Don’t lose touch with laid-off media contacts

Newsroom staffs are being slashed right and left, making it tougher to maintain your hard-won media relationship

Twenty percent of the newsroom staff to be eliminated at the San Francisco Chronicle… 30 layoffs at the San Jose Mercury News … dozens of layoffs and buyouts at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times … the list goes on and on.

As your media contacts shuffle in and out of newsrooms, how do you maintain these valued relationships? PR pros say it’s a combination of doing your own down-and-dirty media research (instead of relying solely on databases), keeping ears to the ground for newsroom scuttlebutt and using social media tools to stay in touch with journalists in transition.

Get on the grapevine: Mitch Leff, president of Leff & Associates in Atlanta, has been making periodic trips to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom-where 40 staffers recently accepted buyouts-armed with sandwiches and coffee.