Check The Week Ahead Guides For PR Pic Chances

On July 12 1916 a Great White shark in New Jersey killed two swimmers and maimed one other.

Those were the attacks on which the book, and later film, Jaws are based.

For newspapers, you’d think this would be a great picture opportunity of a gruesome man-eating monster.

Actually, the New York Times story that day, looked like this:

There was no picture at all, just dense text.

Nowadays even the stuffiest broadsheet would go to town with about as many scary pictures as it could justify.

That demand for eye-catching pictures definitely extends to the business pages and increasingly so.

If someone floated a shark-killing firm on AIM, we’d illustrate it just as you’d expect.

But getting glamourous or exciting pics for business stories is harder and the resources attached to taking our own original shots are squeezed.

I think the PR industry misses an opportunity here, partly because it doesn’t target the pictures for the right days or right publications.

Today, for example, we had M&S results. That’s an obvious chance for a glamorous fashion shot – picture problem solved.

Typically, I got offered two really good pic related stories embargoed strictly for use today – perhaps the only time this week I didn’t need them.

If the pics had been offered for tomorrow, when the top story is likely to be the latest GDP figures, I’d have bitten your hand off, shark-like.

My suggestion is that flaks make a closer study of the Week Ahead guides that appear in The Telegraph and The Times every Monday. IG and Kantar also do Week Aheads, as do others.

They ought to give you a good clue to which days we might be thankful for a good pic and which days are plainly taken care of.