ABSTRACT
Editors will be more likely to free up a journalist to talk to the school if they are going to get their message across to a wide audience. This may be to a group of Year 11 students about careers, or as part of a media studies course or to a group of governors or senior staff from a number of schools. The payback for the editor is that the newsdesk is not bombarded with insigni®cant news items and you have a name and a face to submit news to, even though the material is subsequently passed to someone else. Any professional relationship with the media therefore needs to be mutually bene®cial. Many newspapers nowadays contain special education supplements from time to time. The motive can often be ®nancial. If a school is in the newspaper, then parents of pupils there will tend to buy the newspaper on that day. But it is also part of the newspaper's remit to re¯ect what is happening in the local community, and that includes school life.
