Given the latest rant about PRs ’spamming’ journos and bloggers, might be timely to revisit this guide – [link to post]

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All of those are good points, but I wish that more publications would make information available on who covers what beats, what their interests are, etc. It would take a few minutes for them to write that up and put it on the web, and the time that it would save them would be tremendous and would solve so many of the problems with irrelevant pitches. We all want to be more targeted, but it’s often a challenge.

I often find, especially as you get down to the more niche publications, there often is little to no information on what the journalists write about. Sometimes even, no online access to articles. From a practical standpoint, sometimes you’ll have to pitch a news story from a client to a publication you’re not familiar with (say a customer announcement that is in a different space that you haven’t focused on before), and with strict deadlines you might have to reach out to that publication without much knowledge of who writes what and what the content is.

Another problem I’ve found when pitching is, where is the line for what constitutes what isn’t a good fit? Does that include everything that might be a fit (i.e. a journalist has written about a topic but not recently, or a journalist has written about the general subject but from a slightly different perspective)? We can agree that if everything is unrelated it’s not a good fit, but it the case of it maybe being a good fit, do we err on the side of trying to get our clients a wider variety of coverage by contacting the “maybes” or do we only contact the “definites” to be more targeted?

I saw your original tweet about this on Sunday morning and checked out Rick Calvert’s post.

As others have noted, its not unlike the issue in traditional media when clients push for a media release when there’s really no news – it’s simply to satisfy their own egos. If the release reaches a news desk, it’ll be tossed (to the detriment of the organization).

I agree with #3 that bloggers in particular would be wise to post something on their site about their policy on pitches, and how they would like to be pitched.

I enjoy reading PR-squared.

Well, I am moving on to pastures new and this is my last Top Five for Strive PR, I hope you like it!
1.  I couldn’t agree more with these seven PR promises (especially numbers six and seven) and the comments from Cortland Coleman and Rob Jewell th…

One (bad) reaction to principle like this is: “But my gosh! If I follow all these rules, I’ll only be able to send out about 4 releases a week. The rest of the time I’ll be researching who to pitch…”

Which is reasonable enough, IF you think the key to PR success is to hit up as many bloggers and reporters as possible.

The temptation to do that is strong: there are a lot of them out there – and the thought must be that if you only hit a small percentage of them, then you’ll only get a small percentage of the possible coverage.

But there must be a fallacy in that thinking somewhere. If you look at this PR person’s “Triple P” strategy [http://tinyurl.com/58y49d], I think it shows that carpet-bombing is not as effective as one might intuit.

She only made two phone calls and got exactly the quality coverage her client needed.

What you need to offer the blogger is the type of things listed in Kevin Kelly’s article “Better Than Free”. Offer bloggers a way to get the news from you before anyone else has it, or offer them the opportunity ask questions and get real answers.