Common sense would tell you that the quickest way to reach a national audience is to get on national television, into national newspapers and onto national radio shows.
Common sense may be becoming quite wrong.
Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill is famous for saying, "All politics is local."
The equivalent maxim in public relations and journalism may be, "All news is local."
The fragmentation of media means nobody dominates the national scene.
Instead of CBS, NBC and ABC doing the six o'clock news, you have dozens of cable news channels broadcasting all day, every day, and and the ability to get on the web and get your news from anywhere on the planet, whether it's BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera -- or a blogger down the street who goes to every city council meeting.
And according to the State of the Media 2011 report, most news is already local, with that trend only accelerating.
Most newspapers, television stations and radio make their bread and butter from local advertisers. That trend is moving to online ads, too. The State of the Media report says local online ad spending was 30 percent the year before and has now jumped to 40 percent.
This trend builds upon the wave of people getting local news on mobile devices.
News is becoming hyper-local. That trend will be a challenge and an opportunity.
For public relations, the trend toward hyper-local news means doing things a bit differently. Now more than ever, it's worth taking some time to localize anything you're doing, tailoring it to different states and cities and audiences.
Every movie, for example, is a huge production. The actors and directors go on a media blitz to promote movies, and that's expected. It'd be smart to look at the army of people it takes to make that movie -- the screenwriters and special effects artists, everybody -- and find out their hometowns.
Each person who worked on the film is a story and a connection to their hometown, a place the stars of the movie very likely will never have a chance to visit. It gives the local press a natural hook.
That kind of story is also different. We typically hear all about the actors and directors. I don't know much about the guys who do CGI to make dinosaurs and aliens come to life on the screen. If one of those people was from my hometown, I'd read the story.
There are other ways to localize stories. With any product, idea or event, a natural question is, How will this affect my family and my neighbors?
A non-profit doing a PR campaign to promote recycling might find out how many pounds of trash got generated in a state by city or county. That kind of number gives every local newspaper, radio station and TV station a local hook, a reason to run it. If you went with a statewide number, you'd be making it harder for them to make it matter to their audience.
How can you make what you do more localized? It's a question worth asking, and something we'll all be doing more off as the news business becomes more fragmented and hyper-local.