How can you get the best out of PR meetings?

Avoid death by generic PowerPoint with these five key questions

Hands up if you’ve attended a networking event and found yourself sitting politely as a PR takes you slide by slide through a generic PowerPoint — with little relevance to your beat — and the end-of-meeting bell sounds, you realise you’ve taken zero notes and come away with nothing useful. I have, on far more occasions than I’d like to admit.

Meeting with PRs shouldn’t be like this, even though it seems an unfortunate rite of passage to work out how to sit through these meetings graciously, pretending to be engaged. But the most important skill is learning how to steer these conversations away from the mundanities of the pre-prepared presentation to something tangible you can use to pitch to an editor and plan a press trip around.

Let me be clear: there are plenty of excellent PRs who wouldn’t dream of doing the above and who are integral to helping us spark brilliant story ideas. But, if the meetings I’ve sat through over the past eight years are anything to go by, there are plenty more who need our help to lead the conversation.

When they do, I’ve started approaching meetings with the following questions.