At Talking Birds, I spent years making newsjacking a key part of our work. Not as an occasional idea whenever something useful happened to appear in the news, but as a consistent part of how we operated.
Two junior team members continuously monitored current affairs through various news platforms and dashboards. These brought together search terms related to our clients’ activities, themes and expertise.
Whenever they spotted a potentially relevant news story, they alerted the account manager responsible for that client. The account manager then had to answer several questions quickly. Does this news align with the client’s strategy? Does the organisation have something relevant to say about it? Can it add something meaningful to the debate? And would responding contribute to the reputation the client wants to build?
If the answers were positive, the account manager translated the signal into a concrete action and submitted it to the client for approval.
The model worked. It helped our clients communicate at more relevant moments and build a clear position in their market or wider environment with relatively limited resources. But it was also highly labour-intensive and heavily dependent on the motivation of the junior team members, their interpretation of the client’s strategy and the sheer volume of news coming at them at any given moment of the day...
Why is newsjacking such a major communication opportunity?
When you want to attract media attention with a story of your own, you generally need to create the relevance yourself first. You may need new research findings, a striking campaign or a compelling hook before an editorial team is willing to set its machinery in motion.
With newsjacking, that machinery is already running.
A topic is attracting attention, journalists are looking for additional angles and stakeholders are trying to understand what a development means for them. As an organisation, you no longer need to generate that interest yourself. You do, however, need to contribute something relevant quickly enough.
This potentially makes newsjacking one of the most efficient public relations techniques. You use the attention already surrounding a topic to demonstrate your expertise, explain your position or tell a story that might otherwise struggle to find its way into the public domain.
That does not mean jumping on every news story. Good newsjacking is not about responding as often as possible. It is about responding when your organisation can genuinely contribute something relevant and when that contribution supports the reputation you want to build.
Why do organisations still miss so many opportunities?
The traditional workflow contains many vulnerable links.
Someone needs to spot the right signal in time amid an enormous volume of news and information. That person must then remember to pass it on. A communications manager or account manager needs the mental bandwidth to assess the news against the strategy and quickly develop a useful response.
The organisation itself must then make time to validate the proposal, both substantively and internally. All of this needs to happen before the news has already moved on.
If just one link fails, the opportunity disappears.
Traditional media monitoring and general news alerts also generate a great deal of noise. They show which words have appeared somewhere, but they do not automatically understand why a signal might be relevant to a particular organisation. Valuable signals therefore risk being lost in a constant stream of notifications that no one pays attention to anymore.
When is a news signal truly relevant?
A signal from the market only becomes interesting when it meets several criteria.
It only becomes useful when it aligns with the organisation’s strategy and reputation objectives. It must be relevant to the stakeholders the organisation wants to reach. And it must offer a credible starting point for a story, position or action through which the organisation can genuinely add something.
This is what we at Pansora call contextual relevance: connecting strong stories with what is happening at that moment in the market, the media or society.
Not every relevant signal automatically becomes a communication proposal. Sometimes a development relates to your activities but responding would not contribute to your reputation objectives. Sometimes you have little to add. And sometimes it is simply not the right moment to respond.
Choosing not to act can therefore also be the result of a strong newsjacking approach.
How do we make newsjacking scalable?
At Talking Birds, the newsjacking process was still largely manual. It was therefore labour-intensive and difficult for smaller teams to manage. One of Pansora’s features as a strategic platform is that it automates this process.
Rather than starting from a collection of general search terms, the platform takes into account an organisation’s strategy, positioning, stakeholders, themes and stories. From that context, it detects relevant signals and assesses whether a credible opportunity exists that could contribute to the organisation’s reputation objectives.
When such an opportunity arises, Pansora helps translate the signal into a concrete communication proposal. A communications manager therefore receives more than a notification that something has happened. They immediately get a substantiated starting point for internal discussion and further development.
Human judgement does not disappear from the process. People are still needed to add nuance, assess sensitivities and make the final decision. Automation primarily ensures that fewer relevant opportunities are missed and that the initial strategic interpretation has already been made.
As a result, communications managers can approach both their organisation and the media more frequently with a concrete, well-founded proposal. A proposal with a clear reason, angle and connection to the strategy is simply more likely to receive the green light than a vague idea.
How does newsjacking help build a reputation?
Reputations are not shaped by one big story. They emerge through the accumulation of meaningful moments in which an organisation demonstrates what it stands for, what it knows and the role it wants to play in its environment.
The more often you can make a relevant contribution at the right moment, the more meaningful layers you build around your brand. In this way, newsjacking can evolve from an isolated PR technique into a structural way of strengthening your positioning and reputation.
Pansora is much more than a newsjacking tool. It is a platform that enables organisations to manage their stories strategically and build their reputation with purpose. It helps them determine which stories they want to tell, which stakeholders they want to reach and which reputation objectives those stories should support. It then connects those stories with relevant moments and developments in the market, the media and society. Newsjacking is just one tangible application of that broader approach.
Would you like to discover how we can set this up for your organisation?