Features are a huge opportunity to increase clients' coverage in print media

Unless you are already active in this field, you may not realise just how big this opportunity is. TIMS, a South African print media feature-tracking service (www.tims.co.za) maintains databases of features relevant to seven broad areas of interest from Business & Finance through Information Technology to Lifestyle, Leisure and Sports. In its Business & Finance database alone, it currently lists almost 500 scheduled features.

What makes this such a great opportunity for PR is that, by the nature of the operation, feature writing is among the toughest, most pressured and least glamorous journalistic disciplines. As such, the scribes who labour in this field tend to be more open than many of the colleagues to professional PR.

But before rushing off to phone your friendly feature writer, here are a few ideas that will help you to increase your penetration of this market.

The first rule of feature supplements

First understand that features are far more often born in the advertising sales department than in the newsroom. And while the people who write and edit them are real journalists, the features happen only when there is advertising support for them.

That does not - or should not - mean that only advertisers' copy gets used. In any publication worth its salt, a real story will be preferred to an advertiser's puff. Of course, there is nothing stopping an advertisers offering the writer a good story, which will almost certainly get preference over a story of equal merit from a non-advertiser.

Here's how it usually works. The sales people are constantly looking for ideas that will attract advertisers. They liaise with, typically, the features editor to develop a feature brief and appoint a writer. They then dangle this brief before likely prospects, and if they get sufficient bites to make the feature commercially viable - and only then - the writer gets to work. It doesn't happen earlier than this in case the feature doesn't attract sufficient advertising and has to be abandoned.

Once the go-ahead is given, the writer typically has only a short time to produce the copy and here's where the PR professional can prove immensely helpful.

The writing rules

First, a caveat. Don't waste the writer's limited time unless your client has a worthwhile story that falls squarely within the ambit of the specific feature brief.

Contact the writer early, give brief details of what you have to offer and find out how they prefer to work. Some writers are happy to base stories on a well-written news release, others prefer to conduct their own interviews. Even in the case of a live interview, always supply the journo with written information containing all the material facts relating to your client and the story. This does not have to be in story form... a summary of key facts is often more useful to the writer.

Email is generally more useful than hard copy as the writer can cut and paste from it, but depending on circumstances you may also want to supply the writer with hard copy.

Tracking feature opportunities

This will be routine for the experienced PR person. What isn't routine, however, is keeping a handle on all the relevant feature opportunities. With so many publications, how do you keep track without spending most of your time on the phone.

The simplest and most cost-effective way is by subscribing to a feature tracking service, where they do exactly that. TIMS database manager Jean McCallum has spent much of her time over the past six years developing her media contacts to ensure her data is kept rigorously up to date.

"In the early days, some of my media contacts considered me a nuisance, but once they realise there are benefits to them in what we do they are extremely co-operative," she said. "As well as publicising their features, we save the media contacts many phone calls from people all asking the same questions about the same features."

For PR professionals, the service offers even more benefits. Even when they know the media contact, collating the information and maintaining its accuracy (when publishing and deadline dates, as well as other info, can change several times between a feature's announcement and its eventual publication) is a time-consuming, frustrating and quite costly exercise.