Media Relations, Built on Relationships With the Journalists Who Matter

They overlap, but they are not the same. Public relations is the broad strategic discipline — managing an organisation’s reputation, profile and positioning across all of its audiences. Media relations is the focused craft within it: building relationships with journalists and securing earned coverage in target outlets. If public relations is the strategy for how an organisation is understood, media relations is the engine that gets the story into the press. Lantern Comitas offers both — see our Public Relations practice for the broader strategic work — but this page is about the placement craft specifically: the relationships and the coverage.

Yes — and it is the point of the practice. Our advisors are former foreign correspondents and senior editors who worked at and with the outlets clients want to appear in, across both the tier-one global press (FT, WSJ, BBC, Reuters, Bloomberg, Sky News, The Guardian) and the African media that shape opinion on the ground. Media relations is a relationships business; the relationships are what we bring.

Yes — this is one of the most differentiated parts of the practice. Most London media-relations firms serve the global tier-one press but lack genuine African media relationships. Our case work proves both: 26 pieces of Ghanaian coverage for AWS across MyJoyOnline, Citinewsroom and Ghanaweb; a 300% coverage lift for the Laikipia Conservancies Association including Kenya’s Daily Nation; more than 1,000 news reports for Heifer Africa across the continent; and a tier-one global break for the Loisaba rhino translocation. The global-to-African media corridor is the rare combination we exist to serve.

It depends entirely on the story, the angle and the audience — credible media relations never promises specific outlets in advance, because earning coverage means a journalist judging the story worth running. What we can say is that our relationships span the tier-one global business, financial and general press and the African continental media, and that our advisors know which outlets and journalists are right for which stories. The trust strip on this page reflects the calibre of media our clients’ stories have reached.

Yes. A reliable press-office function — managing inbound journalist enquiries, responding at the speed newsrooms work to, and being the available, credible point of contact — is part of the practice. Being trusted and responsive when journalists come to you is what keeps an organisation in their contact books for when you go to them.

Yes — embargo and exclusive management is a core capability. The Loisaba rhino translocation is a worked example: a strict embargo held cleanly across governments, communities, donors and global media partners, with the story breaking simultaneously worldwide on embargo lift. Coordinated launches, multi-territory timing and exclusives are how a single moment is turned into sustained, high-quality coverage.

On coverage, not activity. We track the volume, reach, quality and share of voice of the coverage secured — which outlets, which journalists, what audience, and how the organisation’s framing landed versus everyone else’s. Sending a hundred press releases is activity; getting the right story into the right outlet, read by the right audience, is the result. We measure the result.