Another PR Score

On this topic- I have to admit that I have not been able to track down where this story originally came from. Did the couple contact the media to sing the Walt Disney World Resort's praises, or did a sharp PR team recognize the story and put it "out there?" I don't know, but this story has all the elements an organization could want in a news story.

I have linked to a video version of the story below,



but here are the main highlights:
- A family is vacationing on a Walt Disney World Resort property
- There is a bowl and the wife has taken off her engagement, wedding and anniversary rings and placed them inside
- The husband, while cleaning up the room in anticipation of checking out, accidentally throws out the bowl and the rings
- Panic ensues when the mistake is realized, but it is too late- the trash has already been removed from the room
- Enter the hero Walt Disney World Resort employees who apparently volunteered to go through the trash by hand to help find the rings
- Lo and behold, the employees are successful, and are able to return the rings to the family.
- The husband is now out of the dog house and the media has a FANTASTIC story to play with.

If you would like a more coherent wire-copy version, you can link over to it here.

Obviously this plays perfectly into what Disney is all about: making dreams come true. And this has a fairy tale ending.

It also helps that the family has been media-friendly, talking to newspapers, radio stations and TV stations as each request came in.

Plus, it is a VISUAL story. We can mix in file b-roll of the WDW resorts along with video of the family, their pictures from the trip, and video of the rings.

The only critique I have for the folks at WDW is that they really should have allowed the hero employees to speak on-camera to the local Orlando media. Then the story would get more play in both that market and in Boston (since the family was from Worcester, MA which is a city one hour west of Boston and in the DMA). It's disappointing that this great element couldn't have been made available.

Kudos to Disney -- keep it up. And next time, open up even more.

Percent Change

A dramatic number can be a great headline for both TV and print. And sometimes it takes an extra step to translate numbers from an official to put into context. And finding the right headline can lead you to a great story. Let's use the following article as an example. It comes from the Standard-Times and its headline is a dull "New Bedford school lunch prices going up in 2 stages." Here is one of the key details:

"For elementary school students, from the current $1.50 per meal to $1.65 and the following year to $1.75."

I am terrible with math. But I know where to find useful math calculators. So I punched these numbers into an online web site that will tell you what the percent-change is between the numbers.

So after calculating the difference between $1.50 and $1.75, which is 16.6%, we can say that

"Students Face 16% Increase for School Lunches Over the Next Two Years."

This is also a useful tool to figure out whether or not the price increase being charged by the school matches the general rate of inflation for food in the general economy. Those numbers can from from the Consumer Price Index, and for the purposes of this blog entry, I will cite figures from here. Well, food prices are certainly rising:

"The food index rose at a 5.3 percent SAAR in the first quarter of
2008, following a 4.9 percent increase in all of 2007."

That totals a 10.2-percent increase over the last year- with more increases to come. In other words- with the way inflation is going now, it is reasonable to assume by the end of the year, food costs will have increased to a total of at least 16-percent (if not more). So the increase school officials are looking for may well be justified request. And these calculations can help you make that connection easy to understand for your audience.

And school lunch stories- if you can find a school that will open its doors for you- can be visual. Plus it has the added-bonus of affecting many people in your audience.

Covering a Large Market

A lot of TV markets - from big to small - have a seriously large area that their signal can be seen in. This creates logistical challenges for any tv station that wants to cover the whole area - up to the boundaries - of their designated market area. Most TV stations are- understandably- located in or close to urban areas, so making treks to the outlying areas of a coverage area can be tough.

To combat this, some stations with a particularly large ground to cover sometimes open up small bureaus and staff them with a reporter and photographer (or, often, a one-man-band). The office is usually equipped with a studio camera, an edit deck and some way to feed video back to the main station.

Other large stations have a news helicopter that can be sent to breaking news in remote areas.

Meantime, some small towns that lament the lack of coverage from a TV station may simply be quiet places to live! After all, the news is not needed in places where everything is working well.

KOMU-TV in Columbia, Missouri wrote an interesting item on its web site in response to a viewer's email asking if the population of a town influences coverage decisions. I thought they gave a pretty good response,

"KOMU loves news tips. The more people that call and e-mail the station to let KOMU know what's going on, the better the news."

It's true! The more people in the audience who write us and contact us, the more stories we can consider and the greater the likelihood that we'll actually be able to come to one of the story ideas.