Finding newsworthy nuggets to pitch

A while back I got a confusing email from a recruiter.

She was asking to set up a 30-minute call with me to solicit recommendations to fill an opening at a PR agency. That’s not the weird thing – that kind of call happens all the time among PR people.

The odd part was that she was working for an agency owned by one of my really good personal friends. He and I talk often.

“This is weird,” I thought. “I get that he’s probably busy, but why doesn’t he just email me and ask me for some names?”

But I shook it off and did the call with her. And when I hung up I had learned the reason why.

During the conversation with her I had come up with two extra names to recommend to her that hadn’t been at the top of my mind. If he had just emailed me, I wouldn’t have thought about it long enough to realize that I did in fact know some good candidates for him.

Here’s what this experience has to do with you finding more newsworthy nuggets that you can pitch.  

Most PR pros struggle to establish a consistent flow of timely, useful news they can share with their media contacts. Usually, you are stuck pushing out whatever other people (who don’t know what news is) tell you to pitch.

Flip that model around, and YOU be the one to beat the bushes and actually interview people in your organization to shake loose the previously unappreciated tidbits.

Don’t simply email people and ask what might be newsworthy. Everybody’s busy – they’ll say they don’t have anything for you. When really, just like I thought I didn’t know anybody to recommend to the recruiter, they actually do have one or two good ideas kicking around in the recesses of their memory.

Get them on the phone or, better yet, sit down with them for 20 minutes and ask a bunch of open-ended questions. Don’t use the words “media” or “news.” Just get them talking. My experience has been that they actually come up with the most useful information the SECOND time you interview them.

What if you struggle to get access to newsmakers? Like if you’re at an agency? Get creative and get access anyway – it’s worth the time and effort. I’ve seen great agency campaigns grow out of a throwaway line overhead by an agency pro staffing a call between an exec and an analyst. And another that began with a random fact shared in jest by a marketing director over lunch.

Media Relations Masters can take boring or routine information here and there and turn it into  successful pitches. But they don’t rely on being able to pull a rabbit out of a hat routinely. Instead, they take the time to establish a system that serves up a consistent flow of newsworthy leads.