By Mark Macias
Founder of MACIAS PR | Former NBC Executive Producer
When I was an Executive Producer with NBC in New York, I was the boss. I helped determine which stories we pursued, but that didn’t mean I walked around the newsroom telling experienced journalists exactly how to report their stories. That would have been a fast way to damage the creative process—and probably my relationship with the people producing the journalism.
Good journalists are independent thinkers. They want to investigate, ask their own questions and reach their own conclusions. You can give them direction. You can point out what they’re missing, and sometimes challenge them to look deeper. But there’s a difference between guiding a journalist and telling a journalist what to do.
That distinction is just as important in public relations, especially if you’re a CEO who typically tells others what to do. Persistence is necessary in PR. Aggression is different. And when you’re dealing with journalists, your approach can be just as important as your strategy.
Reporters Don’t Work for Your PR Firm
This sounds obvious, but the distinction gets blurry surprisingly quickly when a campaign is under pressure. A client wants an answer, but the reporter hasn’t responded. Someone inside the company wants to know why the story hasn’t been published. Suddenly the publicist starts transferring the client’s nervous energy onto the journalist.
That’s a big mistake that can hurt your coverage. The reporter isn’t working on your deadline. More importantly, the reporter isn’t accountable to your client. They’re accountable to their editor, their audience and their own reporting standards. If you approach that relationship as though the journalist owes you a response, interview or story, the tone changes quickly.
When I was working inside newsrooms, nobody needed to tell me that a publicist wanted coverage. Of course they did. That’s why they were calling. Repeating the request more aggressively didn’t make the underlying story more interesting.
The Best Publicists Guide Journalists Rather Than Control Them
There’s a subtle skill involved in influencing the direction of a story without trying to control it.
Suppose a reporter is pursuing one aspect of an issue, but you know there’s another piece of information that could substantially change their understanding. An inexperienced publicist might say, You’re focusing on the wrong thing. A better publicist finds a way to introduce the missing information and allows the journalist to recognize its significance.
That’s not just diplomacy. It’s strategy.
Journalists generally respond better when they feel they are discovering something rather than being instructed to believe something. If you have strong data, give them the data. If there’s a contradiction they haven’t considered, show them the contradiction. If your executive has firsthand experience that challenges the prevailing narrative, put that experience in front of the reporter.
Then give the journalist room to think. Some of the best PR work happens when the reporter begins asking the questions you hoped they would ask—without you ever telling them what those questions should be.
Don’t Confuse Persistence With Repetition
Persistence absolutely matters in media relations. But sending essentially the same follow-up five times isn’t necessarily persistence. At some point, you’re just knocking harder on the same door.
A useful follow-up should ideally give the journalist another reason to reconsider the story. Maybe something changed in the news cycle. Perhaps you now have new data. An additional source became available. The CEO can provide insight into a development that happened that morning. There may be a fresh reason why the idea matters today that didn’t exist when you originally sent it.
That changes the interaction from Why haven’t you answered me? to Here’s something that may make this more useful to you. The distinction matters.
Your Tone Becomes Part of Your Reputation
PR is a human-capital business. Over time, journalists learn which publicists understand their jobs and which ones create unnecessary friction.
That reputation isn’t built only when you land a story. It’s built in all the small interactions around the story. How do you react when a reporter says no? What happens when an interview gets postponed? Do you become confrontational when a journalist asks a difficult question? Are you respectful when the reporter’s deadline becomes more important than your schedule?
Those moments matter because media relationships aren’t really about knowing someone’s email address. They’re about establishing whether you’re someone a journalist wants to deal with again.
This is also why I don’t subscribe to the caricature of the aggressive publicist who gets results by relentlessly wearing reporters down. That might occasionally produce a response. It can also teach the journalist to avoid your next email.
A Reporter Saying No Isn’t an Invitation to Argue
One of the easiest ways to damage a media relationship is to debate a journalist about why they should cover your story. You can clarify something the reporter misunderstood. You can introduce new information. You can reposition the idea later if circumstances change. But arguing with a journalist about their editorial judgment rarely creates the outcome you want.
I sat in the decision-making seat. If I passed on an idea, a publicist telling me that I was wrong wasn’t likely to suddenly make me enthusiastic about it.
What could change my mind was new information. That’s an important distinction for anyone working in media relations. Don’t try to win the argument. Improve the story.
The Strongest PR Relationships Still Have Boundaries
Being respectful doesn’t mean being passive. There are times when a publicist should push back. A reporter may have a material fact wrong. An interview may be moving into an area that wasn’t represented accurately beforehand. A client can be treated unfairly. Good media relations sometimes requires a firm response.
But being firm and being rude aren’t the same thing. The strongest publicists I’ve encountered understand how to advocate for a client without making the journalist the enemy. They know when to push, when to clarify, when to provide more information and when to leave the reporter alone.
That judgment is difficult to teach because every reporter and situation is different. It’s also one of the areas where newsroom experience can fundamentally change the way a PR campaign is managed. When you’ve sat on the other side, you understand what pressure feels productive and what pressure simply becomes annoying.
About MACIAS PR
Mark Macias is the founder of MACIAS PR, an earned-media public relations agency specializing in media coverage, media relations and thought-leadership campaigns for healthcare, technology, AI and financial companies. Before founding MACIAS PR in 2009, Mark was an Executive Producer with NBC and Senior Producer with CBS in New York, where he evaluated and approved story ideas and worked directly with journalists developing stories. His newsroom experience now shapes the media strategies MACIAS PR uses to identify newsworthy angles and secure earned media coverage for clients.
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