What’s Your “Real” Story?

The owner of a Yoga studio once asked me why we wouldn’t do a story about the opening of his business after he’d sent numerous news releases to the assignment desk at the TV station where I worked. I asked him if there was anything unique about the studio or if he offered a class that made his studio more popular than others. This was an attempt to find an angle, or something more than a “grand-opening” which doesn’t hold much news value.

He proceeded to tell me about a weekly class for patients with Multiple Sclerosis and how it’s changing the lives of people who had previously been bedridden by this debilitating disease. Stunned and intrigued, I asked him if he’d included that in his news release and he said he hadn’t. “That’s the story,” I all but screamed at him. “That’s what you needed to tell us,” I said. “We would have covered that in a heartbeat.”

Needless to say I sent a news crew two weeks later, and the news coverage he’d been seeking for months was finally a reality after having a conversation that lasted less than five minutes.

What’s Your Story? The REAL story. The INTERESTING story? Figure that out, and you’ll be closer to getting media coverage than you could possibly know.