FleishmanHillard UK November Monthly Media Briefing

This month’s Media Briefing focused on the two main crises dominating the headlines: the cost-of-living and the climate. To gain some insight into the coverage on both topics, our head of news Pete Meikle spoke with International Correspondent for Sky News, Saima Mohsin, who currently presents across a spectrum of Sky News programmes, including their dedicated climate programme – The Daily Climate Show.

Climate Crisis

Saima explained that coverage of climate change has evolved significantly over the last thirty years, moving from a somewhat niche area to a hot topic, where almost all companies and media outlets want to show what they are doing to help. Sky News have a long-standing commitment to climate action and in launching The Daily Climate Show, they became the first ever broadcaster to create an outlet solely dedicated to climate news. The Daily Climate Show runs on both weekdays and weekends and is a fantastic platform to pitch clients for climate-related stories. The weekday show runs for ten minutes and focuses on one guest per show, whilst the weekend segment (presented by Tom Heap) is a longer debate-style format featuring a number of guests.

Saima’s advice for getting a client onto the show is to ensure that PRs are familiar with the show and the content they are looking for. She also advises that PRs continue to pitch/take producers for coffee or schedule a Zoom meeting even if your pitch is not successful as there may be further opportunities that arise in the future.

Cost-of-Living

Sky is across all aspects of the cost-of-living story. They now have a dedicated cost-of-living presenter and a new data and analytics department which provides an opportunity for clients to appear in data-driven stories. They are looking for human-interest stories, which spotlight how companies are helping everyday people to cope. If they can combine that with an eco-angle, that is a winning pitch. They also have Ian King’s show, Ian King Live, which focuses on business stories which are relevant to the news of the day. Ian particularly likes to break stories, so if clients have exclusives to offer, Ian’s show is the place to pitch them.

That’s all for now. See you next month!

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