Journalist’s jobs are becoming more and more time-pressed, with their inboxes increasingly flooded with PR’s pitches. Now more than ever, for a journalist to buy into a pitch, it needs to capture their attention. But how as a PR can you make your pitch stand out from the crowd ?
Journalists are inundated with pitches daily, so ones that are boring, uninteresting, and un-newsworthy are destined to fail before they’ve even been sent. ‘The 5 best paints to watch dry’, for example, will never get coverage no matter how amazing your pitch is, or how slow a news week it has been. It is a PR’s responsibility to evaluate whether or not their story is newsworthy before pitching it. Deciding this beforehand stops you from wasting both yours and the journalist’s time, and avoids disappointment when your efforts inevitably fail to deliver results.
The first part of a pitch that a journalist will read is the headline, and many journalists will decide whether or not they will bother to read on purely based on how interesting that headline is. This is why it is important you pay as much attention to crafting an effective email header as you do to your pitch, as this will encourage the journalist to read more.
You could write the most amazing pitch in the world, but if it isn’t pitched to the right publication, it will never be read. For instance, a pitch about a world-changing bacon product that actually makes you lose weight (if only!!), will never be read if you’re pitching it to ‘The Vegetarian News’. Of course this is an extreme example, however it has its relevance.
It is important that, as a PR, you research exactly which publications are interested in the news you wish to share and, more importantly, which journalists from these publications are writing about it. This does take time, but it is a worthwhile exercise. After all, it is far better to pitch to five relevant journalists than scatter your pitch to 50 journalists who are not.
Journalists barely have time in their day to open all their e-mails, let alone read them thoroughly. So, what makes you think they will have time to read your pitch, which is as long as a thesis? You must make your pitch short, snappy and to the point, summarising the story and ensuring the journalist can fully understand its significance.
Cut out all of the unnecessary information – a journalist will not want to read waffle. It is important to ensure that every single word in your pitch is carefully selected leaving the journalist wanting to know more. A pitch should be like a wine tasting, the journalist should have a small glass, and want to come back to you for the whole bottle.
Of course, you want to get your client the best coverage possible, but it is important to not oversell them. You must be realistic about their expertise and the insight they can offer to a journalist, as if you exaggerate this it will always come back to bite you. Not only will the journalist be disappointed, but they’ll view you as untrustworthy and unreliable, ruining your chances of engaging with them in the future, and could risk embarrassing your client as well.
Bearing these five points in mind before firing off that pitch can help ensure that your pitch has the best possible chance of being read and used by a journalist, and result in valuable coverage for your clients.
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Author: Peter Remon