I thought I’d add a few quick thoughts to the points I raised in the PracticeLink article:

• Once you’ve established a new-media presence — and that can be as simple as a good website with solid content or as bells-and-whistles as a regularly updated blog and constant Twitter stream — don’t be shy about bringing that to the attention of the writers or the periodicals whose coverage you’re seeking. Reporters do read blogs and Twitter feeds, but you don’t have to wait to be discovered like a starlet at a Hollywood soda fountain: drop them a line with links to let them know this resource is available to them and that you’d be happy to assist them with their stories. Your work can speak for itself from that point.
• Occasionally, I hear lawyers complaining that bloggers who get quoted in the news aren’t the “best” or most informed lawyers on a subject, and that reporters should do a better job hunting down the legal profession’s leading lights rather than defaulting to the easy blogger quote. To which I say: waiting for journalists to climb your mountain and seek out your wisdom will exercise your patience but accomplish little else. If you think lesser lawyers are out there blogging, go out there and start a blog yourself to prove your superiority. Maybe those bloggers know more about the law than you’d care to admit.
• If and when you do attract the attention of a media representative, the old rules of dealing with reporters still apply: return calls as quickly as you can, ascertain the journalist’s deadlines and whether you can realistically meet them, determine in advance the thrust of the reporter’s story and if possible the nature of the questions she plans to ask, and, above all: unless you have an extremely solid relationship with the journalist, remember that there’s no such thing as “off the record.” Respect for the other’s professionalism is a given, but trust is earned over time.

Share your thoughts here about the PracticeLink article — do you have experiences linking old and/or new media to relate?

Anyway, I’d also be willing to wager that among those 10% purged pages would often be the one marked “Media.” A lot of law firm Media pages are devoted to compilations of published articles that the firm’s lawyers have written or for which they were interviewed. If you view the page’s subtext as “Our lawyers’ appearances in the media,” basically a marketing tool, then that makes sense — although I’ve come across very few clients who like to scroll through a giant list of published articles when choosing a lawyer. However, if you view the page’s subtext as “Information for members of the media” — which, by the way, reporters and editors tend to do — then it’s not exactly helpful in that regard.

Here’s what I think a Media Page should include:

1. Points of Contact: Even if your Media page is otherwise a blank screen, it should include the name, phone number and email address of people in two categories: (a) an overall firm spokesperson and (b) individual contacts for press inquiries on specific subjects of your choosing. “This is our managing partner.” “This is our communications director.” “This is our immigration media contact.” “This is our white-collar crime media contact.” Each contact person’s responsibility is to reply to inquiries, find out what a reporter wants and by when, and make absolutely certain that the inquiry ends with a conversation that meets the reporter’s needs insofar as the firm is able. And each contact must be reliably responsive: there’s no better way to alienate a journalist than by specifically offering on the Media page the coordinates of a person who fails to return calls.

2. The Business Side. Not every reporter’s inquiry involves law-related issues — increasingly, especially in the legal press, stories involve the business side of practice. Yet even savvy Media pages usually offer contacts only in substantive-law areas. At the same time, firms might reasonably resist the idea of a staff member (even a director) acting as a spokesperson, and professional employees themselves are often reluctant to speak to reporters. If so, identify a lawyer who can speak to a  business-side subject: the chair of the marketing committee, for instance, or the partner in charge of hiring. No matter who’s your business-side contact, however, make sure he or she is willing and able to respond to media inquiries under the same criteria listed in #1.

