Working with the press

Louise Gould, Communications Specialist, outlines the high-level communications goals for the wider Faraday Institution community and why responsiveness is so important when working with journalists.

What do the Cambridge Network, the BBC, The Times, Which?, Interfax Global Energy, The Telegraph, and The Financial Times all have in common? All have published pieces covering the Faraday Institution and the work of our projects in the last two months. Take a look at some of this recent coverage here.

In a short time the Faraday Institution and our project teams have achieved good visibility for electrochemical energy storage research in the UK and we are starting to gain traction with the press. Our communications goals are as ambitious as the aims for our research projects, so we want to build further on this early success. We want to secure our position as a trustworthy, independent organisation that speaks directly and honestly about all matters related to energy storage and its research. We wish to build a rapid response media capability – a cadre of experts from our community – a chorus of voices that respond swiftly to media inquiries, that quickly deal with disinformation and work to reclaim a fact-based public debate.

We aim to do this by building a tight-knit communications community that is open and transparent. We want to actively seek out opportunities to work together to amplify each other’s successes. To help with this we have established a set of standard practices for preparing media kits, issuing press releases and engaging with the media so that we have consistency. Check out our brand and messaging standards, which is a good resource for project teams to have to hand with industry experts.

In this and future newsletters I’ll discuss various aspects of working effectively with the press that any researcher interacting with journalists should be aware of. In this first newsletter the key word I’d like to talk about is responsiveness.

People working in different sectors work to different timescales. While the work of academics is paced to the experiment, the term, or the funding cycle, the work of journalists is to the deadline – often hours or minutes away. Producers of broadcast news programmes may only start planning what news stories they will cover half a day or even less before they air the piece. Print journalists usually file news-driven stories the same day, though editorial pages and feature sections aren’t as subject to deadline pressures. The value of news generally decreases as a factor of time, or it is no longer news.

What does this mean to any organisation seeking coverage? You must work on the timescale of the journalist. Should a journalist contact you to request a quote or an interview, act quickly and get back to them. Return a call immediately or ensure a colleague (a member of your university’s or the Faraday Institution’s communications team) knows to do this. This is one example of when picking up the phone rather than resorting to email really can pay dividends.

We want the Faraday Institution and its academic experts to build a reputation as an organisation that can be relied upon to provide insight and comment in a timely and responsible way. That means meeting journalists’ deadlines time after time. Journalists will often reach out to multiple sources. But they are busy people and will take shortcuts where they can. If they can rely on a single source – a trusted subject area expert who routinely provides thoughtful comments and insights and who enables them to meet their deadlines – they will. Strive to be that “go-to” expert. Once that trust has been developed, why would a journalist turn to anyone else?

And finally, two requests:

Do you have any striking images or any footage of your research that the Faraday Institution and your local communication team can use to illustrate news stories and pass on to the media to increase their interest? Please get in touch if you do.

If you hear that a top tier academic publication like Science and Nature has accepted a paper from your research, please notify me as well as your local university communications team in advance of its publication. This will enable us to consider issuing a press release on the date of the publication or assisting with amplifying the research in some other way. Thank you.



Posted on September 21, 2018 in Uncategorized

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About the Author

Louise Gould is a marketing and communications professional who has centred her career around technology-based organisations. She joined the Faraday Institution after 5 years as Marketing Communications Manager at the renewable fuels company Velocys.

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