All The News I Could Make Them Print

The way in which you generate attention to your issue, your product, or your cause has come a long, long way.  Many years ago when I started out in the consumer advocacy/non profit world, everything was about print, radio and TV.

And when you had no advertising budget, people got pretty creative with ways in which they tried to generate earned media.  Does anyone remember the ERA feminists chaining themselves down in the Illinois Statehouse?  Or the Voter Revolt activists dumping garbage in front of the Insurance Commissioner's Office in California?  I, myself, remember a time in Iowa and with family farm advocates, flirting with the idea of bringing milk cows into the State Capitol Rotunda to garner attention to our protest against BgH hormone use in dairy production.  (We didn't by the way.)

However, I do remember several theme-based holiday press conferences, "kick offs" for coalitions and campaigns, and so on and so forth.  In each case, these "free" media events probably cost more in time and effort than outcome produced. 

Perhaps what is different today with all the social and virtual media tools at our disposal is volume.  How does one cut through the noise of it all?  In today's postmodern world, everyone has an opinion and the opinion of your neighbor may matter more than the traditional news source.

Like my experiences many years ago, I think it still boils down to relationships, credibility and truly having something substantive to say. 

Back then, the news that I could generate and that most mattered wasn't from the "Horn of Health Care Plenty" news conference that I staged at Thanksgiving.  Rather, it was the ability to talk with the political reporter about why more than 350,000 Iowans without health care impacted the state's budget.  It was being seen as a trusted resource to the reporter who had to write about the impact of COLA cuts on senior citizens and being able to quickly help him find real people who were impacted.  It was, when I explained to the editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register, about how I contacted every doctor's office within an entire county to inquire about acceptance of Medicaid patients, that I was able to create his trust and confidence in my research and that the results were substantive and meaningful enough to bring to light.

Some things never change?