PR & Media Relations | How Not to Pitch the Media

Whether sending a pitch to a journalist, blogger, reporter, or all three, there are a few things your pitch needs to be for you to be successful. As a blogger who gets a pitch every now and then, I can only imagine the frustration a journalist of a well known publication will feel when those untargeted pitches come in in the hundreds.

So, to help you get the most out of your time spent pitching, and to assist you in getting your stories featured, here are some things to check for before you hit that send button:

1. Your pitch is relevant. Does it cater to what they write about? Is it new news? Is it newsworthy? If it’s not, it’s pretty irrelevant. (Here are some pointers for determining if your news is newsworthy: PR Writing | 5 Tips to Making Your News Newsworthy)
2. Your pitch is timely (also another word for relevant). This is a large part of being newsworthy in regards to the rest of the world, but if your pitch isn’t sent at the right time for the publication you’re pitching, it won’t get much recognition. Deadlines, personal lives, holidays, etc., can all affect the time your pitch will be best received.
3. Your pitch is targeted. This should be #1, but relevance and being targeted are closely related. Your pitch must be sent to the right audience. Sending out a blast email to every email address you can get your hands on is not targeted. Don’t do that.
4. Your pitch is (semi) personal. In line with being targeted, take a minute to at least type their name. I’m all for saving time and copy/pasting content, but if you mention a website, use their name, etc., make sure you change it for every person you contact and that you make sure you let the person you’re pitching know that you’ve done at least a little searching into who they are as a human being. (Media are, after all, people too.)
5. Your pitch is succinct, yet descriptive enough. I don’t want to read 3 pages about your pharmaceutical company. I write about PR, and I write a lot about it. Share with me why your content is relevant to me and my readers, and do so in 3 paragraphs at most, and I’ll be sure to read it. Additionally, if you send me a one sentence email telling me I should check out your link (and link to it from my blog, which I’ve been told to do in the past), I and most everyone else will probably delete your email and not do what you so nicely asked me to do. The main issue here with that pitch: you didn’t offer me anything that would make it worth my while. PR is a give and take.

It’s a simple task to look at old posts, articles, and publications to see first what a publication features, and then what the writer you’re pitching writes about. See what they are passionate about or talk about regularly; this can be a good indicator of what they are looking to write on in the future, and can help you to determine your pitch’s probability of success.

From there, it’s all about etiquette. PR gets a bad rep from people who spam pitch . If your pitch is not the things above, it’s spam. (Sorry, but it is.) You may think your news is the best news there is to hear, and it may in fact be, but if you send it to people who don’t care about your news (meaning they don’t write about it, their audience doesn’t want to read about it, etc.) , you’re sending them spam.

To avoid being that PR person, try to do the following:

1. Use the checklist above! Enough said.
2. Send it, just once. I don’t need to get your email 4 times throughout the day. I’ll reply if I find it interesting, and often times I’ll reply even if I don’t find it interesting and tell you so. I even go so far as to thank you for the spam you’ve sent me, so don’t worry, your reply is coming.
3. Give the person you’ve pitched some time. Like the above mentions, don’t send me the pitch, a follow-up email, and then another follow-up email to see if I got your first three emails. Give me a day or two to get through what’s on my plate and I’ll let you know.
4. Refrain from calling, and emailing, and calling again. Just reiterating this point here, but seriously, I know you’re busy, and you have got to know that I’m busy. If you don’t, I’m not sure how you’ve been able to get a pitch picked up, ever.
5. Recognize deadlines (and not just your own). This follows with point 4: I have things to do, as do you. Notice my posting habits, and see that, if you need something posted today, and it’s already 5PM, I’m probably not going to be much help because I post once a day, in the morning. Other journalists and reporters may have even more important deadlines (mines’ not really a deadline…) that the rest of the paper/publication depends upon; these are important things to take into consideration.

Remember that as the PR professional, you are a representation of your company or client, and there’s no better way to share with a media contact that you’re not the right person to do business with than to spam them with your unsolicited and irrelevant information.

People who write online (like myself) really find it amazing when we get an email that is personalized, quick, and actually makes sense for me to have received it. Moreover, I enjoy it when they want to and I can find the time to carry on a meaningful relationship of sorts. That can simply be someone I talk to through Twitter, someone who will come to my blog and comment, or someone who shares my content and I theirs. These are all small things, but things that make me feel good about helping with their cause, usually the reason they first contacted me.

What are you doing to make your pitches successful?

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