We know you don’t want to intentionally wind up a journalist. After all, cultivating great relationships with journos at your target media outlets is one of your key focuses as PR and comms professionals (and if it isn’t, it should be!). But sometimes it happens. Because PRs slot in certain phrases to their emails and phone
Pitching the right way to your target media outlet is at the key of successful PR and comms – but both journos and PRs alike know how hard it can be. When it comes to email pitching, obviously there isn’t the psychological torment that can come with a badly-gone phone pitch. (We’ve all been there!)
Comment pieces, or ‘op-eds’ as they are often called, are a prestigious way to get your name or brand mentioned in the press. As a journalist I regularly receive pitches from PRs or entrepreneurs offering their view or their client’s view on something topical. But more often than not I delete them. Why? Because they
Sending out a targeted pitch email to a journalist? Make sure you’re not including any of these common, but potentially disastrous phrases. ‘This would be perfect for your readers’ This crops up a LOT in those generic so-called pitches that have been actually sent out to thousands of journalists on a mailing list – and
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash Are you looking to get publicity for a book? You’ll have to have a killer pitch when approaching editors, journalists and producers. It’s estimated 3,000 books a week are published in the UK and each of them wants a spot in the press. As an author and journalist (as well as resident
The hashtag journorequest on Twitter is the sort of tool that pre-digital-age PRs could only dream about. It reveals what used to be days of PR research in just 14 characters – the topics journalists are writing about. No wonder it’s become so popular. So popular, that when I put out a #journorequest recently, I
It’s a strange time of year – that time when everyone’s mind is on the Christmas break, their impending office party, (or carb-loading to try and deal with the after-effects of the party from last night). All of which means it can be a difficult time to know what to pitch in to features and
Getting your product reviewed in the press is one of the most competitive areas of PR. The media are interested in stories not products, so the main route for getting coverage for a newly launched product is through specific review pages or ‘tried and tested’ sections. It is hard to weave in a reference to
Business journalists, like many specialists, are pitched hundreds of similar type stories every day. With journalists spending less than a minute reading an opened press release, never mind the vast majority that get immediately deleted, what is the best way to cut through all the noise? Ditch the jargon When I first started as a
We all know the phrase ‘a good day to bury bad news’. This is used when the government or a big company chooses to put out a press release on a day when the world’s media is looking elsewhere. This might be on the day of a Royal Wedding or when a mega star dies
