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 [...]
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 [...]
Why Media Interviews Are Like Listening to the Radio
Anyone who listens to the radio knows that the time is split between “content” and commercials. Even public radio now has its share of commercials. When you are listening to content on the radio, you instinctively feel like you are getting what you want. But you only endure the commercials, waiting for the content to [...]
How to Get Book Authors on NPR
Here’s a first-rate tip from the recent Bulldog Reporter webinar I moderated on building relationships with journalists: The question was this: how can unknown authors, and their publicists, get on prime NPR shows like “All Things Considered”? Answer: create a relationship with NPR Senior Producer Ellen Silva, who produces the “You Must Read This” segment [...]
Show a little love to build blogger relations
News bloggers who are competing on a minute-by-minute basis with other blogs — such as the feverish competition among technology gadget blogs — are always hungry for an exclusive, or at least to the get the news about a new product a few minutes before the competition. So the next time you have a story [...]
PR for Start-ups
Good helpful piece on PR for start-ups (and most everyone else) here at BlueBlog.
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 [...]
Talkin' FBN
Comcast hasn’t added Fox Business to my line-up yet, so I can’t really give you a first-hand take on the goings on. Needless to say, the global point for business news PR people is that a huge new mainstream media outlet just opened shop, which is very good news in the era of widespread newsroom [...]
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.