When you work in public relations, you send out a lot of press releases. The trick is making sure the press release you send stands when compared to the hundreds of other releases media outlets receive every day.
Before coming to The Creative Company, I spent four years producing the morning and noon newscasts at WISC-TV in Madison. Before that, I had a short stint at WAOW-TV in Wausau and interned at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. Over that time, I read a lot of press releases and pitches. A lot. I had seen some great ones and some not so great ones.
When I moved to The Creative Company to work in public relations, it became part of my job to write and send press releases. I already knew what kind of pitches worked and which ones didn’t because I spent years sifting through them myself.
At Thursday’s Public Relations Society of America meeting, Brennan Nardi, editor of Madison Magazine, spoke about the best way for those in public relations to reach magazines for publication. I had the pleasure of working with Brennan during my time at WISC-TV, which is owned by the same company as Madison Magazine. However, magazines and TV news are quite different, as Brennan put it, one works with a four-month deadline, the other a four-minute deadline. So I was interested to learn her editorial process. Here are a few of her tips for reaching out to magazine editors.
1) Go to the editor first. If you’re not sure which reporter to contact, always start at the top. This is especially true if they use freelancers, which Brennan said are starting to make a comeback now that budgets are getting a little bigger again. Freelancers are usually assigned a story, so your pitch might not go far.
2) Get to know journalists. Don’t just pitch, pitch, pitch. Actually take the time to get to know who the reporters are. Have coffee. Have a normal conversation not related to your client or company. Stroke their egos, according to Brennan.
3) Know the publication. Make sure you’re pitching the right kind of story to the right kind of publication. And make sure you use the correct names! Don’t be so lazy you forget to change the name of the reporter or outlet when you send an email.
4) Don’t be generic or boring. If your short pitch isn’t interesting, a full page article certainly won’t be either. Make the reporter or producer want to know more.
Brennan said she’s happy to take pitches from those working in PR. She said doesn’t care if you got paid to send that story idea as long as it’s a good story idea. That’s great to hear for those of us working in public relations and good for the news business.
Bottom line: A good story, is a good story. Are you telling yours? We know how to do it at The Creative Company. Let us help you get yours heard.