Minimum standards for succeeding with top-tier media
By Michael Smart
My latest in helping you succeed with pitching top-tier media.
Recently I interviewed a national morning show producer.
I showed her 19 actual pitches and recorded her reactions to them.
I put the pitches I thought she’d like best first. It turns out I totally whiffed on the pitch I had at the number two slot. She didn’t care for it. But she asked for more info about five of the other top six.
If I can guess right five out of six times, so can you.
In this post, I’m going to make a case for the way I prepared for my interaction with this discerning producer, and I’ll show you how to do it yourself.
I also put together a one-page worksheet that highlights the other five key takeaways from the interview. You can download that for free here.
The producer was very generous to share her time with me. It was a great opportunity to really understand the pressures that she and her colleagues are under. It turns out many of the insights I gained relate just as much to pitching top-tier media in other formats, like newspaper and magazine journalists.
As you would expect, she emphasized how important it is to prove that you know her show in your pitch.
And she lamented how rarely she gets pitches that actually do that.
Believe it or not, she still receives emails addressed to “Dear NAME” or “Hi XXX”!!!
It should go without saying that blasting generic pitches to top-tier media is a waste of time.
In fact, it’s more than a waste—it actively hurts you and your organization. She said that even though she processes her emails really quickly, when someone blunders like that she makes a mental note to ignore any future outreach from them.
Beyond getting the producer’s name right at the beginning of the email, you need to prove that you understand how your pitch fits in to the way they structure their program.
The minimum standard for pitching national TV is to mention host name(s) and the type of segment you see your story fitting into.
The equivalent for pitching a magazine or a newspaper or agenda-setting web site is the same—you need to reference where and how your idea fits into the specific voice and feel of the outlet.
“But Michael,” you protest, “that means I’ve gotta actually watch the show! And read the magazines and web sites I want to pitch. How can I possibly do that and still get my work done?”
That is a legit concern.
And that’s why so few PR people do their homework before pitching these top journalists. It’s not because you’re lazy, it’s because you’re so busy, and the idea of watching, say, a two- or three-hour show initially feels impossible.
But there is a way around this. I used it to prepare for this interview with her, and that’s how I predicted five out of six of the pitches she would be interested in. (She liked one that I had buried at number 11).
We often view complicated top-tier media outlets such as network morning shows as these impenetrable fortresses. They seem so mysterious that we don’t really know how to get through, so we just throw our usual pitch together and send it off, fingers crossed.
You can do the same prep I did, and then you’ll have the same ability to predict what interests your top-tier TV targets.
Here is a quick checklist on how to predict what interests your top-tier media targets, especially TV.
I’m going to apply this checklist to the most time-consuming type of media to research—national morning shows. But you’ll see how you can adapt it to magazines and newspapers and web sites. I’ve also broken it out according to how much time you are willing to invest. The more you invest in your pitch, the better the chance of success.
10 seconds:
Google the morning show, note the hosts. Include them in your pitch.
3 minutes:
DVR the show or look up and glance at it while you’re at the gym. Fast forward until you see a graphic with a segment name on it, and include that segment name in your pitch.
30 minutes:
DVR the show. Fast forward through the first hour (which is usually stuff you can’t pitch, like White House news and terrorism and so on), the commercials and the celebrity news and interviews. For what’s left over, start watching until you determine it’s irrelevant to your organization, or otherwise unpitchable. Based on what’s left, you’ll know which segment you best match up with. Include that (and a host’s name) in your pitch.
90 minutes:
This is what I did to prepare for our interview. DVR the show three days in a row. See above instructions to watch all three episodes in 90 minutes. Warning—you will feel the same guilty pleasure feeling you did when you skipped a class in high school. You will keep saying to yourself, “I should be actually working right now. I hope no one is noticing me.” Ignore this. You are actually working very hard and very smart. You’ll be close to certain which segment you belong in, and you’ll have one or more examples you can cite in your pitch.
Obviously, I’m half-joking with the first two. Do you believe your idea is worth considering by some of the most busy and stressed people on the planet? Yes, you do. The least you can do for them is spend 30 minutes preparing.
If you read that and just thought, “There’s no way I can spend that much time on just one outlet, and 90 minutes, what a joke,” that’s fine. You just determined that you shouldn’t be pitching a national morning show, so you can save yourself the time of trying and failing. There are plenty of other outlets and formats that are also effective at reaching your key audiences.