Over the past two weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people who want to do communications and marketing for nature protection and pollution control organizations. In these conversations, we wrestle with a challenge: Traditional news media is still dominant, and online social media is still nascent, yet all signs point to this reversing in not so distant future. So how do we get the word out about nature protection and pollution control today, and also acquire the skills we need to get the word out tomorrow?

This morning I came across some interesting research that suggests that blogging and other new media techniques are an effective way to get your message out to traditional news reporters. In 2007, TEKgroup International surveyed a bunch of reporters and found:

• 70% of journalists read at least one blog regularly 
• 25% of journalists read five or more blogs to keep on top of their beat
• 37% receive at least one regular RSS feeds
• 16% receive five or more RSS feeds

These numbers are higher than the adult popultation as a whole, and they will surely grow.

My takeaway from this study was that nature protection and pollution control can take up blogging and other new media activities with the expectation that journalists will cover their issue will be among the first to check out their work.

Try it, you might like it!