As you may have observed over the last few years, the media landscape is evolving quickly, which requires public relations pros to rethink earned media strategies to continue providing value to journalists. With editorial teams shrinking across the board, opportunities to land news coverage– let alone thought leadership pieces–  are fewer and further between. 

When considering ways to pivot your strategy, “newsjacking” is an excellent way to develop relationships with reporters and contribute to media market share. Investing time in this process increases opportunities for relevant, high-quality earned media results. This is because newsjacking helps create a real-time, mutually beneficial relationship between yourself and the reporter, as you’re providing them with a credible third-party resource or commentary that they can use right away, not something they have to take time investigating. Additionally, it helps build your spokesperson or organization as a go-to resource for the media, which means a reporter may be more receptive to reviewing future, proactive topics from your organization.

Implementing a Newsjacking Strategy: Step-by-Step Guide

When developing a successful newsjacking strategy, it’s crucial to identify and align your brand with relevant, larger news cycles. For example, if you are in the adtech space, you may want to follow developments from major advertising platforms like Meta, Google, and, increasingly, TikTok. 

From there, you should work with your agency to align on key industry terms and set up various alerts to stay ahead of breaking news. Once a relevant story breaks, work with your communications team to discuss your organization’s point of view and how this POV contributes a unique position or perspective to the narrative. 

Oh, and by the way, you’ll need to ensure all of this happens before lunch? 

Once you have established the narrative, quickly identify a target list of reporters who may be planning to cover the news. Any written pitch should provide a POV that isn’t already being widely covered and focuses on the wider implications of this development. Make sure reporters know you can turn around expert commentary within 12-24 hours. 

Another important thing to keep in mind is that this strategy won’t always land. So if your spokesperson isn’t quoted the first time, all is not lost. Newsjacking is ultimately a relationship-building initiative to help reporters familiarize themselves with your clients’ expertise and show that your company can be a resource for their reporting. Eventually, a quote will land and they’ll consider you for insights proactively. 

When you have enough newsjacking pitches and quotes in the bank, you may want to consider building a quote library to quickly repurpose when similar stories or ongoing trends arise. This will allow you to optimize your efforts by tracking which perspectives and stories are landing and which can be sunset.  

So, what does a newsjacking strategy look like in practice?

A few short weeks ago two of our teams jumped on a story that led to national coverage in multiple countries. That story was the Crowdstrike IT outage. Following our methodology, teams were prepared with scans set up to track mentions of large-scale software issues. Seeing that this story had broke first with Australian media it was clear from the reporting that the news would be significant globally. The UK team worked with their in-market spokesperson to pull together rapid-response commentary and get the client’s voice out to the media. As the US came online the UK team passed the baton sharing pre-approved commentary and recommended targets. At this point, the story had developed so additional senior spokespersons could step in to offer more technical explanations to the media.

It’s essential to understand the lifecycle of a news story when engaging in newsjacking. Between the Friday that the Crowdstrike outage happened and the following Monday, media coverage dipped by 95%. If you were unable to provide commentary to reporters by that Friday, it would be difficult to breakthrough the noise. With a developing story like Crowdstrike, the approach should adapt to the storylines. Initially, there was a lot of ambiguity, as the media weren’t sure what was causing the issues, and the general public was unaware of how Crowdstrike impacted their daily lives. That left space to offer explanation and education on how an outage of this capacity impacted everything from email to airline coordination, and what the potential causes, losses and solutions were. As the story developed the media moved on to explaining the root cause, this additional clarity provided our global teams to work together to refine our approach in real-time.

When executed smartly and efficiently, newsjacking is an excellent way to help an organization provide true value to reporters and boost their thought leadership profile and credibility. Make sure to be thoughtful about what the media needs and how specific commentary and POVs will resonate with different reporters or outlets, and success will follow.