Story Angles or Pegs
When you are trying to get a reporter to publish your story you should always have great story angle options and pegs. Without these the reporter does not really have any reason to publish your story. Without them you story becomes less like a story and more like an encyclopedia. You cannot just hand them information, you have to give them a great angle and a great peg.
An angle to a story is the view you take from it. Let's say that thousands of people just lost their jobs because a major company had to shut down. This is an interesting story and there are many angles you can take. You could write a story with the angle taken on the large amount of people that are not out of a job.
You write a story about how all those people would now have to go somewhere else and try to find something else. This is difficult task and would be very hard on all these people. On the other hand you could take the view point more like a narrative. You could follow the life of one of the people who is now out of job and show how losing this job was so hard for him and his wife who is pregnant with their first three kids, triplets.
Either angle could be made catchy and interesting. If you do not just hand the reporter a story, but a list of great angles that could be taken, it would help immensely in the publishing process. They would like you because you would be making their job easier so that they would not have to brainstorm and come up with their own interesting angle.
Another thing you will want to make sure you have is a great peg. In the previous scenario your peg would have been the fact that the major business shut down and many people were out of business. You could use this peg to publish information about how hard it is today to find new jobs. You could show the statistics of how many people are not in great job positions, regardless of the amount of education they have.
If you tried to publish this information without a story to go with it, it would be pointless. How interesting is it for someone to read an article about how hard it is to find a job these days? You have to have a great peg such as a current event, to link it to. If you wanted to publish this information you would have to be able to tie it to something else.people can find those statistics on their own, there would be no point in publishing it.
A great peg is important if you want a reporter to publish your story. One way to get a great peg would be by hooking local events to national events. Reporters are always looking for local news stories that can be hooked to national news stories. If you could use a national news story as a peg for your local goings-on then it would be very likely to be published.
If you pitched a story about the local candy store getting robbed, it probably wouldn't make the front page. But if you hooked the story of the local candy store getting robbed to a national story of a national bank getting robbed and showed the statistics of how the crime of robbery is starting to soar sky high, it would be much more likely to get published.
One way you can always make sure to get your stories published is to have a great angle and a great peg. If you do not have both, you will always want to be sure to have one or the other. You want to do all you can to make the reporters job easier. If you do this, they will like you and want to publish your stories.
To find out more information about angles and pegs you can go to the following links:
http://www.publicrelationsideas.com/tips_to_helping_journalists_cover_your_story_000095.html
www.publicrelationsideas.com
www.101publicrelations.com
