Reno area media speak to public relations professionals about reaching a fractured audience

The Public Relations Society of America Sierra Nevada Chapter on February 9 presented a media panel that highlighted one of the more challenging issues facing businesses – and the public relations and marketing professionals who represent them. With the ever more fractured media, including the decline of readership and viewership of traditional media as well as the proliferation of social media, how do we reach consumers, the ever-elusive “target audience,” with our messages?

While the primary topic of the luncheon event was news releases: what do editors want, when and in what format, the key message was that the media are grappling with the same questions as public relations folks: Who and where are our audiences, and how do we not only reach, but inform and attract them?

Brian Duggan, reporter and watchdog coach at the Reno Gazette-Journal; Arianna Bennett, reporter and Face the State host at KTVN-TV; Oliver X, editor and publisher of Reno-Tahoe Tonight Magazine; and Lynnette Bellin, owner of the Reno Moms Blog, spoke to an attentive group of Reno-Sparks public relations professionals about what the media seek in the effort to reach their audiences. Alison Gaulden, internship coordinator and public relations lecturer at the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism, moderated the discussion.

Duggan pointed out that the area’s daily newspaper reporters now communicate on all platforms and make frequent use of videos to keep up with a public that is doing less reading of the sort of media that is made of paper. Content remains key and is the essence of what continues to make journalism relevant. He said that the Reno Gazette-Journal’s recent series on the opioid crisis is an example and is one of the most successful in the newspaper’s recent history. The series not only told a compelling story, but also provided an important public service in highlighting a pressing health, economic and law enforcement problem.

KTVN’s Bennett also expressed optimism regarding the future of journalism. Broadcast news has the ability to go live on screens in homes as well as on social media at any time and offers regularly scheduled news segments from pre-dawn to late-night hours. Local television remains a critical source of information. Television can vividly cover news from the latest scams hitting our area to elections, although Bennett observed that that media could have done a better job of focusing on what was important in covering the recent election, whose result seems to have stunned most of the nation. With the longer format of public affairs programs such as “Face the State,” Bennett pointed out it’s possible to delve deeply into complex issues.

Oliver X ‘s Reno-Tahoe Tonight Magazine reaches a counter-culture audience which he said could range from teens to local judges. Covering the region’s arts, culture, music and entertainment scene, the magazine offers edgier content. On the other end of the spectrum, Bellin’s Reno Moms Blog is all about moms and their needs for connection, education and support. She searches for authentic moms’ voices and content that interests and informs a wide range of consumers with families.

All of the media panelists emphasized that public relations professionals need to know them, their deadlines and audiences, and then build relationships with them. This, several of them acknowledged, was complicated by the proliferation of emails, making it difficult for members of the media to forge through their massive inboxes or to have time to speak personally with anyone trying to reach them. Another major message was the need for brevity. The trend in both traditional and new media is for shorter articles, so news releases should be as concise as possible, making use of bullet points when appropriate.

James Rutter, a senior who soon will be graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism and a communications intern at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, reflected after the program on the challenges of reaching a segmented multi-platform audience, even for someone from the generation that cut its teeth on social media. “I think how a person sees the media today really depends on their age, location and values…The real key for communication professionals is—and always has been—to know their audience, whether that’s through secondary data, or actually sitting down with them in a focus group,” he said.

“You have to know who they are and where they live in the media landscape,” he added. “It’s less about their overall trust of the media, and more about which select media outlets they do trust. Once you know who they trust, I think it really does come down to relationship building with those voices, something many young millennial communicators may struggle with, given the nature of our digital, hands-off upbringing.”

For more information on the Public Relations Society of America Sierra Nevada Chapter’s purpose and programs, please visit the groups’s website.