Last week, we met with the incredible Peter Ranscombe, a Scottish-based freelance drinks journalist who travelled to Clementine Com HQ in Parsons Green to deliver his training on writing, pitching and press trips.
At Clementine Com, we believe that staff development is paramount and we pride ourselves in organising monthly training sessions to ensure we are providing our clients with the best consultancy in PR and social media.
Peter, who has many years of experience in the industry, working for a number of titles including The Scotsman, Decanter, Club Oenologique and The Times and has been very generous to discuss with us about how we can improve our pitching techniques from a journalist’s point of view and master the media.
We first covered the fundamental of media by starting with what media according the Galtung & Ruge ‘News Value’ theory. According to this, there are 11 main values :
Threshold – big events or numbers
Proximity – meaningful to reader’s life
Simplicity – a clear storyline, unambiguous
Consonance – predictable, expected
Continuity – part of an ongoing story
Frequency – timed for news cycle, immediate
Unexpected – something new, unique
Personality – human interest
Elite people – involving elite personality, opinion leaders
Elite countries – involving relevant countries
Negativity – bad news sells
We analysed different case study and highlighted as many news values we could find. This was a very important exercise that allowed us to better understand how to structure our pitch according to the audience we wish to appeal to. In this way, our press release will be even more targeted.
As PR pros, our main role is to be the bridge that mediates between clients and journalists and by saving journalists precious time the chances of our clients being featured increase exponentially. A win-win for everyone!
