Effective Media Relations - You Won't be Talking to the Media Without It!

The media's role is to package and spread news, current affairs and public interest information to the public. They have great power to shape and influence public opinion, to target and exploit audience reactions, emotions and opinions.

Setting up and maintaining good relationships with the media can be of enormous benefit. Effective media relations promote trust and balance between the media and an individual and their organisation.

Once you've proved yourself as a useful and dependable information source, you'll realise it can; help to get your story into a news cycle, and provide opportunities for the media to approach you for comment on appropriate stories which in turn helps a journalist add depth, by filling gaps or backing up information, to their story.

Effective media relations is about working with, rather than against, the media. That's not to say you can't have a robust relationship with the media. However, adopting this approach gives you better access to journalists when there is something to say in the media.

Being available for comment when asked is another essential ingredient in effective media relations. In a crisis, your well-established media relationship can also provide you with a stronger opportunity to get a fair hearing in response.

Consider for a moment reactive media relations - the only time you deal with the media is when things go wrong. The reactive situation puts pressure on outcomes and doesn't always allow for your messages to be delivered in a positive way. Obviously pressured reactive responses, or worst still, no response at all, can negatively influence public opinion of you and your organisation.

Media relations is also about; putting out regular media releases on appropriate issues that catch the eye, with short paragraphs written in newspaper style; actively providing comment on issues and or decisions; knowing what builds or makes a story; and knowing how to keep a story alive and when to let it go.

Using the media effectively can help you win public support. Public support is critical when trying to convince others, such as government or bureaucracy of the merit of a particular proposal or application.

Once you're comfortable talking to the media you should take a proactive approach to your media relations. The benefits are well worth it in the long run.

If you're not ready to manage your own media relations, but would like to work toward it, consider approaching a specialist in the field. They can provide advice or management as appropriate on media issues, help write media releases, distribute media releases, organise news conferences, facilitate one-on-one meetings with journalists, as well as deal with crisis and issues management.

Effective media relations can help you and your organisation develop a media profile. The benefit of a media profile becomes obvious when doors open wider for you within government, business and the community.

Mark Croxford advises clients from the government, private and corporate sectors on Government and Media Relations. He is a co-author of Talking to the Media. Talking to the Media teaches readers the skills and techniques they need to exploit the media’s strengths, limitations and demands. Don’t spend any money on media training until you’ve read Talking to the Media [http://www.talkingtothemedia.com]

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Life without QE2

Last November, the Federal Reserve announced a plan to purchase $75 billion each month in intermediate-term Treasury securities, a measure popularly described as a second round of quantitative easing, or QE2. June is the last month of this program, and it looks unlikely that the Fed will extend it, causing some observers to be concerned. My view is that QE2 had relatively modest effects, and such benefits as it provided should not evaporate with the end of the purchases.

One of the channels by which QE2 could have been expected to affect the economy is by changing the maturity structure of debt held by the public. The theory is that by taking a large enough volume of long-term debt off the market, the price of long-term bonds might rise, that is, long-term yields might fall. The Fed buys the bonds with newly created Federal Reserve deposits, which in the current environment function essentially like short-term Treasury bills. In the current situation, increasing the supply of these has no effect on short-term yields, so that the purchases on balance might be able to exert some economic stimulus.

The empirical evidence suggests that there is some potential for this to work, though massive purchases would be necessary to have modest effects on interest rates. The $75 billion purchased monthly by the Fed amounts to about 1% of marketable Treasury debt held by the public. Moreover, under QE2 the Fed has been purchasing intermediate-term rather than long-term debt, and the fact is that the average maturity of publicly held debt has actually been increasing rather than falling during QE2.

Blue: average maturity (in weeks) of marketable nominal U.S. Treasury debt outstanding as of the end of the month, 1990:M1-2011:M1. Green: average maturity of debt other than that held by the Federal Reserve.

Moreover, as Jeff Miller notes, the end of QE2 doesn't mean the Fed is planning to sell its Treasuries, only that it's not going to continue to buy new ones.

The other reality to keep in mind is that the Fed simply doesn't have the ability to solve our current economic problems. The one thing the Fed can and should do is prevent deflation. I think the main success of QE2 was that it helped the Fed to signal convincingly that it had the ability and the will to prevent deflation. But the fact that the Fed is not buying more Treasury bonds should not change any of that.

There are plenty of things to worry about in the current situation. But the end of QE2 shouldn't be one of them.

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