

How to Pitch a Journalist Successfully - agranzel
http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/finding-your-voice-with-the-media-how-to-pitch-a-journalist/

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klint
Most PR is not news. Writers for daily papers and blogs may run something they
know isn't news to meet a quota (I've been in that situation), but the best
way to pitch us is to give us something that's actually news.

My advice:

1) We're not all the same, no one can speak for all journalists.

2) Edward Bernays, a spin doctor so good he convinced the world that he
invented PR, told Stewart Ewen that the job of PR is to instruct clients on
how to "just interrupt... the continuity of life in some way to bring about
the [media] response" (Ewen's book _PR: A Social History of Spin_ ) In other
words, your job is making news. Easier said than done, but worth keeping in
mind.

3) Read William Zinsser's book _On Writing Well_ and apply it to all your
communications. Specifically, write what you mean as simply as you can. Look
at this for an example of what not to do:
[http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/edward-norton-and-daria-
wer...](http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/edward-norton-and-daria-werbow.html)

What does that Norton quote actually say? "I liked working with these
companies." That's not revealing or funny or interesting. The vast majority of
executive quotes I see in press releases are like this. All they really say is
"We think we have a good product." _Yawn_

4) Speaking of which, we hate quoting from press releases. Get someone
important, like the CEO or CTO, to write a blog post that we can quote from.

5) I'm pretty technical for a journalist, but don't assume even the most
technical of us are going to be able to decipher your string of buzzwords and
jargon. Knowing what each word means individually doesn't mean we'll know what
they mean when you use three or four of them together as a noun. Keep it
simple.

6) Think about your subject line as a headline. Why would a reader read want
to read your story? If a reader would want to read it, I as a journalist will
want to read your e-mail. I get too many e-mails that just say "News from
[some company I've never heard of]" or "big data announcement, time to talk?"
I'd also throw a specific date into the subject line. Examples: "New open
source operating system launches Tuesday" or "Data Released Today Shows
MindFuck is the Fastest Growing Programming Language on the Web."

6) Even tech blogs want people stories. If you're stumped on how to pitch
something in an interesting way, think about people. Things like ERP and tape
backup are inherently boring. Find a fresh human angle. "How a big customer
avoiding disaster with our solution" is a boring story. "How Dr. Steve Made a
Medical Breakthrough by Studying Archival Data" or "How an Average Jane Worker
Catapulted Her Career with a Simple Manufacturing Process Tweak" could be
interesting stories.

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parka
I'm a journalist, not a tech journalist though.

We write for the readers.

Some pointers.

1\. Use the Who, What, When, Where and How. Who are you. What do you want.
When is it happening. These are the three most important points to get across.

2\. Press releases are usually technical jargon that makes no sense to
readers. Explain what your product and service to help the readers. E.g. iPod
can hold 1000 songs, not 10gb of songs.

3\. Think of the readers and pitch it such that your story will be exciting to
the readers.

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inthewoods
I think it's important to remember what journalists are looking for - a story.
I've had journalists basically admit to me that they don't have time to put
together all the stories that they need, so they look for interesting stories
that are easy to understand. A common problem that we had early on was that
the media didn't understand our data - so we worked to refine the story down
to a simple sentence that just about anyone could understand - and we tested
it with people outside our company.

I think the problem with most PR is that it isn't a compelling story - but the
people go to the trouble of doing a full PR release (including throwing it on
the wires) for something that really isn't news and will never get covered.
For items like that, the blog is a perfect outlet combined with social
outreach.

In my opinion, it is also worth measuring the impact of your PR - not by
number of article placements, but with a brand awareness survey of your target
buyers. Yes, it costs money, but you can do it these days for a surprisingly
low amount of money (like $1000). This can give you a benchmark for brand
awareness among your target buyers and you can then measure the impact over
time.

Finally, I think the reason to hire a PR person is because they have the
relationships with the media outlets that you target. Yes, they can help with
messaging, etc - but at the end of the day it's about whether or not they can
pick up the phone and call XXX and have them take their call. Not something
for all startups naturally - and as @brackin said at the top, developing those
relationships yourself is very powerful.

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brackin
Make relationships, it's simple as. You can very easily do this on Twitter but
it's similar to investors in the sense that they won't pick up on you without
an intro or building a prior relationship.

To get the most out of journalists at events you have to do your research. I
went to TC Disrupt and got almost no press at all but did start some
relationships. Six months later I went to LeWeb and prepared and was able to
get an interview on the Wall Street Journal, TNW, Huffington Post, France 24
TV (CNN of France) and many other publications.

All I did was research who was going to be there and emailed them telling them
about me and my startup. They then lined me up as a target to interview rather
than me having to follow them. If their editor already knows about you before
they go filming then you have a better chance as the editor has the real
control, if they like what you've said in the email or call then the chances
are they'll be wanting to get a lot from you as they think it'll be used.

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CurtMonash
This is appalling pabulum. It has no more to do with pitching a journalist
successfully than wearing nice clothing to the interview has to do with
getting a job.

Every pitch should have dual goals:

1\. Ideally, you'd like to get covered. 2\. Absent that, you'd like to
increase the likelihood of getting covered in the future.

So you should think of your pitch as being more about making your company look
worth writing about. In particular, don't breathlessly oversell a minor piece
of news.

If you're a native English speaker, you should strongly consider going without
a PR firm altogether. They're the sort of outfit who follow the cookie-cutter
advice in the post linked here and think they're adding value. They also are
very bad, with few exceptions, at finding credible ways to make you sound
unique.

~~~
CurtMonash
Here's a link with some of the reasons for my opinion:

[http://www.strategicmessaging.com/five-kinds-of-public-
relat...](http://www.strategicmessaging.com/five-kinds-of-public-
relations/2010/02/28/)

(First time I've posted a link to Hacker News. I'm curious to see what happens
...)