3. The Firm’s Media Resources: What if reporters were clients? What if you wanted them to understand what your firm can do for them in as short a time as possible? You might create a section on your Media page explaining what your firm can deliver that matters to them: “We provide objective commentary, both on and off the record, on emerging legal issues.” “We offer free subscriptions to, and free reproduction of any content in, our newsletters and blogs.” “We are happy to make the following media contacts available for TV appearances and/or audio interviews.” And you could throw in some caveats, too: “We cannot discuss any matter covered by lawyer-client confidentiality.” This also ties in nicely with the next recommendation:

4. A Series of Primers: Not to paint with too broad a brush, but the level of legal literacy in the mainstream press is not terribly high. Consider creating a series of primers on your Media page that explain basic legal concepts on issues that appear regularly in the press. If you have a criminal law practice, offer a section on what “reasonable doubt” means or why evidence wrongfully collected can be excluded from trial. Family lawyers could provide information on why spousal support is usually mandatory and defining the “best interests of the child.” Even high-end corporate firms could offer a glossary of terms that commercial lawyers use every day but that even business reporters might not recognize. Benefits include less time spent explaining the basics over the phone, greater chance of accurate reporting, and goodwill from under-the-gun journalists.

What should not be on your Media page? Many of the following items are regularly offered but are of little interest to the media. Consider moving them off the page altogether, or at least cross-linking the subjects to their own separate pages.

• Your lawyers’ published appearances in media outlets: these are marketing materials, and they belong with lawyers’ biographies, or on Practice Group pages, or on a separate “Our Lawyers In the News” page.
• Your firms’ awards, recognitions and rankings: see above under “marketing materials.”
• Your firm’s newsletters: just because these are publications doesn’t make them of interest to publishers. (But see #3, above, re: offering subscriptions.)
• Your firm’s history: it’s not news and no reporter cares about it; if it’s important to your firm, create a separate “History” page.
• Your press releases: you shouldn’t be creating these anyway.

There’s an old expression: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” I think something similar could be said about the press: even if you don’t want to talk to them, it’s quite likely they want to talk with you, and they may have good reason. Some law firms, especially mid-size and smaller ones, show little interest in cultivating relationships with members of the media and don’t provide anything on their websites to encourage them. But the rewards are considerable for the lawyers whom the press finds: I’d estimate that 95% of the time, media connections lead to positive outcomes. A properly structured Media page is the way to facilitate those inquiries.

My distaste for press releases stems from more than a decade of receiving them, in my former capacity as editor of three legal periodicals. I won’t get into the choice of medium — having been inundated by both repeated faxes and floods of email, it’s hard to choose between them, but I reserve a special place for the legal organization that (to this day) faxes announcements on legal-size paper. Nor will I get into press releases on topics entirely irrelevant to the recipient, press releases from people who’ve previously agreed to take you off their distribution list, or press releases with an invitation to an event taking place the next day in a different country. No, my fundamental problem with press releases is that I can’t recall ever receiving one of value to me.

A typical news release consists of a statement and three assumptions. The statement is “We are doing X.” The assumptions are, “X matters to you,” “You will rebroadcast news of X to your readers or listeners,” and “We will benefit in tangible ways from your dissemination of X.” Each of those assumptions is, in almost all cases, deeply flawed.

1. 1. “X matters to you.” Why do you think that? Have you asked me? Is this a personal and direct communication tailored to my publication? No, it’s not, because if it was, it wouldn’t be a press release, it would be a conversation. Press releases are one-sided announcements that bear little resemblance to reality: sales pitches, product descriptions, puffed-up expertise, the stuff you expect to see on the back of a box on a shelf. Why would you believe that would matter to me? “Because your readers are our potential customers” isn’t a reason.
2. “You will rebroadcast X.” Uh, no. Microsoft Outlook was the email system at my last job, and it came with a handy feature that briefly opened a small box on my screen when a new email arrived, telling me the sender and subject line. I got so I could glance at the screen and delete a news release before the little box even began to fade away. There are a few types of periodicals that either reprint a release in its entirety (celebrity wire services, techie blogs) or repackage it as reader fodder (community newspapers, political journalists). Most of the rest can find other sources of copy, thanks.
3. “We will benefit.” This is the assumption that really galls, because it represents a failure of communications strategy. Perhaps there are exceptions, but I’ve yet to come across any law firm that can tie the production of a press release or a succession of press releases to new business or improved profile. I’m not even sure that any but the largest and most sophisticated corporate entities could do so. I laugh when firms ask me what’s the ROI of blogs or Twitter: what’s the ROI of press releases? But because the investment on press releases is so small, no one really cares.

