What is "news" anyway?"

"I know it when I see it" might serve as well to define "news" as it served Justice Potter Stewart to define pornography.

Some media pros cynically say that "news" is whatever an editor or news anchor says it is that day [sort of like the old saw about the law being whatever the last judge said it was]*.

There is truth in that perspective and you can learn something critical from it: News is not necessarily information that ranks high on any objectively measurable scale of historical significance or importance.

But, true or not, that isn't very useful in your quest to make your firm's stories into "news." So here is a more helpful definition to help guide your media and public relations strategy and frame your messages.

News is information of particular interest to the audience of the media outlet you are targeting.

Look at that a bit closer. Notice the key criteria is not any external definition of importance or value: instead it is audience-dependant. If the audience doesn't care about the information then it really does not matter if you care, or if I care. It isn't news.

The other variable in the definition is also critical. News is only news to the particular audience of the media outlet you are targeting. Doesn't that seem obvious? But it is often overlooked. The audience for USA Today is not the same as the audience for the New England Journal of Medicine or MSNBC or The O'Reilly Factor or The New Yorker.

A misunderstanding of those two points accounts for the bulk of failed media outreach. This is just as true for professional publicists as it is of people like you who just want to spark a story about their firm. Each day tens of thousands of press releases are sent to the wrong media outlets and an equal number of phone calls are placed to the wrong busy journalists.

In a previous post I noted that your new associate hire is not news to the largest TV station in a city of two million people. Neither is your remodeled board room, your new marquee sign or your charity golf outing with the local Lions Club.

On the other hand, any one of these firm events might be news to your local weekly community shopper paper or local bar association.

Remember: "information of particular interest to the audience of the news outlet'

What about your brilliant 2500 word article on the latest developments in the right of publicity? Not news to the TV station nor to the weekly shopper. But your state bar association or a special interest bar journal might decide that article is just what they have been looking for.

Target your media audience and your news toward one another. Aim them at one another and correct course en route.

What is trash to one media outlet might be a front page, above the fold, #1 story hit to another one.

You want that other one.

*["News" isn't even necessarily new, as we all know from annual stories like "back to school" and "tuition is rising" and similar. Sometimes people like to hear about things they already know.]