Partner Article

What makes a story newsworthy?

On 23rd May I presented for Tyneside Connect on the subject of ‘Effective online marketing and pr’. One of the subjects I covered was around just what makes a story newsworthy. At Bdaily we receive in excess of 100 releases each day- how do you get journalists to notice your story and what actually makes the masses read?

There’s no direct science to getting your releases noticed, but there are a few indicators that are evident in the most read stories on Bdaily:

Timeline: The story may be of immediate interest, centred around a current event or is a breaking story.

Impact: The story affects the publication’s readers, viewers or listeners. Possibly even hitting a specific region or industry.

Conflict: The story involves problems or issues, e.g. company x has entered administration.

Proximity: The story is geographically relevant.

Uniqueness: The story is different from similar stories and/or offers a different perspective on an issue. The story may be an ‘exclusive’ that has only been made available to a specific publication.

’Celebrity’: The story features a quote from or is about a key figure. This can be applied to business, e.g. a key regional business person/ politician.

Think about Keywords

Search engines bring a large amount of traffic to news sites because fresh information is being published all of the time.

If a story is a hot topic, it’s likely that many people are searching on the likes of Google. Take today for example, Friday 15th June 2012. Popular search queries linking into Bdaily include ‘work placement’ and many around ‘olympic torch route’ and ‘Bear Grylls zipwire’, all topics which have been popular today. Try to think about how you can incorporate popular topics and events into your news.

Think about news aggregators

All of our news is shared via the likes of newsnow, YahooNews and GoogleNews.

GoogleNews in particular brings in a large amount of traffic to Bdaily, especially when we, or a member, covers a story that is within their trending topics. GoogleNews often favours sources that break stories, so if 300 other news sources publishes a similar story and Bdaily gets there first it’s likely that we’d be featured as the lead.

The Bdaily Editorial team have produced a guide into writing press releases, email enquiries@bdaily.co.uk to request a copy of the document.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jonny Marshall .