Tier-2 Media Doesn’t Exist

The communications industry should permanently drop the term ‘Tier-2 media’. It is meaningless, disrespects great publications along with their audiences and it undervalues the role of individual journalists.

If I asked us for a list of ‘the Tier 1s’ in the Australian market, chances are we’d all come up with the same list of names. Which begs the question, why? What groups them together?

Recently I challenged a private support group of independently minded PRs with deep experience in the industry whom I greatly respect, “What is the definition of Tier-2”. None of them could provide an answer, but they all preferred the term “industry media”.

There are some attempts to categorise Tier-1 and Tier-2 out there. Is the publication ‘national’? Do they have ‘multiple avenues to market,’ such as print and broadcast? Is the ‘total audience’ above 100,000, one million?

None of these definitions make sense in a digital age. All publications are national; international in fact. We’d be hard-pressed to find a small publisher that doesn’t have multiple avenues to market between online, social media, podcasting and video.

Even the total audience figure is wobbly. Strong paywalls indicate the audience places a premium on quality content. Fuck your total audience figure. Does the reader value the publication? Do they believe your journalists? Does your publication motivate business outcomes?

The frustrated industry media editor

Here’s a story for you. A PR sends an embargoed press release to a broad swath of business and consumer ‘Tier-1s’. Only the business papers show any interest. The morning the story goes live, the PR receives an early morning phone call from a frustrated editor at a respectable, well resourced, so-called Tier-2 publisher that covers this theme all the time.

“Oh, we’re not sending this press release to Tier-2 publications,” the PR offers as an excuse. That’s a direct quote relayed to me with depressing resignation by a publisher I greatly admire. The PR was told to go fuck themselves. And so they should be.

This is standard operating procedure for countless PR plans. Why? Why would you prioritise occasionally interested Tier-1 organisations over always interested Tier-2s?

When challenged on this, PRs will argue a Tier-1 organisation could be turned off a story if Tier-2 media organisations have equal access.

I’ve definitely watched stories receive less coverage than expected and speculated that it might, might, have been because the Tier-1 wanted a point of difference that day over Tier-2 competitors. At the same time, before I left journalism for PR I was yelled at countless times by my editors for failing to cover a story our Tier-2 competitors had that day.

Not all Tier-1s are equal

Like with Tier-1 media, the thing about industry press is, they are not all equal.

Yes, there are some industry media publishers that are either poorly run, have not identified a strong enough beat to build into a business model, or both. Others are exceptional.

In fact, the depth of coverage means many industry media publications cover stories the mainstream media doesn’t, perhaps can’t. We’ve all heard the throwaway line, “Oh, that’s not Tier-1, that’s an industry media story.” That means there are messages we cannot reliably get to market without industry media.

Sorry, why are they referred to as Tier-2 again? Shouldn’t these people be our number one?

Consider this. Would we read an opinion like this anywhere in a Tier-1 publication? What does that say about our relationship to industry media?

Journalists have their own brands

The final weakness in the Tier-1 vs industry media battle is individual journalists have their own brands and influence within publications.

Yes, publishers have their own brand and that needs to be respected in our media strategies. But individual journalists have varying levels of influence based on their own relationship with the audience. Not all Tier-1s are equal, not all journalists within a Tier-1 are equal and some Tier-2s can kick the sh*t out of Tier-1s on the right day.

Failing to take this into account gives well resourced media organisations a free kick they don’t need, underestimates dedicated industry publications that PRs need more than they’d like to admit, and undersells the role of individual journalists that clients need to understand.