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Magazines and Newspapers are useful tools to reach a large number of a specialized audience group (e.g. policymakers, land managers, citizens). Writing press releases is one option to reach news agencies and get visibility for the RI. However, major global news agencies should be directly contacted and a story offered. This dissemination is free of charge, but the downside is that it can be challenging to get them interested on a story. Another mean to reach the news agencies can be via different events where media is also present. Third option is to hire a freelance journalist to write a story for your RI. The cost depends whether the story is sold only to one media (newsletter, magazine) or if the RI boughts all the rights to its self (website, newsletters etc.).
Advantages: If successful, the news agencies can be very effective way of disseminating information to the public. Writing press release costs only the working hours, but the same material can be used in other dissemination (website, newsletter, blogs).
Challenges: News agencies can be extremely difficult to engage. Chance of misunderstandings and lack of control during the process can occur. RIs are often on quite low in the science “supply chain” and may not reach the the news agencies interest. Writing appealing press releases is not easy.
Resources:Writing press releases need scientific information, writing skills and understanding on media and target audiences. Not necessary one person needs to have all the required skills: scientist can provide the context and communication person modify it to press release. Clear message and story line in respect to target audience (citizens, decision makers).
Recommendations: Good ways to engage news agencies must be developed. Using the science problem first could be one way, another would e.g. be using technology as the main concept for a story. Need to build storylines together with reporters.
In the COP meetings, which have recently been held in Paris, France (COP21) and in Marrakech, Morocco (COP 22), several ESFRIs were present, including ICOS and ACTRIS, and at the same time several global media rooms were present. Naturally the travel expenses need to be covered, but on the other hand if the RIs are present anyway, this can provide useful route to reach global news agencies and furthermore citizens. During COOP+ project we noticed that it was more challenging than we thought to find a good freelancer from Finland to write a story for us. We contacted few journalists and magazines without response. It seems that the most popular freelance journalist writing to the magazines do not publicly share their contact information and it is hard to contact them. The exercise that COOP+ is conducting to describe global challenges under the point of view of RIs could be appealing for global news agencies. Once we have published the special issue, we will prepare a press kit to outreach the obtained results. |
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