Connecting with the media
There are a number of reasons that the arts don’t make the news as much as they could or should. In my view, one main reason is that we concentrate on press releases instead of relationships. Most journalists have to deal with hundreds of press releases every day. They are literally drowning in the stuff. No wonder, then, that journalists often ignore or bin anything that’s been sent by someone whose name they don’t recognise. To make the news, you have to get to know your key contacts and cultivate some kind of relationship with them.
Being fragmented as an industry doesn’t help either. As a sector, we tend to forget that we have a powerful position as advertisers: our communal print and online advertising must amount to millions of pounds. Perhaps an even more powerful tactic would be to research how much we jointly spend as advertisers across the UK and use this information as part of the armoury of key lobbying tools that could be used to improve our relationships with the media.