Having the following elements in hand prior to your first contact with News & Research Communications is helpful (news folk like to call them the “Five Ws”):
- Who is the central person/persons involved in your story? Background information on main participants, speakers, researchers, etc., is always helpful.
- What is the story? Are you publishing a research paper in a journal? Launching a new service project? Getting a big award? Details, please!
- When is all of this happening? Specifics are critical – “approximate times” won’t do.
- Where is this taking place? If your news item isn’t tied to a location, no problem, but if it is, street addresses that allow individuals to map your location via Google or other search engines are important.
- Why should anyone care? Thousands of story ideas cross reporters’ and editors’ desks each day. What makes yours special or of potential interest to others? We can often help you think through this one and isolate angles or elements that are helpful in promoting a story.
Photos, video, social media & more
Elements that help illustrate your story can be critical in helping persuade reporters to cover it or in enhancing its interest to your target audience. With ever-expanding ways to use those elements on the Web, making sure you have such material in hand can be a ticket to widespread exposure and engagement.
Think broadly about what might work. Images don’t have to be professionally shot to be of use. Media commonly use cell phone video, book jacket covers, microscope snapshots of interesting scientific phenomena and more to illustrate stories. We’ve shared footage shot by graduate students on research boats and seen it wind up on network news. If you’re unsure, let us help you make a determination about what might work.
Give us time to work with your elements or help produce illustration pieces. We often need to alter photos or video that we haven’t produced ourselves to provide them to media in formats that work for them. We also may need time to get them loaded for use on any number of OSU social media sites, including:
- Oregon State University on YouTube
- Oregon State University on Facebook
- Oregon State University news flickr
- Oregon State University news Twitter
Thousands of individuals interested in OSU visit these and other sites daily. Appropriately used, social media can be invaluable in promoting your story or event.
Target audiences
Help us get your news in front of the right people by thinking through who you most need to get your news. Is there a particular city, news outlet or demographic that is critical for your purposes? Does a donor want to be recognized in his/her hometown paper? Should your new research publication be noted in a particular academic newsletter?
Share any thoughts along these lines with the news staff. Even if you don’t have much information on any given news outlet, we have software that allows us to find, among other things, contact essentials for all U.S. and Canadian media, including individual e-mail addresses and phone numbers for newsroom staff.
Tracking coverage
If your story idea turns into media coverage, we can help you track stories and generate coverage reports representing the totality of media exposure. Such reports have been of significant importance for faculty researchers as they document impact of their work for the National Science Foundation and other federal funding agencies. OSU Governmental Affairs staff also appreciate such reports and use them to help illustrate value of public investments in Oregon State.