Pitching the right editors and bloggers

In public relations it’s all about relationship building and knowing which editors and bloggers to pitch your ideas to. Many editors will not take emails and phone calls from individuals due to the fact they are not paying attention to the stories they are writing.

One horror story that I found was on Longtail.com where Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, posted the email addresses of people who are blacklisted from pitching him EVER AGAIN! It’s a great debate between the lazy approach to PR, which is spaming every writer you can find, and sending the right pitches to the right editors. This could be the difference between having your story picked up and never speaking to a reporter again.

I leave you with this; do your due diligence, research the right editor, read several stories he or she has written in the past. There are several ways of doing this like Google News, Lexus Nexis, etc…. Journalists are so busy with thousands of pitches, you want to make sure you don’t waste their time, and definitely don’t get blacklisted from ever speaking to them again.