Member Article

Five easy mistakes to make when you’re pitching a story to a journalist

Even if you’re not a PR professional, there’s a good chance that at some point in your career, you’ll be wanting to get in contact with a journalist about some media coverage.

The problem is that a good percentage of the pitch emails send to individual journalists or general tip lines will either never get read or be deleted on the spot.

Mostly, that’s just the nature of how PR works. Even at its highest levels, PR is a numbers game, but we’ve put together a list of the five biggest mistakes people make when approaching journalists, so that when your time comes, you’ll know better.

Getting off on the wrong foot

The surest way to ensure your pitch winds up in the trash can is to mess up the subject line of your email.

They say first impressions are important in general, but in PR, if your first impression isn’t clean and on message, don’t expect someone to open it.

When crafting a subject line, there are two common tendencies that are best avoided. It’s hard to say which one is worse.

• Being too vague
• Being too loud

Think about what you want your pitch to be and then say it. If you can’t make it fit into one, short sentence (15-20 words or less) then maybe you don’t really have anything clear to pitch in the first place.

Journalists—and most people, really—don’t read every email they get. So again, be clear. Using Bdaily as an example, you wouldn’t say, “Bdaily launches, aims to revolutionize the bloggosphere,” because in that case, you haven’t really said anything. What is Bdaily? Which bloggosphere? How is it going to revolutionize anything?

The other extreme is equally likely to get your email dumped, perhaps even more so. Nothing screams spam and desperation quite like leading with “Urgent” or inundating your subject with unNECesSaRY caps. FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION may have been appropriate in the ages of fax machines,but that isn’t the case today. These seem simple, but the mistakes are still made all the time.

Assuming you’re owed coverage

Except in the case of a profile, no one in the news media covers companies just for the sake of it.

Journalists write about news. If you don’t have news to offer them, don’t waste their time asking for coverage. You’ll only succeed in hurting your chances down the road.

What qualifies as news always depends on different factors—the publication, the company—but until you’ve developed a more nuanced feel for the media landscape, better to stick to the basics.

• Launches (new products, new company, new location, etc.)
• Fundraising (money always talks)
• Acquisitions (you’ve been bought, you’ve bought someone—see above)
• Milestones (you turn five, your blog gets its 10,000th follower)

Get your news out early on in the email. That’s what the journalist is reading it for.

Then, assuming they’re still interested, you can get into all the other stuff about why you and your company are awesome.

Rambling

Don’t include too much other stuff, though. The purpose of your email is to sell an idea, not write the story for them.

There are plenty of people who will flatly refuse to read any email that looks too long at a glance.

Keep your sentences short and to-the-point. Don’t include more than two sentences in any given line. The email, as a whole, should come in at no more than eight lines in total, including your greeting and sign-off.

Be patient. If you grab their attention, there will be plenty of time later to get into your backstory.

Getting too heavy into the jargon

Good journalism means informing an audience about things you yourself are likely still learning about.

There are exceptions—specialist journalists and publications —but in general, don’t assume a journalist has any idea what you’re talking about when you use an acronym or some jargon.

Don’t talk down, because that’s just patronizing. But don’t trot out all your fancy vocabulary, either. It doesn’t make you sound like an authority. It just alienates whoever happens to be reading it.

Frame your news and your company in terms a layman could understand. Not only will it help journalists understand your message, it also gives them a sense of whether a general audience would find what you have to say interesting or appealing.

Forgetting your manners

A journalist’s time is valuable. Treat it that way. A few nice words might earn you a lot more time down the road.

And yes, it’s possible to be polite and concise at the same time. There’s no need to be gushy, just give recognition where it’s due.

As we explained before, even just opening the email is its own act of kindness. Thank them for considering your pitch.

Plenty of open emails don’t get read all the way through. Thank them for making it to the end of yours.

It’s common sense, but in the rush to “get down to business,” you’d be surprised how many people overlook it.

In closing, keep the following things in mind. It will help your chances when pitching to journalists, and give you the peace of mind that, if you don’t get picked up, at least you went about it the right way.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Andrew Wight .