Home > Promoting Healthy Families in Your Community: 2008 Resource Packet > Chapter 4: Engaging Your Community - Pitching Story Ideas to the Media

Promoting Healthy Families in Your Community : 2008 Resource Packet

Author(s):   Child Welfare Information Gateway, Children's Bureau, FRIENDS National Resource Center For Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention

Year Published:  2008

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Chapter 4: Engaging Your Community
Pitching Story Ideas to the Media

Media professionals want to know that their stories will have an impact on the entire community. When the topic of child abuse and neglect arises, their first question is often, "How many children have been abused in this State?" or "How many children have died this year from abuse?"

While these tragic numbers may garner momentary attention, they provide limited insight into the multiple dimensions of child maltreatment. They reveal little about the interactions among individuals, families, communities, and society that lead to such incidents. This complexity confounds our search for a simple answer to the question, "Why does child maltreatment occur?"

You can help the media understand that this same complexity offers great hope, because a problem with so many contributing factors offers multiple opportunities for intervention and change. The power of the story is in the healing that occurs when a community joins together, not only to identify and reduce known risk factors, but also to enhance protective factors that strengthen families, reduce the incidence of abuse and neglect, and protect children from its negative effects. The following are some tips for successful media pitches.

Anchor your story to a timely, local event
When you talk to the media about supporting parents and families to reduce the risk of child abuse and neglect, think about angles that make the story current and interesting to a local audience. This does not have to be a recent child tragedy; it could be a back-to-school story about how one elementary school supports neighborhood families, for example.

Have a clear message
Communicate the idea that the five protective factors have been shown through research to promote healthy families and reduce the likelihood of child abuse and neglect.

Other sample "bottom line" messages:

• Supporting families and ensuring that parents have the knowledge, skills, and resources they need are effective ways to protect children from the risk of child abuse and neglect.
• Children do well when their parents do well. And parents do best when they live in communities that actively support families. We can all play a positive part.

Focus on the five protective factors
Focus on successful ways your community is:

• Promoting nurturing and parent-child attachment
• Enhancing knowledge of parenting and of child and youth development
• Strengthening parental resilience to stress
• Building social connections
• Identifying concrete supports for parents

Keep your message simple and direct. You might even pick just one protective factor and describe how it helps keep children safe and communities healthy by making families strong. For example:

• Suggest a story on parental resilience, focusing on a young family that had to relocate after Hurricane Katrina. Have the parents meet the reporter at a healthy marriage class that helped them support one another as they coped with their move. Prepare them to talk about how improving their marriage helped them provide a less stressful environment for their children during a difficult time.
• Connect a reporter with an urban tribal organization that promotes social connections by giving lessons in Native American art and dance to children, while giving their parents a chance to meet members of their own and other tribes in an informal social setting.

Celebrate community heroes
Suggest interviewees who can demonstrate the success of family strengthening programs and protective factors through their own lives. Some suggestions:

• A young immigrant mother who participated in a visiting nurse program and learned new ways to nurture, connect with, and care for her baby from a provider who spoke her native language.
• An instructor who promotes resilience by combining a couples yoga class with tips on maintaining a healthy marriage.
• A doctor who created a package of parenting tips appropriate for different developmental stages.
• A church that offers Wednesday night social activities for families.
• A community organization that provides concrete supports by helping residents find safe, affordable housing to prevent homelessness and keep families together.

Always conclude media pitches with suggestions for where to go for more information or tips for how community members can participate in similar efforts.

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Resources

For more on shaping a media message about strengthening families, see "Reframing Child Abuse and Neglect: A Practical Tool Kit," produced by Prevent Child Abuse America for the FRIENDS National Resource Center for Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention:

www.friendsnrc.org/reframing/Index1.htm

For more on shaping messages to the media about parent leaders and strengthening families, see The Parent Networker^®, produced by Parents Anonymous^® Inc. This publication includes parents' stories and issues of importance to families:

http://www.parentsanonymous.org/pahtml/pubPubs.html

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Updated on March 1, 2010