Media Lists as Free Lunch

I'm not going to talk about food in this post, though I'm pretty hungry so that could explain why I find the "Free Lunch" portion of the title so provocative. No, I'm going to talk about an idea whose business model is so bad, so seemingly flawed as to reduce a Harvard Business School professor to tears, that only someone who's used to connecting with people for free over Twitter, Facebook, etc. could think it interesting: a free media list for nascent nonprofits.

Note: different places may call them different things, but where I work, "media lists" are lists of reporters who write articles relevant to the work our nonprofit does. They are the ones we send press releases to. I just use "media lists" as a shorthand for email distribution lists of germane reporters.

I know what you're going to say: we live in a capitalist society and everyone (as this PC World article notes re: the brain trust at Twitter) expects some sort of return on investment. But aren't nonprofits supposed to be just that: not particularly obsessed with making tons of money? A simple Google search for "free media lists for nonprofits" yields zero relevant hits. I get it. Who wants to spend tons of time compiling media lists only to just turn them over to the dark void of the intertubes without any compensation?

It's a tough one. Maybe you could tie advertising in with it somehow? I'll have to get my Old Man Potter on and try to figure it out. But here's a case in point: I'm volunteering to be the media relations manager for a brand new nonprofit called First(,) Aid Water. They will be placing water filters in developing nations in order to bring clean water to populations who wouldn't otherwise have it. Since they're new, they don't have much moolah to spend (i.e. they'll not be subscribing to any news distribution outlets). How nice would it be, then, to hop online and find a ready-made media list of reporters chomping at the bit to cover emerging nonprofits?

I don't want to sound lazy, because I'm happy to do the legwork (I'm not into just spamming a couple of hundred reporters so that one or two will give me a blurb). It's just that, with reporters' jobs being about as secure as a glass-blowing studio on the San Andreas fault, it would be nice to have someone updating reporters' contact info and keeping track of what beats they're working in their new gigs. Heck, maybe reporters would even pay for this service, especially with so many of them freelancing it these days.

Obviously this is a dream, but one that would save a lot of nonprofit PR folks a lot of headaches. Maybe there is some permutation of this idea in existence, but if so, I haven't found it. As Tavis Smiley always says, I need to "keep the faith."

When Whales Attack!

There’s a great post over at the Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf talking about how books (especially political books) with inflammatory titles are all the rage these days. It is an annoying practice, in my opinion, particularly when liberal writers slap hyperbolic titles on books in which they rail against inflammatory language used by the right. At the end of his post, Friedersdorf says, and I’m paraphrasing, that soon, publishing houses will start re-releasing classic books with updated, unhinged titles to get the book-buying public all stirred up.

And that got me thinking.

What would some of those titles be? A short list of classic fiction books came to mind that feature subdued titles. A list:

1.) "Moby Dick" would become “When Whales ATTACK!!!”

2.) "One Hundred Years of Solitude" would be "The Fall of the House of Jose Aureliano, Aureliano Jose, Jose Aurelanio Buendia, and Like Three Remidioses"

I could go like this all day. Ah, Fridays.

Hearing (Persuasive) Voices

This post is a little beyond the normal purview of this blog, but I just had an idea. It's an idea that I'm sure at least ten billion other people have already had, so I'm not saying it's unique. More than a brainstorm, though, it's probably more a commentary on the highly-calibrated consumer society in which we live. Someone near my desk, I don't know who, just got a call. Apparently they didn't want to talk to the caller, and also, it seems, they didn't know how to activate the "silence" feature on the phone, because it kept ringing and ringing. But the ring was no normal ring: no, their cell phone blasted out a jazzy percussion-y song as loud as if I was standing in a two-car garage and the Boston Philharmonic was there playing their guts out.

We're talking loud.

And it got me to thinking...someday I'll bet companies find a way to allure people into uploading their marketing slogans as ringtones. Something like, "Fifteen minutes or less could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance" would be piped through, sung by Robin Thicke accompanied by a smooth jazz baseline. Or something. Over and over, Thicke would croon his pitch as adoring teenage girls let their calls go into voicemail, not wanting to interrupt his syrupy lyrics. Wait: is Robin Thicke still popular with teenage girls? I don't know. Point is: someone will figure out how to do this.

The notion reminds me of a creepy story I once read by George Saunders in his book of short stories "In Persuasion Nation" (I can't remember the title off the top of my head, but it might be "My Flamboyant Grandson"). In the story, an older man is assailed by all sorts of different advertising images as he takes his grandson to see a musical in the city. As he walks past an endless string of storefronts, a microchip in his shoe triggers holograms and aural announcements directing him to buy all manner of products. It's a not-too-distant-future look at how our consumer culture, unchecked, could wall us off in a prison of zany advertisements.

