How to please a journalist

There are many ways to get the attention of a journalist, but below are some thoughts and tips from veteran tech reporter Jane Wakefield, who worked at the BBC for two decades, covering thousands of tech stories.

Mar 01, 2023

On a typical day, I could write three or four news stories, and I could receive as many as 100 emails each day too.

If you are heads-down writing a complex news story, phone interruptions weren’t particularly welcome, and emails would go unread. That’s not to say I didn’t catch up with them once the bulk of the work was done because, like most journalists, I have a lot of curiosity, so I would read all the emails I was sent, although I can’t pretend I replied to them all!

I was always searching for a great story - either some revolutionary tech that was genuinely going to change the world, or for something that made me sit up and go, ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ or for that amazing human-interest story that shows how tech can improve lives or change society. 

But the reality was that much of my time was taken up with more mundane news or focusing on what the big tech firms were doing - Facebook moving to the metaverse, Google facing another huge fine, Amazon workers demanding union rights, Twitter in meltdown.

Couple these everyday occurrences with hack attacks, which seem to take place with increasing regularity, or a government select committee on how to deal with Big Tech, or a request from the front page for a tech angle for the war in Ukraine or the pandemic. There was little time to think about the many other pitches I was sent.

Tech is fast-moving, and there is never a shortage of stories, so breaking through with something from a start-up that might not be well-known to the journalist or wider public is a difficult task.

Sometimes you get lucky - maybe your client has some cutting-edge tech, a human interest angle or a story that chimes with something already in the news agenda. But even armed with these things, getting the attention of time-poor journalists can be challenging.

And to make it more tricky, things have changed since the pandemic. The relationships that PRs built up and nurtured, whether via a lunch chat or a drink in the pub or at an industry event, all went on hold.

And now, we are living in a new kind of normal - we all want to work differently, spend more time working from home, less in the office, or even leave full-time work altogether to go freelance. 

One of the nice things about working from home for me personally was not being interrupted by phone pitches. And I’ve noticed that post-pandemic many PR firms have decided to let go of their phone lines or even ditch their offices.

It all means that PRs need to approach things with a laser-like focus on the end goal - getting coverage for their clients. Here are a few things to think about:

1: Understand the publication and the journalist you are pitching to: know what stories they cover and the type of stories the publication covers. Reference articles the journalist has written

2: Don’t send boring press releases/surveys. If you wouldn’t share it with a friend down the pub, it probably won’t hit the mark with a journalist.

3: Make your pitch email short and relevant. See it as a way to pique interest rather than a history lesson on the whole company you are pitching about

4: Emails work better than calls, but if you call, do it in the afternoon when the journalist is hopefully less busy

5: Give your email a general title because it may be relevant to something the journalist writes in the future, so needs to come up if they do an email search relating to a particular topic

5: Be prepared to offer experts who can explain complex topics, tech or industry trends

6:Build relationships and don’t be afraid to tell journalists things in confidence - journalists love industry gossip!

7: Surveys must tell me something I didn’t know, and they must have asked 1,000 people or more. Generally, journalists are sceptical of surveys, especially if they fall into the category of ‘Nine out of ten people say they want more paper, says a paper-making company’ style of surveying

8: It’s ok to ask someone what they are working on to see if a client is a fit, but often journalists don’t really know and certainly won’t have a nice spreadsheet of features for the next six months, so don’t expect that!