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.