Media in the New Millennium

When I started in PR, correspondence between PR people and members of the media was more often than not done with “snail mail.” As such, if you really goofed, your news release might end up on a bulletin board in a news room someplace. Not a good thing, but a reasonable private thing.

It’s all different now, thanks to the blogosphere. Maybe this can help us all do our jobs better.

The folks at the “Bad Pitch Blog” have found yet another example of why “hacks” can get tired of “flacks.” This is so bad I hesitate to even call it a pitch.

The folks at BPB did a good job taking this “pitch” apart, so rather than piling on, I thought I’d take a minute to talk about our rules of pitching here at Metzger. Pretty simple, really. A pitch must be:

Personalized
Interesting
Timely
Carefully targeted
Helpful

Personalized: A reporter or editor wants to know you’ve taken the time to understand what they cover and send them a good idea based on their beat and, more importantly, the way that person covers the beat. Every tech reporter does not have the same interest and angle, so find out what that reporter likes. How? LOOK AT THEIR STORIES BEFORE YOU PITCH!

Interesting: Self-explanitory. “Plane lands safely at DIA” is not interesting. “United flight shows up on time” is. (Sorry for the mini-rant, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.)

Timely: This can mean different things to different outlets. Monthly publicatons may be more interested in long-term trend pieces, while a daily paper wants to cover, for the most part, what happened in the last 24 hours. Offer ideas appropriately.

Carefully targeted: Just because a reporter covers the Internet, for example, doesn’t mean every single company with a Web site is interesting. If the reporter writes for the Denver Post, for example, he or she will more than likely only be interested in Internet stories with a Denver angle. Mass pitches almost never work.

Helpful: This may come as a shock, but no repoter’s job description says, “use stories from PR people.” If you want to be a source, you must help reporters do their jobs, not make their jobs more difficult by filling their inboxes with crap. Give a reporter an idea (and, really, that’s what a pitch is — an idea for a story) that helps them do their job better by providing new information, a unique angle, a local fact for a hot national story, etc., and they’ll open your next email. Spam them, and you’ll fail.

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