I was speaking with a group of Northern Kentucky leaders last week when one of them asked me about how we find our stories.
“What percentage of your stories come from press releases or pitches from businesses and what percentage come from your reporters finding stories themselves?” she asked.
About 60-70% of our story ideas come from our reporters working their beats, I told her, and the rest are submitted ideas and press releases. Now that I have had more time to think about it, the number is probably closer to 80 percent, but either way: Most of our stories come from beat coverage.
A beat is like a topic that reporters focus on. They develop relationships related to that topic which lead them to other relationships and so on. Everyone has a story, so the more relationships a reporter has, the more stories they are able to tell.
For example, Haley Parnell is our Campbell County reporter. So for the most part, anything that needs reporting on in Campbell County is Parnell’s purview. She meets regularly with city council members, majors, commissioners, business owners and residents to learn what is happening in the community and how it is impacting the people who live and work there.
When the Newport community became fed up with spontaneous explosions at recycling company River Metals Recycling, residents went to Parnell to help get their story out there. Eventually, the company agreed to move its shredding operations (responsible for the explosions) out of Newport.
If Haley hadn’t built those relationships, we may never have known about the problem at all.
As for the other 20% of ideas, we do often get story ideas or find out about events happening around the region from press releases.
While we have a press release portal, which allows people and businesses to share their releases verbatim with the community, we don’t publish press releases as news stories.
What’s the difference between a press release and a news story?
A press release is usually written by a business with the purpose of promoting that business or something it is doing or has accomplished. A press release is inherently one sided, whereas a news story strives to reflect what happens in the community with multiple sides or opinions reflected. It should not be clear what the writer of the news story’s opinion is on a topic; but with a press release, the person or company pushing the product or news is attempting to win over the person reading it, so their position is clear.
Sometimes, we will find out about something from a press release and decide to do research and additional interviews for a full news story. Other times, we direct people to our portal so that they can publish their press releases directly.
If you have a news tip that you’d like our team to look into, please email news@linknky.com or call 859-878-1669.
If you’d like to submit a press release for publication through our press release portal and consideration for a news story, go to linknky.com/releases.
Inside LINK is a biweekly column written by either LINK nky president and CEO Lacy Starling or Executive Editor Meghan Goth.
