What Good is a Protest without the Press?
June 29 , 2006 -- CNN, Fox News, NY Times, XM Satellite Radio & Asahi Shimbun (the largest circulation newspaper in the world)
We sent a press release on Saturday for the “Gun Rights Activism Partners”. They had a protest scheduled for Monday, June 26 at 10:00 AM at the U.N. The group wrote in their newsletter, “We had a large media-to-protester ratio, 8-to-5, so there were 1.6 reporters for each one of us, and we have already garnered one major newspaper article so far from the event, published Tuesday in The New York Times.”
The group went on to say, “We believe this article was a fair and quality reporting job of our interview which lasted for over an hour, during which we had time to explain and discuss many issues and individual points concerning the benefits of respecting the individual human right to bear arms and exercise self defense.”
Their spokesman explained, “We were also interviewed by CNN, Asahi Shimbun of Japan (the largest circulation newspaper in the world), photographed by Fox News TV, and invited to appear on what we believe to be NRALIVE on Sirius Satellite Radio or XM Satellite (which unfortunately Sirius or whoever it was who called has not yet followed up on for some reason, but perhaps they will soon). We think we also talked to someone from the Daily News, but we had trouble hearing this person on our cellular.”
The group was very happy with the media coverage. They understand that good publicity is very valuable. Their newsletter said, “considering a full page ad in the Times costs about $110,000, this article is worth at least tens of thousands of dollars in free gun rights advocacy and publicity. We think you'll agree we hit on some major sound bytes and bullet points with this write-up.”
You can see a copy of their press release here: http://mmdnewswire.com/content/view/396/26/ We believe that it is important to put the “when, where, how, why and who” in bold for an event, especially if the press release is being sent on short notice. Journalists need to have the key details about the event highlighted and easy to find.
We have noticed that press releases for protests are most effective if sent about 48 hours before the event. Protests should be at a well known location. Colorful protest signs and a large group of protesters are important. Unfortunately, the “Gun Rights Activism Partners” only had 8 protesters show up. If they had 80 it would have been much larger news, possibly international news. Once the protest is over, a press release announcing the success of the event is a very good idea. It is important to keep the buzz going for as long as possible.
In order to get this great response for the protest, we sent press releases to 8,097 media contacts nationwide. We targeted journalists that covered politics, guns, human rights, national news and a few other smaller categories. We weeded out the smaller media outlets and focused on newspapers and broadcast news with a large circulation. Our list included 53 targeted contacts for CNN, almost 200 contacts for the NY Times, and 33 contacts for Fox News. We were not surprised that these particular news outlets showed up. We have thousands of contacts for these large media outlets and target only the journalists and editors that had written about politics or guns, etc.
Mass Media Distribution LLC
Website: http://www.massmediadistribution.com
Phone: 813-333-2723
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