How to pitch a story to media: 5 tips and best practices
Magazine covers
A common refrain that I've heard from folks getting into the communication profession is that it's increasingly hard to pitch stories with editors and reporters overwhelmed with email, tweets, and more. To help those making their first pitches whether as freelance journalists or communications staff, I’ve written up this brief example of a successful pitch and provided some tips for how to pitch.
Pitching the Story: Staking out a Position on Gun Safety
Background:
During 2016 I was consulting with multiple political campaigns and causes in Washington State. Chief among those initiatives was now Lieutenant Governor Cyrus Habib’s campaign. The race was a crowded one with 11 candidates from across the political spectrum filing for the position in the open primary. Among the 4 democrats, one other candidate was already running hard for the large progressive bloc of the party, one was largely a non-entity, and one was running a centralized campaign with the goal of sneaking through and into the general election and becoming the consensus candidate. From the start of the campaign our team made a conscious decision to win the fundraising battle to give us the edge in getting our candidate’s name out across the state and to target our message at the largest block of democratic primary voters, progressives-- particularly in King County. One of the most influential voices for that block of voters is The Stranger; a liberal Seattle-based newspaper whose endorsement carries significant weight.
The Topic:
With those strategic considerations in mind, the team set out to differentiate ourselves from the competition. Gun safety (and other issues surrounding guns) is a hot topic in progressive circles. Millions of dollars had been poured into a highly successful statewide background check initiative(I-594) two years prior; I-594 had won with 59.27% of the vote statewide and an astounding 74.99% of the vote in liberal King County. Since Cyrus Habib already had a strong record on gun safety legislation during his time in the Washington State Senate we saw this as a great way to differentiate ourselves from other candidates. By taking a stand on gun safety, the state Senator could position himself as the candidate who is willing to stand up and fight for his values and earn quite a bit of media attention doing so.
The Pitch:
While we eventually hoped to use this issue to garner the endorsement of progressive organizations such as the editorial board of The Stranger, we decided to approach the Seattle Times first due to their much larger size. While we created a press release and pitched other reporters for the story, we knew that getting coverage in the Seattle Times would ensure a large audience would view the story and that it would be picked up elsewhere. In addition, we knew that with a much larger staff than other state news organizations, we’d have a better opportunity of having our story picked up and featured.
Therefore we pitched Times local news/local politics reporter EJ Smith III in advance of our press release. As a new beat reporter at the time, we knew he’d be interested in the opportunity to be ahead on a story that would be certain to generate plenty of attention and controversy. We tailored our pitch email with this in mind, offering EJ a quote from then-Senator Habib and focusing on being succinct in our outreach so as to be cognizant of the severe time constraints that most journalists work under. We sent out our pitch email a few days before the slated press release (Monday to take advantage of a full week’s news cycle) and if we hadn’t gotten a reply we would have followed up over the phone to briefly check that the email was received.
Five Tips and Best Practices for Successful Story Pitches
Concise is key – most people only spend 10-15 seconds scanning each email and busy journalists may not even open your email. You can’t afford to send them paragraphs of information to kick things off.
Title your email – if the email isn’t opened, it isn’t read. Journalists get even more spam each day than the average person, so you need to stand out. In our case “Gun Legislation” and “Cyrus Habib” were keywords that allowed us to get our email opened and read.
Pitch an angle - a well-written pitch needs to get to the point. You can’t spend a lot of time introducing the story and angle, it needs to be clear why this story matters and why it makes sense for them to do a piece on it. Keep that in mind – why should they, in particular, cover your story?
Phone follow up – even if you do all of these things right, you may not hear back. I always recommend a follow up over the phone if you believe your story is really worth reporting on. However, you have to do phone follow up right. You need to get to the point, be friendly, informative, and know when to stop. The first pitch call I ever did a reporter told me “I’m busy, I’ve seen your email and we’ll report on it, but don’t bother me”. It was brusque, he was not happy I’d called him. However, I knew he’d remember the story and it taught me to be quick and drove home just how busy reporters are.
Relationships matter – EJ was new to the Times so we didn’t have an established relationship with him, but we helped to establish a relationship by giving him the first opportunity to cover the issue. In the long run, the rapport and trust you establish with reporters is important and can get your pitches read and your stories in the media over somebody else’s. Be unfailingly polite, helpful, and try to tailor your approach to the personality and quirks of each reporter as you get to know them.
The Result:
Our pitch resulted not only in a story in the Seattle Times but extensive media attention across the state. The issue proved a successful wedge for us to differentiate ourselves from other political candidates in the race and was explicitly called out by progressive organizations and newspapers, including in The Stranger as one of the key reasons for their endorsement of Cyrus Habib for Lieutenant Governor. Our team won the crowded primary by garnering 22.26% of the vote and went on to win the general election with 54.39% of the vote. The attention and support generated by our gun safety media push proved to be one of the key strategies that swung the election.
