A picture is worth a thousand words.

How to Send Photographs to the Media…

Placing images about your business in the media is a much overlooked discipline. But, once yo’ve achieved your stunning publicity shot, there are a few protocols you might want to bear in mind.

Image spec.

I find a good rule of thumb is to ensure any image is at least 1MB (or as close to it as possible) in size and a jpeg. This way the file should contain enough digital info to reproduce crisply on the page.

Captioning.

Because I deal with such a wide variety of media titles I assume the lowest common denominator with captioning – and that means emailing with the caption in the body of the email that the image is attached to.

‘CAPTION: LtoR Geoff Sellingstuff opens the Acme Supermarket with Mayor Billy Politics’ – or whatever.

I have included captions in the file info – but many smaller titles amazingly don’t realise this yet! Until they do – I’ll probably continue with the email approach.

Procedure.

NEVER email a 1MB photo with a news release. I have occasionally distributed resized smaller versions (thumbnails) to hopefully whet a journalist’s appetite. But the risk with this is that journalists ‘think’ that that’s the biggest file you have and conclude that the image will be too small.

If in doubt ask the journalist. Some like to receive the image themselves – some like to send it to the photo desk with the journalist’s name in the subject line.

And sometimes I’ve successfully placed images in the paper by going direct to the picture desk – and not even speaking to the journalist. Each paper, each picture and each story will be different.

When I email, my news release pre-amble always says something like : ‘Hi Hope the following is of interest. Ive got a great photo to go with this – let me know if you’d like to see a copy.’

In addition, the ‘Notes for Editors’ at the end always say PHOTO AVAILABLE – followed by contact details to request it.

Following up.

As is well – and shrewdly – documented, you should never follow up and ask a journalist if they’ve received a press release. NEVER. However, calling to ask a journalist if they’d like the photo seems OK – and amounts to the same thing anyway.