No amount of excited posturing will convince a journalist to cover something they have already covered, or some internal organisational announcement that no one in the public would care about. And for goodness sake, don’t do a generic copy / paste and leave the wrong contact name or company name in there. Believe us, it happens.
This type of thing may seem basic, but it still happens every day. Journalists receive so many press requests that it’s easy to tell quickly which is going to provide valuable content and which is going in the bin.
If you’re struggling to get your stories published, here are five reasons why that might be the case.
1. There’s no human interest element to it
Great stories always come back to the characters. The same is true in the media. Even if your story is about a company or an initiative, find the human story at the core of it and lead with that. And it needs to be someone who has a story that your target audience will be able to relate to, not some one percenter.
If there is no person at the core of the story, then talk about how the company / initiative / project will affect the humans who are going to be end users, or benefit from it. Craft your story around people. That’s human interest.
2. You haven’t utilised any medium options
In the world we live in today, image-based and video content sees far and away more engagement than the written word. So use it. Have eye-catching imagery to go with your story. If there’s any way you can include video content – do it. If you’re providing complex data or even any data, a colourful graph or chart will help to illustrate the point.
3. You’ve been vague
You’ll see this point over and over, but you need to make things easy for the journalist you are pitching. If your headline doesn’t make it totally clear what it is you’re talking about, how is anyone else supposed to be interested? If your narrative is muddy or ambiguous, it’ll go in the too hard basket. Make sure you lay out your release in a way that’s easy to read, then extract the key points of your media release and include them in the body of your contact email.