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!)
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
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
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
When I’m not being a journalist or media training, I’m training for triathlons. Like many journalists, my passion and hobby have influenced what I write about. So health and fitness articles has fast become one of my focus areas. I regularly write for the Fitness Trends section at Metro (recent assignments include night swimming in
Pitching is one of the tasks PRs get most stressed out about. We know this, because from the hundreds of PRs and comms specialists we’ve trained over the years, this is the number one issue they bring up. How to best approach a journo, how to get their interest, whether to call or email them,
Take a guess at how many press releases land in a journalist’s inbox every day? As a freelance journalist I can expect around twenty. When Nine Media co-founder Karen Attwood worked at the Independent on Sunday she received more than a hundred. Bad press releases are the scourge of busy news desks (and sometimes the
A couple of weeks ago, Becky and I were tired, exhilarated and buzzing all at the same time – as well as really needing a glass of wine. The reason? We’d just run our Ultimate Training Day to a fantastic group of delegates, and received such positive feedback from them that we were chuffed to
