple months, I got a press release about a green building. It was a housing development and it was sent to me from a university. And so then I sent them a note and said, "Do you know what the price point will be on this versus a conventional unit because that's a piece of information I'd like while I evaluate this?" And their rep was like, "Oh, well, no. That's a question for the builder." And again, I appreciate that this person might be very busy. I don't think that they only work on climate releases for the university. I think they're much more general. On the other hand, I wasn't set on doing a story. I was just kind of interested in this topic. And so as soon as you put a piece of friction in front of someone, it's like, okay, well, I have to dig up the builder and dig up their media person, and I have 20 other things on my list. So learn as you go along what is effective and what causes things to die on the vine. Elizabeth McIsaac: We've talked a lot about press releases, news releases, but then sometimes we hear that using a newswire is a better way to get distribution of the press release. Is that viewed differently on the other side, or is it all one and the same? Denise Balkissoon: I think a good release is a good release no matter who it comes from. The thing that I think is handy about Newswires is that often if you Google a company’s media relations, you don't get an email. You don't get a specific person. But then if I go to Canada Newswire and put the company in, often I get a specific person from a previous email, from a previous release they've sent out, and I scroll to the bottom and it's like a specific person with their email and phone number versus [email protected]. So I think Newswire is probably best for archiving your releases. In terms of who I'm getting it from, I just need it to be good. Bigger organizations that have specific people, it's easier to build a relationship with them. I know who they are. I might run into them at different events or things. There is a face to the name, but I appreciate that smaller organizations don't necessarily have the budget to have a specific person just doing that. Elizabeth McIsaac: So sometimes I'll do an op-ed and then I get complete control over my story and I'll get that placed or even write a longer form article for placement. Is that a strong approach? Does that build your profile with the media? Is that a different tool for a different purpose? Denise Balkissoon: I don't know if it builds your profile with the media so much as it builds your profile in the public. Like your organization might be super happy if you got an op-ed in the Globe. Very many smart and talented people are not necessarily great writers. And I read a lot of op-eds that are not written for a general audience that are very formal or filled with very industry specific jargon that I don't think get the point across as well as a good story that interviewed that person by a journalist would do. We publish very few op-eds at The Narwhal because we do prefer to be able to provide that context. So we would prefer to talk to the expert than build the story around it. But on the other hand, if you're a very high profile person, it could be a great way for your organization to get into a big paper or something that a lot of people read. So my number one question is, can this person write? Is anyone going to understand what they say? Elizabeth McIsaac: Any final words of advice to this sector who is trying very hard to get messages across, tell their stories? Denise Balkissoon: So I said that social's falling apart, which I think is true, but something is going to happen next. Social media has been part of the landscape for so long. It's a what comes next question, not is it over forever. For better or for worse, for the types of organization that Maytree is targeting, it's great. It's a great chance to tell your story yourself and the way you want to do it and get your own photos and video and stuff made. It's not so great when politicians don't have to talk to journalists. They can just send out their own videos. That is not amazing for democracy. But I do think for your members, it still is valuable to be telling your own stories. And actually maybe more people will see your stories on Instagram right now than ours because you're not a news organization. I also think it's hard not to take things personally, even as a journalist, it's hard to take things personal. We don't get callbacks, but often it's just that everyone is very, very busy. It doesn't mean that they don't care about the same subject so they don't think that what you're presenting is valuable. It's just for whatever reason not at the top of their list right now. We really appreciate all the work that advocates do. I actually just got to spend a week out in Washington state with some environmental organizations. And it was interesting because I think of myself more as a journalist than an environmentalist. And sometimes in Canada, I have to keep that relationship very separate because these are organizations that we might report on and maybe someone in them is going to behave badly, and I have to keep that distance. But to be with a bunch of organizations that I'm never going to report on, it really showed me how hardworking and smart and caring everyone is. And it did give me the sense that maybe that needs to come across in our stories a bit more while we still figure out how to maintain that distance in case we need to write something less than positive in the future. Which is to say that the journalists that are on the beats that you want to get their attention, they're on those beats for years and years because they also care about that topic. And like I said, even if they're not getting back to you right after your press release, it doesn't mean that they didn't read it or that they don't think that what you're doing is valuable. And maybe one day it will come around where there's an opportunity to work with them.