Part 3

That depends on your purpose for doing publicity in the first place. What is your goal? Are you running a club and looking for new members? Are you a new tournament organizer looking to promote a specific event? Are you local volunteer trying to help with a sectional championship or a national tournament? Are you working to get more public recognition of fencing as a competitive sport? Are you trying to do several of these at the same time?

Whatever your goals, there are two essential requirements for news: First, it has to be current, something that’s about to happen or has just happened. This means that if you’re announcing tournament results, you’re announcing them the day of the tournament or the next day at the latest. If you wait even two days, your results are no longer news, and nobody will be interested.

Second, it’s got to be relevant to your news outlet—that is, if you’re sending news to your local paper or television station, you’ve got to have some kind of local connection. If one of your club members wins a national championship, that’s a local connection. If a national tournament is held in your city, that’s a local connection. If the American women’s foil team wins an Olympic silver medal, the local media won’t care to hear about it from you unless you can leverage a local angle into the story: One of the team members grew up locally, your club held an all-night streaming-video viewing party to watch the competition, or perhaps a team member is visiting your club to show off her medal and talk about her Olympic experience.

So what news do you want to send out? You can send out results for every local tournament your fencers compete in, but it’s not likely that they’ll all get printed. The odds will be better in a tiny neighborhood weekly than a large metropolitan daily paper, but they’re still pretty slim. Regional and national results for local fencers are a better bet for attracting media attention, but aren’t guaranteed to make it into the news. You’ll probably find that news outlets are attracted by medals more than placement: a fencer who wins gold at a section championship and can be called, for example, “Pacific Coast Champion” will probably get more attention than someone who makes the top 16 at a Division I NAC, even though the section championship was only a B-rated event with 27 competitors and the Division I event was 174 fencers with six Olympians included.

You’ll probably find that it’ll take a long time—years—to train your local media outlets to think of fencing competitions as sporting events worth covering. You can train them by sending news releases about:

•fencers entering JO and SN qualifiers

•fencers qualifying for JOs and SNs

•fencers preparing to leave for JOs or SNs

•daily results of local fencers at NACs, JOs, or SNs

•recap of local fencer results at NACs, JOs, or SNs

If you’re organizing a major tournament, you can announce:

•the fact of the tournament, with date and site and anticipated attendance and local impact

•the signing of sponsors for the event

•the number of actual entries at deadline

•notable entries (e.g., 2008 Olympic medalist entered to compete)

•tournament results

Sending out news releases can seem pointless when you seldom see any response to your work. But you can plug away at it with no result at all, and then suddenly two newspaper reporters and a TV crew want to interview you within a few hours. The response you’ll get to your efforts will often seem random, dependent as it is on what other news is happening, on the resources of the paper or TV station, on the whim of a particular assignment editor, but every so often the circumstances will fall in your favor.

(Just be prepared—when the press finally comes calling, they’ll usually want you Right Now, and you’ll end up scrambling to find enough club members to show up at whatever weird hour the TV crew needs to get their story done in time for that night’s evening news!)

Writing the News

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

The King’s advice to the White Rabbit is a good—though not the only—way to tell a story. But it is never the best way to write news.

News is meant to be understood immediately. The best news writing gets directly to the point and leaves background details for later. The traditional term for the style is the “inverted pyramid.” This simply means that you present your information in order from the most important to the least important, and that you cover the what, where, when, and who of your story before you get to how and why.

For example, assume that your club is planning a tournament at a local shopping mall to give both the sport and your club some local exposure. The information you most need to get out to the public is what the event is, and when and where it will be held. If you start instead at the beginning—how at a parents’ meeting five months ago you decided to hold the event because your former assistant coach’s wife’s old division had such a success with theirs—you’ll lose your readers before you finally get to the point.

Present your information in the active voice (“The Anytown Fencing Center presents its fourth annual Tournament of Champions…”). The passive voice (“A fencing tournament will be held…”) sounds anonymous and detached, as though no people are, or will ever be, involved.

“Just the facts, ma’am.”

Joe Friday had it right. Avoid editorializing in a news release or any straight news article. (The styles for feature articles differ a bit; we’ll cover those later.) This doesn’t mean you can’t slant your information to make your point. It just means you should maintain the appearance of objectivity. Instead of using adjectives to comment on your facts (“The amazing Anytown Fencing Center will hold its fabulous Tournament of Champions. . . .), quote someone directly to make your point (“‘Our whole family’s now avidly fencing because of last year’s amazing event!’ says Esther Épée.”).

With any news release you write, ask yourself the following questions:

•What is the purpose of this announcement? Whose attention amy I trying to get and for what purpose?
•Does this news release give all the facts necessary for a member of my target audience to do what I’m trying to persuade her to do? (Date, time, place, etc.)
•Am I sticking to the facts? Is any editorial comment in the form of direct quotations?
• Can I cut any unneeded words? Have I used active verbs as much as possible?

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