What’s the story? Engaging with the press

Author and presenter:
Jill Palmer
Medical journalist, Former medical editor of the Daily Mirror, London, UK

Abstract
What makes a good story and how do you get it into the press.

Worthy stories are not necessarily newsworthy stories.

Everyone knows that smoking is bad for your health and is the biggest preventable cause of ill health. This no longer makes news. You must have something different to get smoking stories into the newspapers or onto the radio or television.

My presentation will give you journalistic insights into super stories. I will explain what makes a good story and what journalists are looking for. Stories that are new, unexpected, unusual, informative, quirky, topical, and human interest. A 70-year-old man quitting smoking to improve his health is NOT news. That same man quitting smoking so he won’t smell and can cuddle his grandchild IS a story.

I will explain how to contact the right journalist at the right time. The importance of facts and figures, key statistics and information.
I will explain the pitfalls you can get into and how to avoid them. How to do an interview and how to make sure it is your agenda and not the journalist’s agenda that is the story.

You are the expert in your field, the journalist is not. But he or she is the expert who can get your knowledge across to the public. As Lord Northcliffe described journalism ‘A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.’

Source of funding: not relevant

Declaration of interest: none

About the presenter
Jill Palmer was Medical Editor of the Daily Mirror, then one of the UK’s best selling tabloid newspapers, from 1985 to 2003 following nine years as a general news reporter on the paper. During this time she wrote about virtually every illness, every new drug, every new operation and covered all political health issues involving the NHS, producing stories on a daily basis. Jill also wrote a weekly health feature column. She now works for herself writing health/medical stories for national newspapers and magazines as well as writing for the Department of Health, Health Protection Agency, National Patient Safety Agency, various Strategic Health Authorities, and health-related charities. She wrote and edited the Department of Health’s official NHS 60 commemorative brochure and has a monthly political health column in Tribune.

Jill has won numerous awards including campaigning journalist of the year in the 1986 British Press Awards for her exposure of NHS cutbacks, medical journalist of the year award by the Medical Journalists Association in 1992 and 1996; and the Royal College of Nursing in the media award in 1996. In 2003 she was awarded the Cancer Research UK cancer journalist of the year award and was shortlisted for medical writer of the year in the British Press Awards. She has written extensively about smoking cessation, was a judge for the QUITTER of the Year Awards for many years and now writes patient information leaflets for the charity QUIT.