What Makes a Good PR Pitch

I got involved in an online discussion of PR pitches. Here's my take on what PR people ought to know about how to construct a pitch. For those who might come across this and don't know me, I’m a working freelance journalist, both blogging an in print, and used to work in marketing years ago. A good 90 to 95 percent of pitches I receive are atrocious and suffer immediate deletion. I almost never find something of value in a pitch because they are so rarely put together in a useful way. Here are some suggestions:

• Write no more than a paragraph. If you can’t get the basic idea across in that space, you either write badly or, more likely, don’t understand what you’re pitching. A journalist can always ask for more information. This also keeps a pitch from droning on.
• Try to put yourself in the journalist’s shoes and consider what is actually newsworthy, not what the client thinks is newsworthy. You work for the client, but you have to interest the reporter. If you don’t have an angle that I would actually consider as a story - an angle that focused on how I write and what my readers are looking for - then you’re wasting your time and mine. For me, at least, an effective news hook is almost never “my client wants to announce something.” Like any good marketing, it has to be all about the audience, not the sponsor.
• Cut the buzzwords. They are unnecessary.
• Only pitch when there’s something to pitch. Don’t ask me to read a release that you created as a billing exercise.
• Don’t send big attachments without asking first.
• If you write a release, use the old inverted pyramid construction from traditional newspaper and wire reporting. First graph has the basic news. Additional graphs expand it. Don’t try to come up with an enticing lead and leave the journalist in suspense for several graphs. I can’t tell you how many times I trash releases because someone is making me spend my time teasing out what is essentially a sales pitch. I generally don't have the patience to even follow long enough to find the actual message.
• Never call me unless you know me particularly well and I’ve said it’s OK. Don’t send me a tweet, don’t send surface mail (unless I know you and said it’s OK) - just a single graph in an email. You might be surprised at how effective it can be.
• If you’re sending something cold, simply don’t expect a response. I always respond when I’ve got a pitch out on Profnet or HARO, but often lack time to compose answers to all the pitches that I *haven’t* asked for.

Hope someone out there finds this useful.