How to Get Featured in Budget Coverage
Chancellor’s Budget: Insider tips from Bloomberg’s Joe Mayes
It brings me great joy to hand over this edition of Off the Record to Joe Mayes, one of the loveliest people in journalism. He is Bloomberg’s UK political reporter and the bestselling author of “Can You Run The Economy?”. Having read his book recently, it gives me no joy to admit I certainly couldn’t do it...but that’s maybe for an edition another day)!
With the Chancellor’s budget fast approaching, Joe has shared his insider advice for comms pros looking to land their clients in coverage. He spills the beans on everything from how to catch a journalist’s eye before the big day on 26 November to what makes post-budget commentary stand out from the noise.
So, over to Joe!
What can comms pros can do in the run-up to a Chancellor’s budget to make you more likely to include their client/organisation in coverage? Be completely up to speed on what budget measures are likely in scope for your sector/client, and proactively offer top-quality insight and commentary on those measures. Best of all, if your client/organisation has picked up any signals on potential government action from their interactions with officials, and those can be shared privately, that will certainly grab my attention!
What makes reaction to the Chancellor’s budget stand out from the flood of commentary on the day itself? Punchy, clear quotes that take a strong view. Keep those comments short and sweet. Wow me with your boldness and brevity.
If you were advising a comms team on budget-day strategy, what would you tell them to prioritise? Being fast out of the blocks with quality, punchy commentary on the big decisions made in your sector/field. Journalists are under pressure to file their pieces soon after the Chancellor sits down, so the quicker you can provide a memorable quote or two, the better the chance of inclusion!
What kinds of economic or business stories do you think will dominate this year’s budget coverage? Tax rises will dominate, because Rachel Reeves has such a big hole to fill in the public finances. There’ll be lots to say about the fairness of those tax rises, their impact on household incomes, and also how they’ll affect economic growth. Areas I anticipate we’ll see tax changes include on the gambling sector, banks, property, the wealthy and pensions.
What opportunities exist for businesses or experts to stay in the media cycle after the initial budget headlines die down? The best chance of ongoing coverage after the budget will be if one of Reeves’s measures “unravels” and a business or expert is able to contribute to the debate around that unravelling up to the point of the dreaded U-turn. Beyond that, I think it’s just standard good comms strategy: be quick, relevant, unique and helpful to a journalist on wherever the economic story goes post-budget for Reeves.
Are you still looking for fresh takes in the days following the budget or is the window very short? The budget and all its ancillary documents are dense and long, so I expect there’ll still be things to uncover and discuss in the days following. If your client/organisation is able to talk authoritatively about one of those issues – or even better, alert a journalist to a juicy detail in the small print they may have overlooked – then the chances for coverage increase greatly.
Quick fire time...
Best time to pitch you? Between 8am and 11am.
Worst time to pitch you? After 3pm.
Best place to contact you? jmayes9@bloomberg.net
Joe is the author of “Can You Run The Economy?”, a choose-your-own-adventure where you take on the role of Chancellor, tasked with delivering a budget and winning an upcoming general election. A #1 Amazon bestseller, it’s available in all good bookstores. You can also buy it here.
Remember folks, keep this just between us! We’re off the record.
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