Most organizations, schools and municipalities have regularly occurring board meetings. Generally, newspapers love covering these events, but they often find it difficult to send a reporter to the actual meeting.

On Newsworthy we've recommended that PR pros become their own beat reporter because nowadays reporters often lack the time and/or resources to cover smaller events of interest to their readers. By covering your organization’s beat, you’ll increase your visibility both online and in newsrooms. Writing news stories about your regularly scheduled meetings is a great way to own your organization’s beat.

Traditionally there are two types of meeting reports that have been filling newspaper pages for ages:

• The traditional news story – a longer news article that takes a deep dive into the most important events taking place at a meeting
• The bullet-form story – a shorter collection of bulleted paragraphs, each summarizing an individual item the board discussed or acted upon

So what’s the best way to craft a news release about an organizational meeting? Honestly, I would recommend a hybrid of the two story types. Begin your release by discussing the most newsworthy item from the meeting. Draw attention to it in both your headline and opening paragraphs. Include details and quotes from the meeting to flesh out your story’s lede and provide context for both your organization and opening topic.

After discussing the most important item in detail, move on to the other items. Summarize each of these items in one paragraph (of no more than three to four sentences), and then move on to the next one. The bulleted list you create will be a quick read and give readers a clear picture of what happened at your meeting.

This type of story features the most important topic from your meeting and helps it stand out in search engines, but also provides details about the smaller items the board acted on. Never assume your readers are only interested in the “big” items discussed at your meetings – be transparent about all of important actions your board takes. It will help you own your organization’s beat, and encourage readers to turn to you for breaking news.

Here’s an example from Genesee Community College

The timing was really perfect. There's been a resurgence recently of the "press releases are dead" meme. The flames were most recently fanned by Simon Dumenco at AdAge, which led to a poll asking readers to weigh in on whether press releases have any value. (Check out the comments.)

As I shared with the attendees at the summit, press releases are far from dead. Sure, they've evolved and look a lot different now than they did 10 (or even three) years ago. Done right, they're published to the web and contain links and multimedia and SEO-optimized headlines. They get indexed to Google News and syndicated and given new life on the web. They've changed, but they're certainly not dead.

Reporters are busier than ever and rely on press releases as ready-to-go story content (whether they admit it or not). How many of you have seen your release reprinted, verbatim? Or called to pitch a reporter on a story, piqued their interest, and then been asked to send them a release?

Often reporters will do a quick fact-check of a press release, add a few lines of context, and then run the story. Your release is the crucial starting point. Many professionals working in PR today are former reporters themselves, who possess good news judgment, good writing skills and the ability to craft a compelling press release that reads just like a news story.

Most PR professionals don't spend their careers doing celebrity publicity for the likes of Lindsay Lohan or Kanye West. For many of us who don't have superstars as client, press releases are an important way for us to get a story out to the media, into search engines and syndicators, and directly to online audiences. 

Press releases aren't dead. They're an important asset in the content marketing toolbox.

Here's the presentation I shared in Louisville:

Getting your organization featured on The Today Show, in the New York Times, or on CNN.com can be a dream come true for a PR professional. These big-name outlets have a broad reach and a lot of cachet. Whose boss wouldn’t like to read about themselves in a national media outlet?

Because these outlets are so coveted, they are also the hardest places to land stories. Reporters at The Wall Street Journal or producers at TV networks' morning news shows get thousands and thousands of pitches every day. Even the most skilled PR pros can have a hard time standing out.

But many organizations manage to get national media coverage without ever pitching to national media! Those quirky, interesting feature stories about a unique local charity or a student who has overcome long odds that you see in national media often originate in local media first. And it’s much easier to create relationships and pitch local reporters in your own backyard than to be always chasing after national journalists.

Local reporters are the key to national coverage

As a PR professional, the local Associated Press reporter in your town or region should be your best friend. They’re always looking for interesting, relevant local content, and once they publish a story on the AP wire, the Internet does the rest of the work. AP stories get syndicated and aggregated to hundreds of other media markets, and many even end up on web sites of big, national media outlets. This may pique the interest of a national reporter, who decides to follow-up and do a more in-depth story. Or it may appeal to a producer of a national television news program.

Local media outlets need content. Newsrooms continue to cut staff, but the news hole they need to fill each day isn’t getting any smaller (in fact, in many cases it’s getting larger as TV stations add additional newscasts and newspapers expand online coverage). Sending a local reporter a well-timed, relevant pitch about your organization can get you coverage locally that later draws attention nationally. Once content is on the web, there are no geographic boundaries. Whether it’s an AP wire story or a piece in the online edition of your local paper or TV station, these stories find their way into Google and Yahoo and many other sites, where they’re more likely to be noticed by someone on the national media stage.

From Iowa to New York City, Los Angeles, and beyond

Case in point? The Iowa State Fair. We’ve talked about this readMedia client before, and how they do a great job with local publicity for Fair events and awards. Last year, they never expected that a story they pitched to local and state media in Iowa would gain the national recognition that it did. The Fair announced that it would display a butter sculpture of Michael Jackson alongside its famous butter cow. The story was featured by the Des Moines Register, on several local television stations and the Des Moines Associated Press reporter picked it up. Those outlets propelled the story to FoxNews, ABC, the Huffington Post, The New York Times, LA Times, and many more outlets across the country.

What was a typical pre-Fair announcement became a national story, and probably faster and more easily than if the Iowa State Fair had tried to pitch the story to all of those national media outlets. As a result of the media coverage the story generated, the Fair decided to hold a vote on whether to include the Michael Jackson sculpture. This vote created a whole new round of media coverage on the topic, as more than 100,000 people voted.

To go national, start local.

Local media can be the gateway to national coverage for your organization. Instead of exhaustively researching 8-10 high profile reporters at big outlets and agonizing over how to pitch each one, focus on the 1-2 local journalists that you likely already have a strong relationship with, and have them help you get your story out to your community and onto the web. Once it’s there, syndication, aggregation and social sharing can give it the exposure it needs to find its way to national outlets and national audiences.

Image via Flickr user Purple X