Maybe people could try personal stories with local media as this appears to be working in Scotland?
I would very much encourage this, with the only comment to add that local news will want to focus on the local person and therefore are likely to want to have a photo alongside your story.
As an example. Currently, in my life outside the ME bubble, we are fighting against enormous flat repair bills that our maintenance company are trying to pass on to us, in the region of £30k+ per flat, despite the fact that it was their lack of maintenance that led to this state. We leaseholders have had quite some success in getting into the local media, by presenting the people affected by this issue, but every story they have run has been accompanied by a picture of one of us. It's taken time but the story has started to seep into the awareness of regional news as well now.
I think there could well be a lot of mileage in trying to spread out collective ME story locally, the drawback can be that it comes down to fewer individuals, whereas a national effort can tend to spread the load wider.
@emsho , once you have had the chance to recover from your recent efforts, could we ask you to try and distil what steps you took to achieve your success into a number of bullet points? Where we have success, we need to try and learn as much as possible from it.