Freelance Media Relations Specialist: Two Breaking Stories, One Christmas Flight (Remote), Peace 2000 Earthchild

Two ready-made stories, both launching now. We are hiring experienced media relations freelancers and former journalists, one per market, to place them with the biggest national and international media.

Story 1: “Where is Santa’s money?”

€149,000 belonging to a children’s charity was stolen and ended up at a regulated London payments firm. The firm has accounted for 82 pence. When asked where the rest went, it filed a €475,000 claim to stop the charity naming it. Most of the money was guests’ accommodation payments at the charity’s Peace Center in Reykjavik, collected by Booking.com, which told the world in April that no financial information had been accessed. On 5 October the Dutch central bank set a €849,600 fine for the firm’s Dutch subsidiary over failures in its anti-money laundering checks. The founder, who founded Iceland’s first credit card company, is on the record and the full evidence is in one book.

Story 2: Help Santa fly to Kyiv

This Christmas Eve, Santa flies to Kyiv, the first Santa flight into the city since its airspace closed. From now until Christmas Eve, children around the world send a gift and a personal message to a child in a war zone. Every gift lights up the sender’s home town on a live World Peace Map, ending in a live flight and an illuminated truck convoy.

What You’ll Do

• Take Story 1 straight to the biggest national and international outlets and negotiate an exclusive with one major outlet before it goes anywhere else
• Give senior editors and reporters at those outlets private access to the book
• Launch Story 2 now and run it to Christmas Eve: broadcast, features, lifestyle
• Handle all pitching and follow-ups; bring the founder in once a reporter commits
• Send a short daily report

What We’re Looking For:

• Direct relationships with editors, desk heads or senior reporters at major national outlets
• A record of placing exclusives
• Speed

Full Campaign Brief (PDF):

About Peace 2000 Earthchild

A humanitarian charity founded in Iceland in 1995. When the skies were closed to regular flights, it found a way to fly Santa in: gifts into besieged Sarajevo from Iceland and London Stansted, and medical supplies and toys into Baghdad on Christmas Eve 1997 under special permission of the UN Security Council. It also flew critically ill children from Chernobyl to Ireland for heart surgery. Its founder presented a peace plan to President Clinton in Washington in 1996.