Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal with Lonnie Champagne of Louisiana Sugar Refining, Alan Willits of Cargill and John Sheptor of Imperial Sugar Company posing for photos.
Event publicity is a tough business. There always seems to be something sexier, more appealing competing for the media’s attention. On top of that, resources of today’s mainstream media to cover stories is stretched by cutbacks and shrinking budgets.
So, what to do when a client asks for coverage of an event that’s to be held in a small town, 35 miles from any major media city?
The team at The News Group Net, of which I’m a partner, was recently given the assignment to handle news media coverage for a ground breaking event near New Orleans – a major, new cane sugar refinery is being built at Gramercy, La., along the Mississippi, 35 miles miles from both New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The sugar refinery will become the largest in North America.
TV photographer for WBRZ, Baton Rouge
Our clients included the groups that make up the joint venture – Imperial Sugar Company, Cargill and the Louisiana Sugar Growers.
But, we had another formidable problem, besides distance – the event was scheduled for February 3, in the middle of Super Bowl week as New Orleans Saints were getting ready for the big game. Media attention, understandably, was focused on the hometown team’s first trip to the Super Bowl.
Our first task was to find a compelling and legitimate news story angle to appeal to the media, and that part was easy – the sugar refinery, biggest in North America, would be an economic development engine for southern Louisiana, attracting as many as 500 construction jobs for starters.
Photographer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune
In this digital era of media, our focus turned to creating a content-rich media resource Web site which we got online in less than a day. We got lucky and registered a great domain name – LouisianaSugarNews.com. Credible-sounding and appropriate. This is important – the site’s sole purpose was to serve as a news media resource.
Working together with Nicole Riechert, an outstanding professional on Cargill’s corporate communications team, we drafted an advance media alert and specific news stories for the site. Ed Lallo of The News Group Net went on-location to shoot high resolution news photos and HD video.
No news releases were used because releases are really the antithesis of what today’s media wants … reporters want stories. We created no media kit because everything was online. Rather, we also put all high res photos and HD videos on USB “thumb” drives that we handed out to the media.
Reporters and photographers at ground breaking event
The traditional PR business … which is slow to embrace using the powerful tools of real news stories, authentic online news sites, photos and video … remains largely paralyzed in a kind of press release catatonic state, generating a blizzard of releases that the media no longer pays attention to.
We also avoided the paid news services – such as Vocus, Businesswire and PR Newswire – that lazy PR agencies persist in using even though they rarely achieve results. Instead, Hattie Horn of our team created a custom media list for southern Louisiana. Hattie is absolutely the best media relations pro at finding the media contacts that really count.
When our media alert first went out 10 days before the event, it resulted in a national Associated Press story, among other local stories. We know of a little secret about how to get AP coverage and bypass all competing PR hype.
The event on February 3 was … well, astonishingly successful. It was covered by 21 reporters and photographers from newspapers, TV stations and trade magazines. The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a half page about the event in the Metro section the next day. One television news team fed the story to 17 TV stations throughout the state.
The News Group Net doesn’t do PR. We work with organizations to achieve substantial results through what we call Corporate Journalism … and, it is powerfully effective.