On some days at my day job as the editor of a small weekly newspaper, I receive upward of 200 email pitches a day.
Some of them I delete immediately, especially if they’re from a Nigerian prince wanting my financial assistance or are clearly advertisements trying to masquerade as content.
But that still leaves a lot of emails that I do at least glance at, even if most are quickly deleted, too.
That brings me to my point: Mass generic pitching doesn’t work these days, whether it’s for a utility, a retail business, a pop star or anything else.
When I left journalism about 17 years ago for a decade-long sojourn in public relations, I was intrigued by how pitching could work. If we wrote a pitch for a client, all I had to do was send it to my PR firm’s database administrator, give him a few target words (to narrow down the massive database a bit) and, within minutes, it was in the inboxes of journalists worldwide.
And it even worked then, although I should have paid more attention to the occasional grumpy responses I’d receive from journalists who didn’t like irrelevant mass pitches.
While mass pitching is time efficient, I now realize it really doesn’t work.
For one thing, reporters often change beats. The reporter who covered your utilities last year may now be covering city hall.
Second, a few generic target words aren’t enough of a filter. Most journalists have a narrow window of things they cover. Sending a football writer a pitch about baseball doesn’t cut it.
Most of all, it shows a reporter hasn’t done his/her homework.
My newspaper, for example, is in Philadelphia and covers local Jewish news. I’m included in lots of databases that must list every Jewish publication in the world.
That’s why I get pitches about rabbis in Rochester, synagogues in Seattle, and responses to antisemitism in Arkansas and Alabama. All those things are nice, but they don’t apply to me.
But it’s not all about databases.
I get plenty of pitches from PR professionals that I can tell immediately are unfamiliar with my publication.
How do I know?
Sometimes they’re pitching something we already wrote about in the not-too-distant past.
They might ask if we accept articles not written by staffers. Or they might wonder if we would accept a 5,000-word op-ed. Perhaps they ask if we would publish poetry. Sometimes, they want us to republish an article from 10 years ago. Other times, folks want to pay us to place an article.
We do none of those things, and anyone who’s ever looked at the paper for more than two minutes would realize that immediately.
It makes me think the person in question isn’t serious and I typically dismiss them, even where they might be a germ of something interesting to consider.
I realize that a PR person tasked with pitching dozens of media outlets isn’t going to be an expert on all of them, but even a couple of minutes of preparation makes a difference. I can tell when someone is prepared and am willing to forgive minor transgressions.
If your utility does have a media database, make sure it’s updated regularly and don’t go blindly pitching, especially regarding your preferred outlets. Know them like the back of your hand before you pitch.
Here are a few other pitching tips:
If it’s a weekly outlet, don’t pitch on the day they put it together. If it’s a daily outlet or an electronic outlet with multiple programs, don’t pitch late in the day.
Be flexible with your pitches; if the media outlet is interested but wants to change the gist of the story, go with it (if it doesn’t make it inaccurate).
Always think in terms of visual possibilities. Know in advance how you might illustrate the story.
If an outlet shows interest and they say, “Jump,” your response is always, “How high?” Make it easy for the media outlet and get them whatever they need.
Don’t be greedy: If you were covered by an outlet recently, don’t push them for more stories unless they’re covering an ongoing issue. For example, multiple stories on power outages are fine; pushing for a profile of the chief financial officer a month after your CEO was profiled is a no-no.
If you do receive coverage, be eternally grateful. I can’t stress enough how many people and organizations want coverage and how few receive it.