The problem, of course, is that the investment on a news release is small only for the sender. For the recipient(s), of whom there might be several thousand, the investment ranges from one second (in my case) to the time required to open or read a release and dispose of it; the attention costs are downloaded onto the receiver. The mass dissemination of unsolicited information that the recipient has to clean up goes by another a word these days: spam. If your law firm is sending spam, even (especially) to media organizations, please stop.

So that’s the beating-up part, and it’s easy and fun. The larger point is that news releases are only a symptom of a larger problem within law firms: rote communication, the habitual continuation of archaic methods of speaking to the public or to clients.

Most firms send press releases because they’ve always done so, dating back to a media era utterly different from today’s. Most firms create law firm newsletters because they’ve always done so, despite newsletters’ tenuous (at best) modern relationship with client service. Most firms place advertisements in magazines or seek interviews for their lawyers because that’s the way the firm has always built its profile — or at least, that’s what the firm believes. Measurable, concrete evidence of how law firm communications advance the firm’s business objectives is, in most cases, vanishingly rare. The exceptions, ironically, are social media, blogs, LinkedIn accounts, SEO and other new media tools whose reach is trackable and whose returns are traceable and verifiable (using press releases to boost your SEO is highly questionable, by the way, but that’s a story for another day).

How the world communicates has changed; how most law firms communicate has not. So the first step in carving out a rational, defensible communications strategy for a firm is to look at every single method of communication and ask: why are we doing this? What ends does it serve? If we stopped doing this tomorrow, what would happen? (Negatively and positively.) I used to make my colleagues at National nervous by asking my boss, every year or so, “Does the CBA still need a magazine?” The answer was always yes, on the merits: but I felt it was critically important that the question be seriously posed and carefully answered. Your firm deserves to have the same rigour applied to its own communications.

A lot of firms are looking hard at new forms of communication these days. My advice, before you begin, is to look hard at the old ones and get rid of those you can’t justify.

Nonetheless, law firms (like other corporate entities) still strive for just a mention of the firm or its lawyers in a “major newspaper” or “national magazine.” I spent ten years editing an actual “National magazine” at the Canadian Bar Association, and I was struck by how much lawyers and law firms wanted to appear in its pages. PR agencies would constantly propose lawyers as interview subjects, and large national firms would ask for PDFs of an article featuring their lawyers to post on their websites. They clearly perceived some value or prestige arising from a mention in the magazine — even more so, I’m sure, in the Globe & Mail or National Post. But is the perception accurate? I’m not sure enough law firms ask themselves this.

Media appearances have long been considered a self-evidently valuable marketing effort. But just like any other such effort, they still demand a degree of ROI examination. Most lawyers would say they want the value arising from the imprimatur of legitimacy and respect that a media outlet bestows — “we were quoted in The New York Times!” And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of power still invested in these legacy media brands that can make them powerful players in this new landscape. But from law firms’ point of view, “major media mentions,” in isolation, can’t automatically be assumed to have an effect on a law firm’s brand and business development. They need to serve a purpose.

I was often tempted to ask the law firm marketing professionals seeking an appearance in National: “You do know that only other lawyers read this magazine, right?” Because it sometimes seemed to me they were investing a lot of time and effort in getting their lawyers in front of their competitors rather than their clients. They might have had good strategic reasons; for example, a firm’s repeated appearance in a nationwide legal periodical could translate into recruitment and lateral hiring advantages. But just as often, I suspect, a request to profile or interview a particular partner was driven by that partner’s combination of ego and influence.

All of which is to say: before setting out to get you or your firm into any kind of media outlet, be certain why you’re doing it and what you hope to get out of it. Brand management, profile enhancement, business development, referral generation, expertise demonstration — these are all valid reasons for pursuing media exposure, but most won’t apply in every situation. Be strategic in your choice of media placement, just as you should be with every other marketing choice. For example:

• If you run a small family law practice in New Brunswick, will you get more value from a mention in the Globe & Mail or in the Fredericton Gleaner? The answer depends on whether you want a prestige injection or a business development opportunity.
• If you run a civil litigation firm in Montreal, do you want to be profiled in Canadian Lawyer or in the Montreal Gazette? The answer depends on whether you want referrals from other lawyers or higher profile within your local business community.
• If you own a full-service firm in Edmonton with a smaller Calgary office, do you need attention from the Edmonton Journal or the Calgary Herald? The answer depends on whether you want to strengthen your headquarters or develop your satellite.

