Publicist Kathi Petersen of Asheville North Carolina writes:
“I am wondering how other publicists archive their news clippings. I am surrounded by newspapers and magazines that I cannot bear to toss, though the professional organizer I hired questions the importance of keeping one’s news clips.
“I insisted to her that showing a prospective client an actual newspaper with the front page, top-of-fold story I achieved is far more impressive than telling them about the coverage, or showing them a reduced version that is either a copy or scanned, or telling them to visit the archives. Particularly because you can’t find this stuff by simply Googling.
“I’m going crazy with all this stuff surrounding me. How do your Hounds keep track of coverage they’ve received? Obviously, archiving TV/radio is a little easier with CDs/DVDs. It’s the print stuff.”
Front page stories I keep in plastic sleeves in a binder for each client. Everything else, I scan and keep on my server hard drive.
One answer is simply to scan the articles etc. and file them in electronic form. That way they can become a folder/ sub folder set on your PC. Hope that helps.
Stephen
This is an easy one! Get yourself either a 3-ring binder or an artists portfolio — or maybe both. Keep the originals in the larger artists portfolio and keep copies or actual smaller articles in your 3-ring binder inside clear “sleeves”. I have mine divided by Print Media, Broadcast Media, Internet Media, Live Presentations, and Miscellaneous.
I know it works.
**I used by binder to sit down with distributors at BEA and had them flip through the binder as I gave them my pitch as to why they should carry my book. It worked. I now have a major national distributor.
**I used the binder as the basis of my submission to PMA for the Benjamin Franklin Awards. I recreated it in a new binder, added the addtional things they wanted — and walked off with this year’s Benjamin Franklin Award for Marketing Excellence and Innovation.
I also keep many of the blurbs, radio and TV interviews, articles, press releases, etc. on my website at http://www.roadtripdream.com/media.html
Good Luck Hounds!
Carol White
Live Your Road Trip Dream
http://www.roadtripdream.com
888 522 TRIP (8747)
Winner – 2006 Benjamin Franklin Award – Marketing Excellence
Finalist – 2004 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year – Travel
We keep the “cream” only.
More important, we keep a relational database of all clips on a daily basis, so pulling number of clips for a report, etc., is easily done with a few keystrokes.
We use FileMaker Pro v7 for this, I believe….
I scan and/or place a link for all stories on my organization’s Web site with the date and story title. I also refer individuals to the Web site to see the archived stories. I am thinking about framing the articles and displaying them in the hallway.
Scanners nowadays can make very good images and are fairly affordable, however, I agree with you that it’s not the real deal and nowhere as impressive as giving them the physical copy to handle.
A way to reduce the physical clutter w/o majorly compromising quality of your clip reports is to save the prominent clips in their physical form (be sure to scan too… paper does go yellow over time), but scan and electronically archive the rest (be sure to make duplicates too.)
Of course, you and your organizer needs to set some standards as to what is considered “prominent” enough. Front-page, definitely — a mention stuffed into a section, probably — an events listing, probably not.
Good luck!
Three-ring binders — definitely! I put big bold labels on the sides with the name of the project in all caps. It serves as a terrific reminder to me and to anyone who comes to my office that I achieve results.
If you need to conserve space, toss or scan something else. Keep your clip binders prominently displayed. It’s physical evidence of the hard work done.
Thanks, folks for these ideas. But WHERE do you get full page newspapers scanned? I have several very large front-page clips and my scanner/copier is the desktop variety. Do you go to some place like Kinko’s? (My experience is that they won’t scan items that are copyrighted and that includes newspaper clips.)
Most document scanners will scan into a Portable Document File (PDF). It will take about as much hard drive room as an image file from other scanning methods, but it shows the actual clipping. You can set up an easy to manage database in any spreadsheet program and code name the file to coorespond to the database entry.
Retreival is a few clicks away and the PDF will attach, can be buried in the copy or printed.
I read magazines with a craft knife and a black marker. I mark the article and cut it out (the whole page) and file it in folders. One has to be pretty ruthless and file the articles you REALLY think you will need. The important ones are filed in a ring binder and subdivided.
Read the magazine once and send it for recycling.
I subscribe to 16 magazines and I have NEVER read the same magazine twice or have to go through tons of past issues trying to find an article i remember i read once.
My archive problem is not how to organize clips to use today, but how to store them so that they are available 100 years from now. I work for a non-profit agency that goes back 130 years, and I wish I had clippings from past decades. I’d like to ensure that future generations have a rich record of the work we’re doing now. I do like the idea of scanning articles and storing them electronically, but the hardware needed to access them may become obsolete (think eight-track tapes). A librarian suggested photocopying articles because regular copy paper won’t deteriorate as quickly as newsprint does.
I make COLOR copies of all my clips. That way they last a LONG time, and at the same time it’s obvious that they were newspaper or magazine articles.
The copyright wrinkle does complicate matters sometimes. I’ve found that local independent copy shops that know me will copy pretty much anything I take in, because they know it’s for my PR file.
CLIP YOUR CLIPS. Clip the article immediately, no matter how big or small, then label it with date, publication name, and page/section number. Place it in a clear 8-1/2×11″ sleeve in a binder that separates articles, pr, bios, etc. Binders that are clearly labeled by ‘clip type’ are easy to manage on book shelves or as I do, with hanging binders inside my file cabinets. Note: Hard drives crash, so if you save scanned clips to your hard drive be sure to make a backup CD.