What Makes a Journalist Take Your Call?

For a lot of companies, media relations works like a tap. There is an announcement, so the tap opens: a press release goes out, a list gets contacted, someone chases the outlets that did not reply. Coverage appears, or it does not. The tap closes. Three months later it opens again.

From the inside this feels like a process. From a journalist's side it looks like something else. A company they hear from only when it wants something. No context, no history, no idea whether the person writing to them has read a single thing they have published.

The process is sound. What is missing is everything that happens between the announcements, and that absence explains two things companies run into constantly: coverage that stays thin no matter how good the news is, and the discovery, at the worst possible moment, that there is nobody in the press they can actually call.

The alternative is slower and much less visible, which is why it is rare.

It starts with knowing what a journalist covers, not what their title says. Reading them. Noticing when their beat shifts. Remembering that six months ago they said corporate announcements were not for them but company culture stories were, and not sending them a corporate announcement again.

It means being useful when there is nothing to promote. A journalist working on a piece about the sector needs a figure, a contact, someone who will explain how a thing works on background. Helping with that costs nothing and is not coverage. It is the reason the next email gets opened.

It means respecting a no. A journalist who passes on a story and is chased three more times has learned something about the agency contacting them, and it is not good. A journalist who passes and hears nothing more about it has learned something better.

And it means being reachable the way each of them prefers to work. In Morocco, plenty of journalists treat WhatsApp as a normal working channel alongside email and the phone. Insisting on a formal press portal because that is the global process is a small friction, and small frictions decide who gets called back.

None of it pays off on the campaign it happens during. That is the hard part to sell internally, and the reason so few brands do it.

What changes is the starting position. Send a story to someone who has never heard of you and you are asking a stranger for a favour, competing with everything else in their inbox that morning. Send the same story to someone who knows your client, has covered them fairly before, and trusts that you would not waste their time, and you are not asking for a favour. You are giving them something they can use.

Over a few years this changes what is possible. The interview gets accepted. The embargo holds. The journalist calls you when they are writing about the sector, before you have thought to pitch. Announcements that would have needed chasing get picked up because the relationship did the work in advance.

Coverage stops being something a brand goes out and captures. It becomes something the brand is already part of.

This is where the mechanics come in, and they matter more than they look.

Every irrelevant email a journalist receives costs the sender a small amount of credit. Send enough of them and the relationship is spent before you ever had something that person genuinely wanted. Mass distribution does not just underperform. It actively burns the asset you are supposed to be building.

So before any announcement goes out, the list gets built around what the journalist actually covers rather than their job title, which outlet they write for and who reads it, the language that outlet publishes in, the format they prefer to work with, and what our history with them says: what they have asked us for, what they have covered, and what they have told us is not for them.

That last criterion is the one a bought media list cannot give you. It only exists if somebody has been keeping track, which is why we maintain our own database of Moroccan journalists rather than renting one. It records beats, outlets, languages and working preferences, and it gets updated continuously, because a database that is eighteen months old is a list of people who have moved on.

The result is a short list instead of a long one. That is the point. Precision is not an efficiency measure here, it is how the relationship survives contact with the campaign calendar.

The real argument for all of this is not the coverage. It is what happens on the day something goes wrong.

A crisis gives a brand hours, not weeks. A story is being written, a journalist is on deadline, and the company has one chance to be part of it rather than the subject of it. Everything depends on relationships that already exist, because there is no time to build any.

The difference is concrete. A journalist who knows the agency calls before publishing to check a fact. They take the statement and use it properly instead of quoting one line out of it. They give the company an hour to respond rather than forty minutes. They are willing to hear that the first version of the story is wrong, because the person telling them has never wasted their time before.

A journalist who has only ever received press releases from that brand does none of this. Not out of hostility. They simply have no reason to extend credit to a company that has never treated them as anything but a distribution point.

This is the part that makes media relations worth funding between campaigns. The relationships are not only producing coverage. They are the thing standing between a bad week and a lasting reputational problem, and they have to be in place long before anyone knows they are needed.

In a market with thousands of journalists, a brand can burn a few relationships and move on to the next tranche of the list. That option does not really exist across most African markets.

The press corps covering a given sector in Morocco, Tunisia or Senegal is small enough that people know each other. Reputations travel between newsrooms. An agency known for sending irrelevant releases is known by everyone within a year, and a brand attached to that agency inherits the problem. The same works in the other direction, which is the opportunity.

Memories are also longer. A journalist remembers the company that was unreachable during a difficult story three years ago, and remembers the one whose spokesperson picked up. And because many outlets publish regionally, a relationship built in Casablanca can matter in Tunis or Abidjan, which makes each one worth more than its market alone suggests.

None of this can be bought at the moment it becomes useful. It is either already there or it is not.

Thinking about your media relations beyond the next announcement? That is the conversation we prefer to have.

This is the third of four articles on how communication actually works across African markets. The others cover why global campaigns underperform when they are translated rather than localized, and what major brand moments teach about the difference between visibility and relevance.