On second thought, let's keep the whole ringtone thing between you and me. I don't want it falling into the wrong hands.

Media List, Schmedia List

Have you been asked to compile a media email distribution list in the past, oh, say five years? Are you tired of getting fifty bounce-backs from a list of 55 reporters? If so, you'll understand how pointless the whole enterprise seems. In this era of newspapers and magazines shuttering in the face of a hurricane of bloggers, it's ever harder to depend on journalists remaining at the same publication from year-to-year.

Listen, I don't begrudge writers moving on to make a living, it only makes sense, but it sure makes compiling media lists an uphill battle. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, it reminds me of a dream I used to have as a kid: some unspeakably horrible black vortexy cloud would be pursuing me, chewing up the very ground beneath me, and I'd be trying to run away, but I seemed bogged down in one place, unable to move forward.

This is what compiling a media list feels like.

That's probably why I don't have that dream anymore: I already live the waking vortex nightmare of being asked to put lists together, so my subconscious is off the hook. I wish either A.) reporters were more in the habit of giving out personal email addresses (the gmail's and yahoo's of the world) or B.) that more newsrooms would assign their writers generic email addresses so that they can be used by the next writer who comes down the pike. Or does that seem like a death sentence from day 1 to be assigned such a Stepford Wives email address?

I know in this era of Facebook, everyone wants to have that warm toasty feeling of knowing the person they're emailing on some intimate-ish level, so I guess for those warm/fuzzy types, they like email addresses that make use of some part of their contact's name. But really, this practice has to end. Think of all those hours wasted researching the newest health beat reporter at Super Action News 8 that could've been used more productively.

Hopefully some publishing baron is reading this as we speak and will decide to change the paradigm.

Pitching to Reporters

Hi all, this is my first post of what I hope to be many on the field of public relations. I've been working in the field for a few years now, and feel I've accumulated enough experience to merit a humble blog. Not that I'll be commenting about what I do at my day job - I believe in a separation of church and state. No, I'll mainly be commenting on trends I see in the PR world. In the interest of full disclosure, I have a background in nonprofits, so much of what I say will be filtered through that lens.

For my inaugural post, I figured I'd tackle a discussion that's got one of my LinkedIn PR groups all a-twitter: what is the best way to pitch stories to reporters? As the guy who started the discussion notes, it used to be industry standard (in days of Charlemagne) to take reporters one hoped to develop as resources out to coffee(!) or dinner (why does this conjure images of Don Draper in my mind?) to introduce themselves.

That was before my time. I can't possibly imagine that, given the constraints on journalists' time (and I agree with the moderator on this one), any reporter would be open to this sort of face-to-face meet-up. I'm guessing that even if you'd planned to rob a bank together, the reporter would much rather rob it over Skype than waste time coming in person. The moderator asks, basically, given this landscape of crushing deadlines and scaled-back newsrooms, should we as PR folks actually even cold-call reporters? Or does email work better?

As many of the commenters to the thread mentioned, this is a tough call. Since everyone is inundated with email, it seems like an email pitch to a reporter might get lost in the shuffle. But, as I've noticed when dialing up reporters, often times, all you get is their voicemail. So what's the answer? Something I didn't see mentioned in the thread is the notion of an effective subject line. And by "effective", I mean Ninja-efficient, a gleaming throwing star that tears to the marrow of the matter. I've been trained to treat email subject lines like the Ark of the Covenant: objects of mystical beauty that, if handled incorrectly, could melt your face off.

If a reporter sees an overly-wordy subject line, i.e. one that contains too many prepositions or a cavalcade of syllables, they'll click "delete". I'm not going to launch into a clinic on how to write the perfect subject line because, like ultimate nirvana, most of us will only catch fleeting glimpses of it now and then. I'm no expert. But I do know that a solid subject line that contains "hot" or "topical" words important to journalists in a given field will at least get you a look.

Also (and please feel free to insert a "duh" here), only pitch to journalists who have written about whatever type of story it is you're pitching. This is one of those things that seems simple but requires legwork. When I first started out, I used to send out queries to anyone and everyone who had ever typed the word "health", it seemed. Embarrassingly, I even once added Malcolm Gladwell to an email distribution list before quickly deleting him at my boss' behest; somehow or other, I'd managed not to know who Gladwell was. Yes, I was an outlier.

Of course, once you've established a relationship with a reporter, it's best to call them because just like regular human beings everywhere, reporters don't like getting little bits and pieces of information in email after scanty email, which can, by our nature as professional multi-taskers, mean that emails are spaced apart by hours. Get them on the phone so they can ask you as many questions as they like.

But cold-calling reporters? In my experience, you'd have better luck getting Bruce Banner into an anger management class taught by Lex Luthor than coaxing a reporter out of the blue to cover your story by cold-calling them.