PR News: Silly season doesn’t mean the pitches stop
PR, Synapse News
Hey there,
Silly season is here, but that doesn’t mean the pitches stop.
Now more than ever journalists need stories to fill those lighter news pages, and ideally, they’re looking for something with a longer shelf life. Think campaigns that can resonate for the whole of summer (not just July).
Drop your story into the Synapse marketplace or send it to pitches@synapse.media and we’ll post it for you!
Now welcome back to The Loop – your favourite weekly scroll of live journo requests, media relations tips and news you don’t want to miss.
Here’s what’s hot this week…
🔥 MUST READ
…advice we’ve spotted from the experts
“Journalists want to speak to spokespeople directly, not just accept written statements.”
Talia Hatch’s takeaways from our Spotlight Session: AI, Public Relations and Building Trust: prioritise real voices, use AI to sense-check relevance, and never underestimate the power of a coffee meeting.
👉 Read the full LinkedIn post
🔎 JOURNO REQUESTS
Here’s what journalists are currently looking for on Synapse:
Insider Media:
- Looking for all dealmaking-related announcements from B2B press teams in the West Midlands area – legal, accountancy, and corporate finance advisers
- Seeking dealmaking news from Dorset-based professional services – legal, accountancy, and corporate finance firms.
The i Paper:
- Looking for expert comments/case study of someone in one of the vulnerable groups that have lost out on the winter fuel payment u-turn for
- Looking to speak to someone who keeps physical cash at home, hidden away safely, for emergencies.
- Looking to speak to someone who received a higher inheritance tax bill because they disputed the value of their property.
- Looking for someone who is less likely to use a cash ISA if Reeves cut the annual allowance.
Newsquest:
Metro:
- Looking to hear from couples who bought a house together about their deposit.
- Looking to chat to couples of all ages about how they split their money.
Triangle News:
- Looking to speak to young people who have very successful businesses talking about how they managed it.
- I am looking for parents who pay their own parents a salary to look after their pre-schoolers because it’s cheaper than sending them to nursery.
Express:
LADbible:
Daily Mirror / Express / Reach titles:
Or head to the marketplace now to look at requests yourself.
🗞️ PR-Y STUFF
Here’s what we’ve read this week so that you don’t have to:
- PR pay gaps fuel major PRWeek project – PRWeek is gathering comprehensive salary data from agencies to spotlight pay disparities and drive transparency across the industry. read more
- Why PR beats advertising in the AI age – As AI starts churning out ad copy and creative at scale, PR pros can breathe easy. read more
- Google accused of causing “serious irreparable harm” to the UK news industry. – a legal claim has been submitted to the CMA over the impact of Google’s AI overviews on news publishers read more
- PR salaries grow in 2024 – Average PR salaries rose last year, agency employers in an attempt to retain staff, according to the latest survey by The Works Search. read more
- Nearly half of UK adults have used AI tools to stay up to date with news and current affairs – that’s according to research from PR agency Portland. They also found that 81% of ‘decision-makers’ are using AI to access news. read more
📆 NEXT MONTH’S HOOKS
…just because we don’t want you missing out on stuff.
- 1 August: Edinburgh Fringe Festival begins
- 1 August: ‘The Bad Guys 2’ movie release date for the UK
- 7 August: Bank of England MPC Base Rate decision – It will be reviewed to determine interest rates set by lenders and savings providers
- 8 August: ‘The Naked Gun’ release date – A reboot starring Liam Neeson, directed by Akiva Schaffer.
- 9 August: Edinburgh International Book Festival begins – featuring everyone from the rising stars of fiction to Nobel Prize-winners
- 14 August: University Clearing search peak – Searches for ‘Clearing’ spike here. Smart PR timing for universities, fintechs, student accommodation and retail brands aimed at young adults.
- 14 August: UK economic announcements – Balance of Trade, Gross Domestic Product, Index of Services and Industrial Production announced.
- 21 August: GCSE Results Day – MailOnline’s social platforms reach 2 in 5 school leavers. BBC’s informed that students will receive their results via the Education Record app this year.
- 21 August: Reading & Leeds Festival begins
- 22 August: Women’s Rugby World Cup starts – London, Bristol, Sunderland, Brighton, Northampton, Exeter, Manchester and York are the host cities.
- 24 August: Notting Hill Carnival
- 27 August: ‘School shoes’ searches peak – According to MailMetro Media, 46% of parents use payment schemes for back-to-school items.
✨ BEFORE YOU GO
Got something great but in a rush?
Send it over to pitches@synapse.media and we’ll get it in our marketplace for you.
FAQs
Registration is simple! Click here to here and then fill out your information. Our team hand verify all of our users within 24 hours. Once your account has been approved, you’ll receive an email inviting you to log in.
If you have any questions or problems, get in touch with support@synapse.media
Our team hand-verify every single one of our users. Synapse is designed for journalists, reporters, editors and those in the media sourcing stories. It’s also designed for PR professionals. We have our own verification process, but if required, we’ll always get in touch with you directly to get some more information on your day-to-day role and to make sure Synapse is right for you.
There are over 3000 amazing people on Synapse; all of whom want to revolutionise the media relations industry. Our PR user base is from across the UK and covers a mix of agency, freelance and in-house professionals. Our journalist user base is similarly broad. There are national publications, trades, regionals and freelancers all using the platform.
No! At the moment, Synapse is completely free to use for all users, so register today and try it out.
We’d love to. But we’re not quite there yet.
Synapse believes that journalists have the right to their own data, and that by giving journalists control over their data, PRs will receive more accurate and timely information that isn’t currently available on any other database.
This means that we need to work with journalists to register them on the platform, rather than adding every UK journalist without permission. This is something our team is working on every single day.
Have a journalist or publication you’d like to see on Synapse? Get in touch and let us know at support@synapse.media
We launched on 21st September 2023 with over 1800 users already pre-registered. Since then we’ve grown to over 3000 users, onboarded national publications and have more news to come. Watch this space!
Our users are so important to us. You literally keep us going each and every day so we’re always here to help. From solving tech issues, demoing the platform to posting pitches and requests on your behalf when you’re just having one of those weeks, we put our users at the heart of everything we do.
If you want to read more about our users’ experiences, you can check out their stories here or get in touch with support@synapse.media
Depending on whether you have a journalist profile or a PR profile, you’ll have access to slightly different AI tools.
For PRs, you can save time by exploring our intelligent recommendations of which journalists to pitch to. Our AI will make recommendations based on proprietary data, saving you hours of research time.
For journalists, our secure AI assistant is there to help you as you write your stories. You’re in control of whether you use the tool and to what extent with options of a bulleted summary through to a full generative article.
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