3 tips for focusing your media pitch

If you want your PR efforts to be effective, you must approach media relations as an ongoing process.

Every day you should be making connections and furthering relationships with key media contacts.  “Relationship” is the key term. You must understand that media relations isn’t based on crafting the perfect pitch. It’s about building trust and knowing what your media contacts need.

Here are three tips to deepen your relationships with journalists and assignment editors:

1. Learn to pitch how they think.

Journalists and media pros have a different set of priorities than PR professionals. That sounds like it should be obvious, but, if it was, more people would keep those diverse priorities in mind when crafting their pitches.

If you don’t have experience as a journalist, reach out and ask them. What kinds of messages catch their attention? What kind of submissions will they actually open and read versus what kind goes directly into the trash?

Some of this work is done in the style of the press release itself. Most journalists still operate using the inverted pyramid that stacks all the most relevant information at the top of the release, with each subsequent paragraph offering important but successively less relevant information.