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Office of Communications and Marketing > Working with the Media > Tips for Successful Media Coverage

Tips for Successful Media Coverage

• Give the Communications Office as much advance time as possible. If you are helping to plan an event on campus that you would like publicized, please inform the Communications Office at (601) 974-1034 at least one month in advance. If you have received an honor or award, or have concluded some newsworthy research, please inform us of your news as soon as possible.
  
• Remember that you can never provide the Communications Office with too much information. The more background details and relevant tidbits you give us, the more information we are able to pass along to busy journalists on deadline (who will sincerely appreciate the consideration).
  
• While we cannot ensure that your news will receive coverage, we will do everything we can to give it the best possibility of publicity. Journalists receive a huge amount of mail, faxes, and email each day and are not, unfortunately, able to cover all the news they receive. In order to show the media that we respect them as professionals, we send them only the releases that are appropriate to their "beats" and only items which they would consider newsworthy. This helps both the college and the reporter: they know that when they receive news from Millsaps, it is news, and our reputation with reporters thrives as a result.
  
• If a journalist makes an error in coverage of your news, please call (601) 974-1034 immediately. Mistakes will happen. When they do, let us know and we will call the appropriate editors with a request for a correction.
  
• Please make sure that all information you provide the Office of Communications is completely accurate. It is crucial to our office (and to our promotion of the college) that we have a reputation of being 100 percent accurate. If your event information changes, please call (601) 974-1034 as soon as possible to let us know. We will send out a correction immediately.
  
• If you have a question as to whether your accomplishment, campus event, or other news merits media attention, please don't hesitate to call us. The Office of Communications wants to know about your professional development, what your department is doing, and what interesting things you are working on. Even if your item won't support publicity efforts alone, it can often be publicized in conjunction with other events on campus or bundled into a larger story about campus life or achievements by members of the Millsaps community.