How a graduate field course got national press for being hands-on.
A multi-agency disaster simulation at Florida International University — the largest such drill in the state — translated into a press release that reporters actually picked up. CBS News Miami ran it. Regional outlets syndicated it. The trick wasn't the program; the program was already extraordinary. The trick was making that obvious to a general-audience reporter in the first 90 seconds of reading.
The challenge
FIU's Robert Stempel College runs a hands-on graduate program in disaster management. Each year, students participate in a multi-agency disaster simulation alongside police, fire, EMS, and public health partners. The program is unusual; the scale is real; the academic value is obvious to anyone inside the field.
The communications challenge was the gap between "obvious to anyone inside the field" and "compelling to a general-audience reporter." Most university press releases about graduate programs read like curriculum descriptions — accurate and ignorable. This one needed to do better.
The approach
Lead with what's visible. Students in the field. Real partner agencies. The largest drill in the state. Not "the multi-disciplinary curriculum component."
Name the partners. Multi-agency coordination is how reporters validate a story is real. Listing the police, fire, EMS, and public health agencies that participated meant CBS News Miami didn't have to do their own legwork to verify the scale — the verification was in the release.
Make the visual assets ready before pitching. Reporters asking for photos and B-roll mid-deadline are reporters who don't run the story. Photos and footage from the drill were prepared and available alongside the release.
The result
CBS News Miami picked it up. The release ran in FIU News and was syndicated through regional outlets, including CBS News Miami.
The CBS pickup mattered for two reasons. First, it placed FIU's program in front of a general audience that wouldn't read FIU News directly. Second, it created a citable third-party validator that the program could reference in subsequent recruiting, donor, and partner communications. Earned coverage compounds in ways that owned channels don't.
Why it worked
- The "largest in the state" hook was concrete. Comparative claims like "leading" or "innovative" don't pass a reporter's smell test. "Largest in the state" is specific and verifiable.
- The press release respected reporters' time. The lede told them what was visible, who was involved, and why it mattered — in that order. The academic detail came later.
- Multi-agency partners gave the story external validation. When a story is "FIU says," it's marketing. When a story is "FIU plus six agencies say," it's coverage.
"Most university press releases about graduate programs read like curriculum descriptions — accurate and ignorable. This one needed to do better."
What this kind of work looks like for higher-ed comms teams
If you are leading communications at a university, school, or research institution and trying to get general-audience coverage for academic programs that genuinely deserve it, the playbook is portable: a concrete hook, named external partners, visual assets ready before you pitch. The trade-off is in the work — pre-pitching specific reporters before broad distribution, building agency relationships that survive past one release, knowing which outlets need photos and which can shoot their own. None of that scales by itself. It scales by being done deliberately, on every release.
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