In autumn 2022, a group of young people cut off traffic on Mannerheimintie in Helsinki. It was a demonstration by the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion Finland. Extinction Rebellion Finland’s goal is to disrupt everyday life so that the climate and environmental crisis is not overlooked by anyone.
The Constitution of Finland provides for the freedom of assembly for everyone. Social media is an effective tool for bringing like-minded people together, but even in a hybrid media environment, access to the front pages of traditional news media and news broadcasts is the goal of influencers. Media attention has a major impact on how organisations such as Extinction Rebellion Finland can draw attention to their goals and thus influence people’s behaviour.
One way to catch the attention of the news media is to offer tips on articles directly to the editorial teams.
Many newspapers have forms on their websites for this purpose.
You can also send a press release to the news media. A good press release follows the logic of a news article: it tells the reader right from the start, for example, what the purpose of a demonstration is and why it is important. The editorial team assesses the newsworthiness of the topic based on its social significance, novelty value and how interesting it is. Relevance also has an impact: the topic should be meaningful, new and interesting for the audience of the news media in question.
People are interested in people. The impact of a press release can be boosted by giving the organisers a voice through interesting and topical quotes. For example, Extinction Rebellion Finland has its own website specifically for the purpose of reaching out to journalists.
One traditional and still impactful way of influencing people through the media is through opinion pieces. As one of the most important tasks of the news media is to support public discourse, one publication criterion for opinion pieces is that the topic is related to current, common issues. A newspaper’s editorial team responsible for opinion pieces selects the opinion pieces to be published. Not all submitted texts are published.
You can often comment on a topic below online articles. However, online commenting seems to be a challenging art: research has shown that negative emotions are highlighted online, and anger is the emotion that spreads most easily on social media. Juxtaposition with others who think differently is also emphasised online. Therefore, it is no wonder that a phenomenon such as social media outrage exists. The concept of social media outrage may sound funny, but the consequences in democracy can be unpredictable. Many experts may not even give an interview to the media any more because they are afraid of falling victim to social media outrage. The solution is to recognise how social media can influence our emotions and to stop and think. There is nothing wrong with passionate debate, but its success requires respect for others – at best, it can help us to understand the perspective of another person who thinks differently.