~~~
Mz
You can do an after action report tomorrow. I would like to see it, especially
if it doesn't involve 10k hits. I think only the crazy stuff gets reported and
it skews public perception of what it means to post a link here. My links
never get anywhere near the traffic that gets reported around here until
people seem to think that kind of hype is the norm.

------
derrida
The thing to consider about a press release is it's a way that other
journalists know every other journalist has gotten the news, and thus, is a
way to guarantee that not many people will write about you (journalists are
driven by the scoop). If what you have is actually 'news' and not just
propaganda, give an exclusive to someone at a major daily. That beats a press
release. Don't worry that the story they write hasn't got your contact
details, the best journalists are like hackers, they can get any information
they want. So the people that call you the day the story has run (and for this
you must fit with the journalists schedule and resist talking early) will be a
selection of the best and most interested journalists.

~~~
klint
This works, but as I journalist I'd like to add that we hate being scooped and
we hate hearing about news for the first time on a competitors site.

An alternative approach would be to give one publication an exclusive, and
then as soon as the story runs send out the copy of a blog post from someone
within the company (preferably a founder or the CTO, assuming it's a tech
company) to journalists and say "we're going to run this on the company blog
in an hour, but feel free to run a story with quotes from it now." That way we
have something other than the competitors' story to quote from and we don't
feel totally shutout.

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wiradikusuma
Asking it here instead of commenting in the blog for more eyeballs:

1\. The (only) media covering startups for my target market happens to be
funded by the same investor and in the same company group with the startup I'm
competing with. How to deal with this?

2\. How to deal the case where you get reply from more than one media near
simultaneously (after you BCC-spam them). Promising each of them "exclusive
info" seems weird right? Should you honestly reply the rest, "Sorry folks, one
media already replied."?

~~~
CurtMonash
1\. One journalist at a time. Journalists often have very different integrity
and biases than their employers.

2\. I don't understand why you think you need to offer exclusives at all. So I
don't really understand the question.

------
techjournalist
It's really not that hard. If the news is actually interesting to me - I
assume (that if i'm a reflection of my readers) it will be interesting to
them.

Basic product pitches, 500 words context setting shit and partnership stuff is
often not interesting. Something i've never heard of before, something that
will improve the way I work and live - that's what I crave.

Pitch me on that - and I'll write.

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danielhunt
Is it just me, or is this title missing a 'to'?

How to pitch a journalist - surely I can't be the only one thinking that this
contains instructions on how best to throw a journalist 10 meters in any
direction...

I've noticed this quite a bit in American posts - words clearly missing, but
no one cares

~~~
derrida
The English language is a flexible thing. Some think that "y'all" is not
'proper', but name another single word second person collective pronoun in
English. Some English in America also has "write me" instead of "write to me".

~~~
ballooney
I sympathise with Daniel Hunt in my heart though I rationally see where you're
coming from. If I were to give a nice blank canvas as a gift to a child and
they were to smear excrement all over it, in my gut I'd be annoyed but I could
probably be talked around to the idea that it's a valid form of self-
expression, even if it's not my cup of tea.

However, saying "I could care less" when you mean "I could not care less".
There is no justification for such a heinous crime. Murderers can be
rehabilitated, electro-convulsive therapy can take care of all manor of
criminal perversions, so save your death penalty for when it is really in the
public interest. For the unconvinced, the Guardian newspaper made a little
video:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/la...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/language-
usa)

------
jagermo
few pointers: Never, and I mean, never ever, call a journalist after you sent
them your news and ask them if they got your mail and when they will write
about it. It's a sure way to get you blacklisted. Target your mail. A tech-
blog needs other information than a local newspaper. Set up a page with
pictures and link to them.

And: Get a professional PR person. You might be good, but if you let your pr
be handled by "guy x in marketing" then you are no better than those companies
who let their IT be handled by "my sisters brother, he really knows his way
around the internet".

~~~
CurtMonash
Your fist paragraph is good. The second one, as stated in my own comment to
the main, I vigorously disagree with.

~~~
klint
I can't say what the best long term strategy is, but I can say that as a tech
journalist I almost always prefer to hear from someone involved in a company
rather than a PR firm. But hiring a full-time internal PR person isn't the
same thing as hiring an agency.

As inthewoods wrote, the reason for hiring a PR person is for their contacts.
Agencies will make a lot of claims about how many contacts they have, but I've
heard they'll often stick low-priority accounts with junior PR people or even
interns (and the quality of pitches and press releases I've seen from well
known agencies about unknown companies seems to confirm this).

Jagermo wrote: "i get a lot of mails from marketing people who think they know
what journalists want. Most of them do not."

I get a lot of e-mails from PR people who think they know what I want, and few
do. I get a lot of the same from marketing, but a lot of journalists end up in
PR or marketing at some point in their careers and they often do know what
other journalists want. Some people just seem to get it, whether they've been
journalists or not, and some don't. I imagine it's easier to keep track on
who's doing what and how good they're doing if they're internal and not
outsourced to an agency, but I wouldn't know.

FWIW, some of the best pitches for startups I've gotten have come from
investors.

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wilfra
Bookmarked! Great work. Thanks.

I'll add one thing that I've found so far:

They can take a long time to respond. One site got back to us several weeks
later. A few days or more is very common.

Of course no response at all is by far the most common result, but just
because they don't respond within a day or two doesn't mean they aren't
interested. They get a TON of emails...

~~~
jagermo
excatly. And it does not mean, that a journalist doesn't notice you. If a
similar story comes up, he might remember your mail and call you up out of the
blue.

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dw5ight
great stuff as usual tdm!

