Advice from a Reporter: 7 Tricks to Capturing Attention
By John Biggs
May 2022
When everything is noise, how do you get someone to listen to your signal? This is one of the biggest problems both comms professionals and journalists face on a daily basis.
I’m a professional journalist and I’ve been taking pitches for at least 20 years. My goal, always, has been to offer clarity under difficult and ever-changing circumstances.
Comms professionals are in the same business, only their goal is to tell a story for their brand or a client. My job is to hear that story and see where it fits in the grand narrative associated with everything from global politics to the gadgets in our pockets.
So how do you break through the noise and capture attention?
Here are my top seven tips.
Target. When you have a piece of news that simply needs to go up on a specific website, target your pitch carefully. My best piece of advice is to always target one level below the main editor. If you’re trying to access the WSJ, don’t email the bonds desk editor, email the reporter who covers bonds the most. They’ll always be looking for a story and they’re in the right position to write the news.
Keep your pitch simple. My favorite emails are one line long. They usually consist of something simple like “Hey, do you want to see this cool new thing we made?” Then, when I don’t respond to that, I usually get a follow-up, equally simple, that puts why I should care about the news in context. If you send a third email and the journalist doesn’t respond, it’s probably not in the cards.
Avoid spam filters. I know how tempting it is to send a million emails and hope something sticks. When it comes to important client information, however, don’t do it. There are two factors at work here: first, you will run afoul of spam filters almost immediately and you end up in the “Promotions” inbox in Gmail.
Further, you run the risk of appearing like another piece of junk mail in a journo’s inbox. If the news is important, send it to a small subset of your list and follow up using the method described above. If you still think you need to send it out to a wider list, use a tool like SerialMailer that will send out emails from your inbox directly. Unlike MailChimp, SerialMailer will use your personal mail servers which will make things less likely to be caught in spam.
Bothering journos on Twitter is fine. Look: journos are hanging out on Twitter anyway. DMing them is always fair game and if you’re not using that channel then you’re doing yourself a disservice. A quick DM and a quicker “No thanks!” can save you hours of headache.
Manage expectations. Most comms professionals already know this but you absolutely have to manage expectations when it comes to coverage. Startup coverage in particular is a tricky topic with journos because they’ve been burned by ideas that are too early (or too late). Remember that the journalist has seen way more than you have and they’re going to be deeply skeptical. In fact, you want them to be skeptical! It keeps everyone honest.
Be the change you want to see in PR. You’re as exhausted as the journalist by the endless pace of news. Why not take a step back, decide what works and what doesn’t, and treat journalists like the truth-tellers they are. Instead of spraying and praying, a direct, one-on-one relationship will work far better. Create that relationship any way you can and, finally…
Be a human. Modern PR is at a crossroads: digital media is changing and there are more outlets than ever. Your mission? To see the human behind the screen, whether it’s creating a relationship or following and understanding new media organizations. It’s almost impossible to know everything about a particular space, but you can try! Now that the pandemic is almost over, meeting for coffee should happen more than Tweeting for coverage.
John Biggs is a writer, consultant, programmer, former East Coast Editor and current contributing writer for TechCrunch. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Laptop, PC Upgrade, Surge, Gizmodo, Men’s Health, InSync, Linux Journal, Popular Science, Sync, and he has written a book called Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age. He builds products, writes books, and consults with startups to help them make cool things. John Biggs runs the BWL family of blogs, SlushPile.net, Audiomonger, and WristWatchReview.com. Born in 1975, he currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