Before setting out on media placement efforts, lawyers and firms need to ask themselves: where do we want to show up, what do we want to be noted for, and why? Answering those questions correctly will greatly amplify the effectiveness of those efforts.

I like to think there’s a balance that lawyers can strike between careful and care-free, one that depends on setting expectations at the start and preparing in advance; that’s what the article explores in more detail. The whole issue really emphasizes the critical importance of trust between a lawyer and a journalist, and like in any relationship, that trust has to be earned over time. To paraphrase an old rule: verify until trust.

Q. Did you only work with and quote BigLaw lawyers, or did you also talk with lawyers from smaller and mid-size firms? Did you speak just with Canadian firms, or were you open to quoting legal sources from the U.S.?

I wrote a blog post last October at Law21 about the difficulties small and mid-size firms experience in trying to get noticed by the media. The gist is that large firms can outgun their smaller rivals just by throwing a lot of money into the publicity machine and cranking it up, although there are cultural issues at work too. It’s kind of an institutional problem, and I wouldn’t expect the media to correct it independently: if a mid-size or smaller firm wants to get its rightful share of publicity, it needs to make media relations a disproportionate priority.

Luckily, there are cost-effective ways of doing this. Twitter is great, although nothing beats blogs. And in any event, a mid-size firm doesn’t need to out-publicize the Clifford Chances of the world — it just needs to shine in its specific market or in the industry areas it deems most significant to its business plan. Smart media relations are an underrated tool for mid-size firms looking for a competitive edge.

In terms of the nationality of firms the magazine interviewed, a lot depended on the story itself. Obviously, I had no interest in speaking with American firms about American law for a Canadian publication, but I was always interested in U.S. firms that were doing something interesting on the practice management or business-model side, because these are universal issues for lawyers. The same applied to U.K., Australian and other firms worldwide.

But even for all that, there were still important distinctions when you crossed the border. I remember receiving a fine article last fall written by lawyers at four different firms worldwide about surviving the recession. But since Canada escaped the worst of the recession, it didn’t make sense for National to run it. And you always needed to be alive to the potential for pushing nationalist buttons: lawyers in one country want to read about themselves, not lawyers in a foreign jurisdiction. It’s challenging to recognize and promote globalized ideas to readerships that are often more interested in home-grown fare.

Q. Are there any specific items on the media pages of law firm websites that you and your editorial team preferred?

There are very few good media pages on law firm websites, to be honest. Some sites squirrel away their media contacts on an obscure “Contact Us” page. Others create media pages, but fill them with old press releases — or worse again, lists of the latest publications to feature one of their lawyers. Put it this way: if I see that one of your lawyers has been interviewed by a competitor publication, why would I now want to interview that lawyer for my publication? That would make me look like I was scouring the competition seeking sources. Firms invariably place this information, which is nothing more than marketing bumpf, on their media pages  — which is kind of pointless, because the people least likely to be impressed that a lawyer was interviewed by a reporter are other reporters.

The firms that get it right are the ones with media pages that serve the media’s purposes, not the firm’s. These websites make it incredibly easy for a reporter or editor to find a complete list of media contacts, two clicks at most from the home page. These pages specify which personnel handle which sorts of matters, so that the reporter needing a quote for a deadline 30 minutes away doesn’t wind up in the voicemail of the person who handles reprint permissions. These sites also comprehensively index their lawyers’ written work according to subject area, so that reporters looking for experts don’t need to skim through individual lawyer pages hoping to find an article on a topic of interest. When designing your media page, remember that its purpose is to make it easy for reporters to get your lawyers into their publication on the right topics. It’s not there for the firm to brag about itself.

