Too Many News Pitches Can Spoil Your Client’s Reputation and Yours

by Bill Arnovich - Media Relations Specialist
Let’s say you have a client that has hired you to secure media opportunities for them. They have a lot of stories; all are interesting, and viable. They keep expecting that just because they have a story that everyone of them should grace the covers of every Trade Journal on the planet and want them to run now. They just dumped this assignment in your lap you are the Media Relations person. OK How will you relate to make this happen?

If you are like most, you will pepper the media lists you maintain with email pitch after email pitch. Then you will make hundreds of follow up calls to those you just emailed. You may by the law of averages secure a respectable number of media hits but in the process you will gain a reputation for making much of un-newsworthy stories, that you are highly aggressive with your style of business, and that you push to set up briefings and demonstrations week after week. You will never be taken seriously again when you do have an important piece of news.

To have impact and build credibility, you must stagger your email campaigns based on their newsworthiness, timing, and most of all the impact of said story on your client’s bottom line. To release stories to the media just because it’s your job is a foolish way to go and will cost you your clients. You need to sit down with your clients. Have open, honest, and frank discussions as to goals, tactics, time deadlines, and results.

It’s your job to manage the information flow to the media. It’s your job to to manage the message and make sure your clients are on the same page. You need to train your clients that not every story is newsworthy, and could cause more trouble than its worth. Your job is to shave that story together down to its lean meaning and thrust. You need to help your clients develop well researched, well written, and meaningful news items.

Editors want news not ads. They want crisp, easy to understand news their readers or viewers or listeners can use. If it’s a product how will that product impact their audience? Will it change a business process? Long held beliefs? Untie doubts they have about your service or product or the overall message? Research research research will go a long way to making sure your client has all relevant facts. Research the right media, for the right audience to hear the right message at the right time.

Choose the numbers of briefings, product launches. Nothing irritates media members more than a PR person hyping and pushing hard for a briefing about nothing. Why burn a media bridge by over hyping a briefing only to have the journalist show up expecting something brilliant and once the interview starts it turns out to be less than what it was talked up to be.