Sure Fire Elements of Media Stories, Or How to Get in the Times if You’re Looking for a Job (Hint: Be Cute, Young, Blond and a Twin)
Part of my media training curriculum is explaining to people that the media covers only a set group of topics — they are broad, but they are really all you will find in American mainstream media, so if you want coverage, you better figure out which buckets your story fits in.
They are:
Novelty: things that don’t [...]
GM's Wagoner Uses the B-word and Gets Burned
Being a spokesperson is hard — seriously. And being the spokesperson when you are also the CEO of General Motors in 2009 must be close to impossible. But hey, that’s why they get paid the big bucks, right?
GM’s CEO inadvertently used the phrase “bankruptcy…could work,” at a media breakfast with the Wall Street Journal in [...]
Don't Waste Precious Real Estate With Bloated Email Pitches
Be concise. Tell the journalist how your pitch will help them do their job, in the crucial first words of an email pitch. Customize your outgoing email address, if you have to, to make it more recognizable and user-friendly. Bottom-line: every character counts, and you have zero to waste.
That is the key-takeaway from today’s Bulldog [...]
The Big PR Lesson of "Thank You For Smoking"
I finally got around to seeing “Thank You For Smoking” last week — my bad. It’s an absolute must-see for anyone in the PR industry and if I was a university PR professor, I would use this film in my course and devote a couple of weeks to watching and analyzing it. It is a [...]
Media Still Underwhelmed By Press Areas of Corporate Web Sites
Here’s another area that PR needs to get right yesterday if we are to survive or grow as a business over the long-term: meeting the needs of journalists via our corporate web sites.
All too often, our sites are repositories of incomplete or merely promotional information, rather than the facts and figures that journalists need to [...]
Pitching wire services is always a key media relations tactic
News wire services are still alive and reasonably well: AP, Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, and so on. They were never directly reliant on advertising revenue for survival (though their customers were/are), and they have found new life on the Internet, where their 24/7 service dovetails perfectly with the web’s insatiable need for news.
The care and [...]
Arrington and TechCrunch Say No to Embargoes
Thinking about pitching an embargoed story to TechCrunch, arguably the top new media web site about emerging technology? Don’t. TechCrunch Supreme Leader Michael Arrington has decreed that the site will no longer honor embargoes and will, in effect, only accept exclusive stories from PR folks they trust.
In Arrington’s typical over-the-top egomaniacal style, he makes this [...]
How NOT to say "No Comment"
Great story in yesterday’s WSJ about the subprime mess — in classic Journal fashion, they looked at the intertwined relationships of players in the mortgage business, tracing the story from the misfortunes of a single homeowner up to giant multinational financial institutions that invested in mortgage-backed securities, including securities whose returns were dependent on the [...]
Attention DC Media Relations Pros
There’s a story in the new issue of the Washingtonian about the idiosyncrasies of some top DC-based journalists. This is must-reading for DC media pitchers. File it away, pull out when you next pitch these folks, use it to build rapport. It can’t hurt.