Also, and I wrote about this on Law21 a while back, one of my major annoyances was that many law firms fail to list their professional staff on their websites. If I wanted to talk to a firm’s marketing director or recruitment chair or IT supervisor for an article, many firm websites were useless — as far as the sites were concerned, these positions didn’t even exist. The only employees many firms list on their sites are lawyers, and the firm often adds insult to injury by giving this list the title “Professionals.” Or worse: “People,” which presumably means that the director of professional development is either vegetable or mineral.

Q. What made you open and receptive to a telephone pitch? How did you prefer to be approached?

Telephone pitches are risky, for the same reason that telemarketer calls are risky – not many people like taking a call from a stranger who’s trying to sell them something. I’d advise a legal PR professional to start with a prior email identifying yourself, stating concisely what you’d like to talk about, and saying that you’ll be calling within the next 24 hours in hopes we can talk about it. Make the email professional yet friendly – you’re introducing yourself and laying the groundwork for a productive phone call.

In order for me to take a pitch over the phone even halfway seriously, I needed some prior knowledge of who the caller was, a sense of exactly what they intended to pitch, and confidence that they were specifically interested in my specific magazine. I hated wasting my time on the phone with someone who was just making the rounds of the legal periodicals with a one-size-fits-all pitch, or who didn’t understand what kinds of pieces appear in the magazine. If someone could prove to me, in a few words, that they knew the publication and could pinpoint exactly the right place where their piece could make it a better issue, I would pay attention. I have to say, though, that was an extremely rare occurrence.

I can’t count how many times I saw or heard the phrase “I thought you might be interested” in pitches. You can’t afford to “think” a journalist “might” be interested. You’ve got to know that what you have to offer is so well aligned with what that journalist needs that you’re certain this is a guaranteed winner for everyone. You have to be in the business of providing solutions to the media outlets with which you work, because while it might be the lawyer who pays your bills, it’s the journalist who has what you need.

Today’s segment: what not to do when dealing with a journalist.

Q. What are the top three faux pas that legal media folks commit when approaching legal reporters?

1. You’re just conducting a mass email. I would get a pitch for, say, an article that discusses the ramifications of a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which was really annoying because I edited a Canadian legal periodical that doesn’t report on U.S. case law. Same thing for proffered articles on the David Souter legacy or the Americans with Disabilities Act or what have you – I was clearly just on a mass-emailing list plucked from a directory somewhere. It was lazy and unprofessional, and all it did was get the sender added to a blacklist. Unsolicited and uncustomized emails from marketers lasted about five seconds in my inbox, if that.

2. You haven’t done any homework on the periodical. National rarely if ever published articles written by law firm lawyers on a new development in an area of law, and any marketing professional who’d even skimmed the last few issues would know that. So I got really tired of having to constantly write back to law firm marketing people to explain that we don’t publish those types of articles. It’s an example of the most common and most damaging aspect of legal PR: making pitches based on what the firm cares about, not what the periodical can use. Send journalists a message that you’ve read at least one issue of their magazine or have paid some attention to their editorial mandate. There’s no excuse for sending a pitch that’s not customized for the specific publication in question.

3. You’re addressing me by my first name and we’ve never met. This may be completely idiosyncratic, but it always bothered me no end to get a chirpy “Hi Jordan!” greeting from a complete stranger. Unearned familiarity is not the way to start a professional relationship. (This is worse for female journalists, by the way – John Smith may often be addressed “Dear Mr. Smith,” but Jane Smith will usually be addressed “Hi Jane”). In this, as in so many things, I take my cue from Ben Stone on Law & Order: “In polite society, sir, you don’t call a man by his first name unless he’s given you permission. I never did that.”

At the heart of difficulties between lawyers and reporters is an absence of trust. I still recall the first time I ever covered an event as a staff writer for The Lawyers Weekly, many years ago. It was an environmental law CLE on a fairly innocuous topic, and I had worked with the presenter at a law firm the previous year. But when he realized I was attending in my new capacity as a journalist, he looked me square in the eye and said: “Don’t make me look bad.” And keep in mind, I was working for a respected legal trade publication, not the local paper or radio station.

