When I do presentations about improving media relations, I stress the importance of having good research skills. On my website bio, it talks about my experience as a researcher for television productions. I am often asked “What does this have to do with media relations?”. In a nutshell the answer is “A lot.” Media relations requires many other skills too. I used to get annoyed with a client who always referred to me as ”a good statistician”, but never praised my ability as a publicist. You can be a good statistician without being a good publicist. But you can’t be a good publicist without being a good statistician.
A good journalist has good research skills. A good media relations representative, or publicist, has good journalism skills. One of the primary functions of a publicist is to recognize a good story angle or story “hook”. In order to do that you need to have a lot of information about the subject and recognize the strongest story, with the strongest “hook”. If you are seeking publicity, arm yourself with information. If you have a wealth of information you are more likely to be interviewed or to be successful in pitching a story idea to a journalist. Without rock-solid, current information, there can be no story.
Once a journalist is working on a story, a good publicist can also provide much of his research for him. This will be mostly by directing him to sources and supplying statistics, facts and figures.
Just working in, or being part of, an organization does not mean you are equipped with this kind of research. Broad-based knowledge is different than the kind you gain from on-going, in-depth research. If you continually research the kind of facts and figures that appeal to journalists, you will recognize stories quickly.
Good research skills mean being able to take a subject about which you know very little and quickly become an expert. It means having the skills to find and verify the most current data on the subject. Such skills involve more than putting the subject name in a search engine.
In sport, a good statistic can be a story in itself. Due to the volume of show jumping research I have done over many years, I have recognized record-settiing achievements approaching. One, that received a large amount of publicity, was recognized nearly two years in advance. No journalist would have known about it otherwise. Building anticipation is a great way to generate publicity.
Show jumping is one of the few sports that has no single source for basic statistics and information. If you do a Google search for “golf statistics” or “tennis statistics”, you will find some quality sources of this kind of information. The same is true of most other sports.
Listening to commentators on an American show jumping broadcast recently, I was shocked at their lack of facts about the subject. Inaccuracies were abound, ranging from the way the jumping order is created to the way riders qualify for the World Cup. They had no facts and figures on the competitors. “He’s a great guy” was the most frequently-heard commentary about various riders.
Statistics that are available about show jumping are often scattered between different sources, not kept up-to-date, or lacking key information such as scores. This is one of the ways in which the sport of show jumping needs to modernize in order to successfully interact with media and sponsors.
It was this void in the sport that prompted me to create a website with just such information. www.equestrianjumpingcanada.com is still a work in progress and will continue to grow. Current information will be added while it is current.
