Media – Connecting with Reporters
Getting reporters to cover a story helps you get the message out – but it also helps them do their job.
The job of a reporter is to tell stories. They want to tell interesting and compelling stories so that people will read them and, sometimes, so that decision-makers will react.
This is good – because you’ve got a story to tell!
In this instance, the story is this campaign – the push that’s on to ensure government creates a bold and broad Social Assistance Review. Your personal story gives reporters the real-life context that explains why a broad Review is necessary to fix the broken social assistance system.
You provide the context that reporters look for to make an issue understandable.
People who are on OW or ODSP and their supporters bring the “human interest” side to stories about government policy around poverty reduction. You provide the voice of experience, reality check, and insights that make statistics and the effects of policy real for the public.
1) So call your local newspaper reporters.
In smaller centres, there may not be very many reporters working for the newspaper. But in larger centres, you may have to find out which reporter covers social issues like poverty, and explain why they should do a story.
2) Tell them about the provincial government’s commitments to poverty reduction and to a Social Assistance Review.
Tell your story of how OW or ODSP has failed you or stopped you from reaching your full potential.
Tell them what you think a good social assistance system with meaningful supports and opportunities would look like.
And tell them that you think the government should honour the all-party commitment to poverty reduction by insisting that the Social Assistance Review:
- creates opportunities for the voices of low-income people to be heard
- identifies and addresses the most punitive elements of the system immediately
- re-imagines and creates a system for the longer term that moves people out of poverty by offering meaningful and appropriate resources and programs
- starts soon – Ontarians need and are entitled to a social assistance system that really works.
3) Watch for opportunities that make this issue timely.
For example, when poverty-related issues are in the news.
Or connect this issue to poverty-related events taking place in your community.
4) Remember to use these sources for information on which newspapers serve your local community and how you can contact them:
5) And if you are hosting your own event
Use our template press release
Press Release link
Back to Connecting with Newspapers
