On another note, with modern day technology as it is, filtering, blocking and categorising unstructured information such as email is really not that hard. You may be surprised to know that not only press receive spam, but we still get on with our lives.

Matt

As journalists, we tend to only accept phone calls or e-mails from sources we already know. That’s a dangerous place to be these days. How are we, as journalists learning anything new if we keep going back to the same old proven sources? By playing it safe, we become as bad as commercial radio-only playing the hits that are focus group tested to death.

As PR practitioners, we don’t take the time to get to know our target audience, in this case the journalist. We build huge media databases, and blast out the same pitch to the entire list, with hopes that a few hits may occur. This is particularly dangerous when we allow younger, inexperienced people to do the pitching. Where’s their business and life experience?

I also happen to teach marketing communications and public relations classes at Emerson College in Boston, and Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Here’s how I teach my students to pitch the media via e-mail. It’s starts with the proposition that what you’re pitching needs to be a bout and for the reporter, not your own company or client. I use the acronym “WIIFY,” which stands for “what’s in it for you” – “YOU” meaning the reporter.

A good pitch letter is typically about four short paragraphs:

1. The first paragraph helps build a relationship with a journalist. Show you know the media outlet, the individual, and what he/she writes. If possible, tie in your idea to an article he/she has written – it shows you’ve actually read his/her writing, and helps you establish relevancy for that reporter (it’s a WIIFY). It gives you the benefit of having a story idea and/or information for him/her that fits what he/she writes about, and would be of interest to his/her readers.

2. The second paragraph elaborates on what that story idea and/or information is. You offer just enough detail to get the journalist’s interest and ask you for more.

3. The third paragraph justifies the reason why the story idea/information is important and/or why the journalist and his/her readers should/will care. This is about what’s in it for them (the “WIIFY”), not what’s in it for your company or client. Don’t tell them about your marketing strategy – they don’t care about that unless it’s a business story about marketing strategies.

4. Your final paragraph is your closing and a call to action. This is where you offer some sort of value-add, such as arranging interviews with experts, celebrities, offer to provide additional information, invite them to an event, etc. It needs to go beyond, “for more information, please contact me.” Give the journalist a reason to want to contact you.

Then you add your name and full contact information (title, phone e-mail) at the bottom. That’s it – a nice brief, informal e-mail.

Remember that paragraphs should be short and simple – not more than two or three sentences long.

Basically, PR people have long identified journalists by their titles or reported beats. These measures, still used by the major PR industry vendors, often do not reflect the journalist’s true editorial interests, e.g., there are many flavors of technology reporters.

There is one promising PR application (with which I’ve had a hand in developing) that takes an entirely new approach. It is a search app that produces a list of relevant journalists based on how closely their cumulative body of work reflects the search query (keywords, pitch letter, news release).

What’s more, this new application, called Matchpoint (www.prmatchpoint.com), only permits the PR pro to email one journalist at a time, and then lets the recipient journalist rate the quality of the pitch.

While not a remedy for lazy PR people, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Peter Himler
Principal
Flatiron Communications LLC
http://www.flatironcomm.com
Twitter: PeterHimler

I did a podcast for my RunMarketing.co.uk website with freelance tech journalist, Gordon Kelly, on this very subject. You can listen to it or download it here: http://bit.ly/TTFuY

These lists enable PR companies to target huge swathes of publications with badly targeted and badly written releases with very little effort. The organisations which have news which will actually interest you should know of you already – they don’t need a media database to find you.

So, if you want to cut down on the amount of crap PR sent to you, it’s simple – get yourselves taken off these lists. The number of valuable stories you might miss as a result is likely to be a fraction of those you’ll miss because they’re lost in a sea of PR spam.

Typically unpleasant attitude by a journalist. Journalists need to treat each PR person on their merits, and not just be miserables b*stards to all of them.