Freelancer Danny Bradbury: How to Connect and Pitching Pitfalls
Freelancer extraordinaire, Danny Bradbury is perhaps one of the more (if not the most) PR-friendly tech journalists out there. Even though he's busy as hell Danny will almost always give feedback on a pitch, whether the answer is 'yes,' 'no,' or 'maybe so.' That's gratifying to PR pros operating under the gun.
Danny's a rare breed, though. He's mastered the art of working with PR firms. He operates a site at itjournalist.com where pr reps can register for automatic notifications about stories for which Danny will need a source. And he's a regular blogger. If you work in PR and are a daily reader of blogs, you've probably run across his site. I'm a little behind with this post but last week he spent a good deal of time putting together some thoughts in a post on how pr-types can better keep Danny informed of their clients' comings and goings here. Read it. If you're new to the profession this is a great primer; if you've been at it for a while but have moved away from some of the daily pitching you used to do, this provides great insight into how to keep your skills sharp.
Just to give you an idea of the time Danny takes to help people help him, here's an interesting exchange he had with one of PAN's people, Andy Dear:
"Sure, I’ll always read a pitch. I don’t accept a lot of them, though – I find a lot of them are veiled sales pitches. Someone sent one the other week disguised as a feature idea on "things you never knew you could do with a multifunction device". I was expecting some Make magazine-like thing on how to take apart and hack a printer, but it ended up being brochureware -- "did you know that you can use the Xcorp photocopier to introduce watermarks into photocopied documents, therefore enhancing security?" That sort of thing. That isn't a feature, it's a commercial.
I'm actually thinking of blogging this point -- feature idea pitches often end up being sales material, or interesting me for an entirely different reason (I might see a flaw in their idea and go after them for an interview with a different angle). But the truly useful ones are few and far between -- the ones where the PR person has a really interesting, new take on a subject. But that isn't meant as a sign of discouragement -- just a warning that I tend to try to pick them apart a bit, because if I don't, then my editor will."
The second paragraph is important. A lot of PR folks will stop short of really thinking about a pitch and how a reporter has to position a story to his or her editor. Younger reps or people new to PR sometimes get so excited that they've interested a reporter in a story idea that they fail to realize the reporter is interested in the pitch for reasons other than what the pitcher intended.
That's how coverage backfires and that's why PR reps need to know as much as they can about the reporter they're targeting. READ the reporter's stories; know what they like, dislike and what makes their writing style unique before pitching them. AND, take time to look at your pitches with 'fresh' eyes and think of how to poke holes in it. That's what reporters (or their editors) will do. If you're not sure about it, have a skeptic read or listen to your pitch and get feedback. There is nothing worse than setting a client's expectations and then getting an unpleasant surprise when coverage hits. Big thanks to Danny for letting PAN blog this point.
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