While the importance of a good news hook will be familiar to anyone working in PR, if you fail to understand this simple but key concept of journalism, PR success for your law firm may well prove elusive.
So what is a news hook? Put simply, it is the peg that makes a story idea timely and draws in the audience, thus defining the idea as relevant and newsworthy. Get your news hook right and PR success is likely to follow. Therefore, understanding what a news hook is and how to generate one is crucial if you want to achieve your PR objectives.
Take, for example, a family lawyer who wants the world to know that she’s an expert at drafting prenups. Even the most capable PR is going to struggle to make this idea of interest to the media. Remember, journalists aren’t interested in promoting your services and expertise for free! The good news is that sooner or later a news story will break around, say, a celebrity divorce or perhaps a royal engagement that may well make a feature on prenups topical and therefore attractive to a personal finance journalist.
Every time you approach a journalist or editor with an idea, you need to think of a fresh twist or angle. For example, can you make a national story local (or vice-versa), be contrarian to the prevailing opinion, personalise a story, or be first to spot an issue or come up with a solution to one?
Keeping up to date with news, insights and issues in the legal industry can help develop hooks. Lawyers and their PR professionals need to be constantly on the alert for the latest, good idea. By doing so they can get to the front of the queue with journalists and secure coverage in the publications which will help them reach their target audience.
Some further examples
While the best news hooks often come from breaking news stories, annual events and holidays, often provide straightforward news hooks providing lawyers with an excuse to promote their expertise.
So while some hooks will be news driven, others will be cyclical. For example:
- Heatwaves – workplace rights for employment lawyers
- Summer holidays/Christmas – childcare arrangements for family lawyers
- Halloween – this fast approaching event can throw up a plethora of opportunities for lawyers who are prepared to think laterally. Real estate lawyers could, say, use Halloween as an excuse to write about their worst property nightmares!
In the niche world of legal PR, news hooks are plentiful; royal stories, celebrity court cases, criminal investigations, Brexit and politics generate a lot of media coverage and all provide opportunities for media savvy solicitors and barristers to provide journalists with comment and feature ideas. For other sectors, the Budget, Christmas and Black Friday will provide hooks.
And finally….
Any story idea should be timely. There’s no point jumping on a topic that numerous experts have already commented on, unless there is a fresh angle. With today’s 24 hour news cycle, you need to act quickly once you have spotted a good hook, before it becomes old news – it would be a shame to let a great idea get away!
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