Media - SchoolsPR

Radio stations and newspapers often ask for pupils or students to be included in a photograph or an interview. You may not want to encourage such coverage, but you could well find that if you refuse your story will be given far less coverage than you would wish.

There are no rules about children or teenagers appearing in the media save that under 16s should only appear with their parents’ permission. You should be ready with your answer to such a request to feature children – if your school is one of those that refuses all such requests, then make the refusal straight away, but do so recognising you will reduce your coverage.

If you are willing to allow pupils and teenagers to be engaged in publicity, then have clearance letters ready for parents – and ensure they are written in such a way that the parents will respond quickly and positively.

BBC Local Radio, and to a lesser degree some commercial radio stations, have a continuous appetite for news stories that relate to local issues. Your local area Radio Times will carry details of your local stations – but you will need to go to the stations’ websites to find more details. Among the details you will be able to find the email address of the station, and it will be worth noting this so that the station gets a copy of each press release you issue. If you know the name of the individual who produces or presents a particular show on which you think your news is most likely to be broadcast then you can also locate that individual’s email address. If it is not printed on the website, phone the station and ask.

Remember that many commercial stations don’t carry educational news – but if you are building an email list (as you should) it is worth putting the station on your list of email contacts, just in case.

National radio is harder to get onto, because the national stations will want to know what broader perspective your story offers listeners across the country. You should aim to email the producers or presenters of individual programmes, rather than the station generally. It is not a good idea to keep sending national stations what is in effect local news, because when you have a national story it could be lost simply because the station has stopped taking any notice of your press releases.

It is fairly obvious that radio wants interviews – which means you need to have someone ready to be interviewed, either on the phone or at the station. If you are taking part in a programme for a national BBC station you can usually go to your local BBC statioin and record your interview there (the quality of the line from a BBC station will make it sound as if you are in the studio with the interviewer – a great improvement on doing the recording from your phone.

Of course you don’t need to use the same person all the time to conduct radio interviews – and if the issue you are discussing is one that is specific to a department then you should certainly invite someone from the relevant department to speak.

you have a good speaker who sounds well on radio, ready to do the interview.
you do not have to go through a complex “clearance” process at the school’s end. The offer to be on a programme might come at a moment’s notice, and a reply that “I’ll just have to clear this with the head first” is liable to mean that the offer is withdrawn, or at least not repeated for a subseqeutn story.
you have a telephone in the school from which you can conduct an interview without interruption.

Local papers will cover your story – and will on occasion give you a half page or even larger spread for a good story. You should ensure that you get copies of the daily paper for your area, plus any weekly papers that print news among the adverts, and note the relevant email addresses to which you can send your stories.

Papers will also welcome a photo or two – so it is worth having a variety of digital pieces ready that you can send via email. Building a library of photos is always a good idea. You can use these not just for press releases but also on your website and indeed for the school prospectus. It is certainly worth getting a range of pictures of:

The staff
The school entrance
The teaching rooms with “interesting” equipment (computers, science equipment etc)
Unusual and interesting parts of the school.

As with radio you will also need to be ready to undertake an interview with a reporter, so you should know who you will be putting up for such an eventuality.

Educational magazines will run stories from schools, but your story has to fit exactly with the type of story that the magazine runs. It is obvious that a special education magazine is only going to run stories about special education – but the reality is that such magazines receive hundreds of stories a month which have nothing to do with their speciality.

It is worth collecting a copy or two of each publication that you think might be interested in your stories. Not only will that help you target exactly the right publication, it will also give you their editorial email and postal address.

THE MEDIA

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