The Newsworthy Insider: One-on-One With Eric Durr
Friday, March 13, 2009 at 12:20PM 
For this week’s blog post I reached out to a model PR client, the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs, (DMNA). Eric Durr, the Director of Public Affairs for DMNA, was kind enough to answer some questions about the strategy he and his staff use to get media coverage. Much of DMNA’s media relations strategy mirrors the advice you’ll find on the Newsworthy blog.
You will find my questions in bold and comments in italics.
Do you have a strict news cycle that you try to follow? Or do you issue news releases and media advisories as the need arises?
Our goal is to announce an event about 36 hours in advance of the press conference, homecoming, departure ceremony, etc. Our thinking is that we want to get the word out early enough so that it gets on the news editors’ radar, but not so early that it gets lost.
If we tell the media that something is happening that day, they may have already scheduled a crew/reporter for another event, and we have lost our opportunity to get the story out. So we want to give them time to plan, but not so much time that our event gets lost.
In the case of events that might require a lot of advance planning or travel such as our major troop reintegration events in Rochester/ Bolton Landing/ Tarrytown we’ve put the word out about four days ahead of time and then we hit the wires with another advisory the day before.
By putting out information out ahead of time, and ensuring that our advisories usually have enough information to make a story out of, we’ve seen that we’re getting pickup on the morning news shows, and AP wire, even if they don’t staff the event.
What kinds of tools do you use to monitor your organization’s media coverage? If you are paying for tools, do you feel they are worth the expense?
Generally, we use “Google news Alerts”. By keying in words like “New York Army National Guard”, “New York Air National Guard”, “New York National Guard”, or the name of one of our spokesmen who was commenting on an issue, we can usually find most of what has been written.
In many cases, though, newspapers or TV stations don’t show up on Google News. So we also check the major media sites for: Syracuse, Rochester, Albany, Buffalo, and NYC as well. We’ve been approached by media monitoring services, but felt that we didn’t get enough value for the money they wanted. We can do it ourselves fairly easily.
How is your organization reacting to the wrenching changes in the media industry?
The financial problems in the media industry make it harder for newspapers and TV stations to commit people and time to covering some of the truly unique stories about the New York National Guard; ranging from the 109th Airlift Wing’s support for research in Greenland, or the 106th Rescue Wing’s support for the Space Shuttle, to the Army National Guard’s annual training at Fort Drum, or at places like Fort Pickett, VA and even for coverage of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Our units are ready to host the press, but the press can’t afford to come. Even traveling from NYC or Long Island to Westchester to can be prohibitive for a TV station or newspaper.
We try to do everything we can to
- give the reporter and crew a good story when they show up and
- provide enough information and photos or B-roll so they can get a story even if they can’t staff something.
Fortunately the Public Affairs Office of the NYS Division of Military and Naval Affairs has a good product to sell. We’ve got the personal stories of more than 11,000 members of the Army and Air National Guard who have been to Iraq and Afghanistan, we have visual imagery of people training for combat or reuniting with their family when they come home. Sometimes, of course, we’re telling the sad story of Soldiers who have died for their country.
When we put something out, the press generally knows it’s at least worth a few paragraphs.
Are you utilizing social media to get the word out about your events? If so, what outlets?
The Army and other armed services are not making extensive use of Myspace and Facebook as a tool for recruiting and we’re constantly talking about reaching into those environments. We’ve put together a ‘draft’ My Space page but haven’t gone live yet.
Very frankly, the demands of keeping our website up to date takes up the time of our excellent webmaster, Bill Albrecht. We simply haven’t been able to work on getting the social networking thing down.
We use our website as a public information tool, a command information tool to talk to our soldiers, and we also maintain applications on it that allow Soldiers and Airmen to apply for a job, or register for a reintegration event.
We put up news, change pictures frequently and post videos and downloadable publications. We’re constantly seeing our number of hits increase.
To increase traffic even further I would suggest DMNA make use of Facebook Pages and Twitter! Both take minimal time to set up and can be used to get more press coverage. Facebook can pull the RSS feed of their press releases right to their page, and Twitter can be used to microblog DMNA’s press releases so their followers can see them and hopefully, Re-tweet them!
Choose an issue that matters to your organization and walk us through what influences your communication strategy, and then how you execute that strategy.
The New York National Guard staff at Joint Forces Headquarters- New York, is currently working very hard to ensure that the 1,200 men and women of the Army National Guard who returned from a 10-month deployment in Afghanistan in December and January are getting the help they need to “reintegrate” back into their civilian jobs and family life.
Making the transition from being a humvee gunner to selling insurance can be tough. It’s also hard to fit back into the family again.
The National Guard hosts every soldier and his or her spouse and family to two weekends at posh hotels where these issues are discussed and each soldier sees a counselor. We provide information about veteran’s services, along with information on advancing both military and civilian affairs.
In the Public Affairs Office we’ve pushed to get the word out about these events. The Adjutant General , Major General Joseph Taluto, held a press conference to highlight that fact that every one of those 1,200 returning Soldiers would get the opportunity to meet with a VA counselor. We also invite the media to each of the events.
We want the people of New York to know that we’re taking care of our Guard Soldiers. Plus, we want the Soldiers to see this in the media and know that they’re important and that the things they are doing matter.
In our command information efforts we’ve produced videos encouraging the Soldiers families to attend, which were mailed to every Soldiers’ home. We also staff every event and take pictures which are turned into slide shows to be viewed at the next event.
As you pointed out, we’ve also keyed off the issue of suicide prevention. There are two reasons for that:
- It’s a critical issue for the United States Army and we want to communicate with our Soldiers on the importance MG Taluto places on looking out for each other.
- This issue is in the news, and talking about it makes it more likely that the media will cover our event, allowing us to get the word out to the public and our Soldiers.
Covering difficult news, like the recent rise in suicides, is not easy to do. However, having transparency is important. It is good PR to acknowledge difficult topics faced by your organization rather than trying to gloss over them.