This absence of trust reflects several aspects unique to lawyer-reporter interactions. One is simply ignorance about exactly what the other person does and the mistrust that accompanies it. Another is journalists’ inherent dislike of people in positions of influence, the tendency to want to topple pedestals and the elites who stand on them. A third is the lawyer’s primary duty to her client’s interests rather than to full disclosure of everything she might know or believe, which reporters often take as a sign of insincerity, evasiveness or flat-out lying. And a fourth might be that whenever reporters encounter a publication ban, a libel suit, or the removal of a “potentially litigious” line in a story, there’s usually a lawyer at the other end of the process.

But I think the single biggest problem between lawyers and the media is the lack of control that lawyers have over the reporting and publishing process. Lawyers, as you might have noticed, greatly dislike the absence of control. We don’t delegate well, we don’t like implicit arrangements, and we really don’t like it when someone else has final say over our words. The fear of being misquoted drives a lot of the reluctance that lawyers display when a reporter asks them for information or for a quote. I can’t tell you how many times over the past dozen years that a lawyer we interviewed asked to see a copy of the article before it was published. But I can tell you how many times we said yes: zero. Our policy was that a lawyer could see his or her quotes to check them for accuracy, but that the article itself was off-limits. Lawyers who prize own their professional independence should appreciate that journalistic independence hinges on the ability to write the article you want to write without interference.

Can the gap between these two professions be bridged? Of course — there are countless examples of successful lawyer-journalist collaboration that deliver value to all sides while respecting professional norms. The Legal Blog Watch piece and its comments include some useful tips on handling the press. Media organizations could use a list of do’s and don’ts as well, but for now, here are a few more ideas that should help lawyers overcome their concerns about dealing with the media.

1. Accept the loss of control. If you simply can’t deal with the fact that you won’t get final sign-off rights on the article, then you might as well step out of the process now. You might or might not even get to see your quotes before they’re published, depending on the periodical in question, though you can certainly ask. There’s risk involved in speaking with the media, and while you can minimize it, you can’t eliminate it.

2. Enact a media policy. If your organization doesn’t have a policy on who speaks to the press, when, on what subjects, and to what extent, then you need to get one in place. This is especially important for lawyers in public-sector and corporate-law departments, who in my experience are extremely reluctant to even return phone calls, let alone speak on the record. Create a policy and cite it when a journalist calls, if only as a simple matter of professional courtesy.

3. Consider recording the conversation. I actually find this approach a tad distasteful, but it’s standard procedure for many high-level political and corporate figures, and law firms should consider it. Tell the reporter you want to record the call (never, ever do it secretly) purely for the purposes of checking the accuracy of your published statements. This is neither necessary nor appropriate with a reporter with whom there’s a degree of familiarity, and it could go some way to easing lawyers’ fears and establishing trust. But make it the exception, not the rule.

4. Compile a media database. If your firm is large enough to have a marketing and communications department, these professionals should be informed of all interactions with reporters and should track their published outcomes. In smaller firms, a lawyer or staff person should be delegated to this task. The idea is to establish a list of media encounters, positive results, reliable reporters, and best practices for successful interviews. Think of it as Media Knowledge Management.

5. Start tracking ROI. Law firms do very few things that lend themselves to sensible return-on-investment analysis, so ROI results from media interactions can be a powerful tool for overcoming internal reluctance or opposition to deal with the media. Include “In the media” on the “How did you hear about us?” portion of your client-intake process. Ask selected current clients whether they saw the firm in the media and what they thought (providing them a PDF or a video clip can help). Bring your rainmakers into the media loop. Do all you can to portray your firm’s media relations not just as a positive thing, but also as a competitive advantage.

There’s a lot more to a successful media strategy than this, of course, but it’s hard to overestimate the importance of trust in your relations with the press. If you can earn it, internally and externally, you’re already way ahead of most lawyers who still prefer to view reporters as the unknown or as the the enemy.