Want to get on your local news? Would tomorrow be soon enough?
Try using food!
Bagels and cream cheese, cans of caramel corn and pretty baskets filled with fresh-baked croissants make your local TV station look more like a gourmet food shop than a newsroom. Yet that's often how the game is played. Find out the name of the assignment editor or the producer of the 6 o'clock news and send a sweet treat along with your story pitch. Before you know it, you're often on the air.
Shawne Duperon, who has been in TV news for more than 10 years, knows the game all too well. The food bribe worked beautifully recently when she did some pro bono PR work trying to drum up TV coverage for an Easy Bake Oven Bake-off sponsored by General Motors at two inner-city schools in Detroit. The kids baked cookies in an Easy Bake Oven, which uses a light bulb as the heat source.
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"We sent a basket of Mrs. Field's cookies to the TV newsrooms along with a little note saying, 'If you think these are great, just wait until you see what we're baking.' The local ABC and NBC affiliates covered the story. But the local print media barely mentioned it. Savvy PR people know that while food bribes are a no-no at print media outlets, they work like magic at TV and radio stations.
"The reason is because TV news people work so hard and they don't get the accolades the print people get," Shawne said. "The people behind the scenes who bust their butts, like the assignment editors who are insane 9 hours a day or the line producers who are producing different shows, are the ones who are making the people on camera look good. They are also the people who are really making the decisions about news coverage."
Of course, if your story idea is a stinker, the food bribe won't work.
But there are lots of other tricks - 19 to be precise. Shawne shared them with us in a recent teleseminar titled "How To Get On Your Local TV News Tomorrow." We taped it, turned it into an audio CD and are offering it to you for just $29.95. To find out more about this powerful CD (after all, which of you wouldn't like to be on the local news tomorrow?)
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