How to get PR photographs into the newspapers
Not many people see the beginning-to-end process of how photographs get from conception to publication in a national newspaper. I work both as a press/PR photographer and a picture editor for The Times so I take pictures, edit them and select pictures for publication. Often newspapers want to use pictures sent by PRs, but can’t because they are missing key information that newspaper editors need. My short guide will ensure that your client’s photographs have the best chance of being used by newspapers.
Captions and File Size:
The most important thing you can do to increase the chance of your picture being used is to caption it. Picture desks see up to 12,000 photographs a day and search for pictures using embedded caption information. Unless your photographs have captions, the editors will never find them because email information is lost when the pictures are processed.
The first sentence must cover: who, what, where and when. The second sentence should explain why this story is interesting.
Finish with contact information in case the editorial team has questions or they want further pictures. Always have someone with access to the photographs and caption info available out of hours to cover the Sundays, Monday editions of the dailies and evenings for late changes.
Photoshop, Photomechanic, Fotostation, etc can all be used to embed captions in pictures. Your photographer should be able to caption the pictures for you. You might want to include this in the job spec you give them.
For newspaper usage the photograph should ideally be a jpeg in RGB format and about 1MB compressed file size – again this is something your photographer can do for you. Magazines need larger file sizes of about 2MB’s.
Which Pictures to Send:
Picture editors often need a photograph to fit a given shape and size because the page layout has already been designed. For pictures of people give them a choice of:
1. A tight headshot is essential because it’s the most commonly used picture format
2. Landscape and portrait layouts of:
• Subject with a plain background
• Subject with a background related to their business – out of the office if possible
3. Include pictures with subtle branding, and some without any branding. Pictures about the business should only include minor branding – they may then be used to illustrate articles about the general market. Pictures full of branding look too much like advertising and will generally not be considered for publication.
A good example of placing branding in a news story:
Timing and How Pictures Influence Story Selection
To have the greatest chance of a photograph getting into a newspaper it needs to be sent in before 2pm. Most daily papers have morning and afternoon editorial and picture conferences – a lot of decisions about where stories will run in the paper will be made at 3pm conference. Having a really good accompanying picture can move a story up from the bottom of the page to a page lead. A great picture will be used as a “standalone”, but only if it is seen in time to fit it into the page design.
PR’s sometimes ask me whether they should phone the picture desk or not: in general one phone call is fine. It is most helpful to call about 20 minutes after the pictures have been sent in to allow time for the pictures to get into the newspaper’s computer systems. More calls than that will just annoy the picture editors.
Sometimes having a photograph means the difference between getting coverage and not getting it. Last week we had a great positive quote from the president of a trade association to use in “Quote of the day” but we needed a photograph as we always run a picture of the speaker with the quote. We couldn’t find a headshot of the man so another quote was used, and the trade association was not mentioned in the paper at all.
For further advice or commissions please contact me or take a look around the rest of my website.