Overly Bold PR Pitches Miss the Target with Journalists

In the past, the JCPR Blog has published content noting the importance of carefully fact-checking and proofreading pitches before sending them to journalists (see this entry from January 2014). However, even letter-perfect pitches that provide compelling hooks can falter if they are gallingly inappropriate.

 

Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post recently wrote a blog entry entitled, “The worst public relations pitches pegged to Robin Williams’s death.” Ms. Rosenberg noted that she and her colleagues received numerous pitches from public relations professionals after the passing of Mr. Williams, and many of them were insensitive, to put it mildly.

 

Ms. Rosenberg wrote:

To try to cut through the clutter, some (though by no means all) publicists take unfortunate advantage of tragic events, occasionally in ways that exhibit a shocking lack of taste and good sense. These pitches are a common joke among journalists. But even I and some of the reporters I know were stunned by the boldness of some of the releases or offers of interviews that came through the transom in the wake of Robin Williams’s suicide.

 

One of these pitches offered an interview with an online security expert, and included the following hook: “Robin Williams’ tragic death leaves consumers at high risk of identity theft. The 1.2 billion people already endangered from the massive Russian hacking just got more vulnerable as identity thieves lure curious citizens with links promising details about Robin Williams.”

 

Another pitch proposed an interview with a clinical psychologist. The e-mail from the doctor’s PR representative stated that, “although he has not treated Robin Williams or can definitely determine what happened,” the psychologist did in fact determine that Mr. Williams “most likely had a longstanding personality disorder.”

 

Ms. Rosenberg pointed out:

Not all of these pitches are necessarily terrible—a broader version of the identity theft pitch, drawing on more examples, and pushed out after a more decorous interval might have been a story I was interested in writing. But it rarely seems to occur to folks that patience might serve them and their clients better (as would more targeted pitches).

 

While the efforts of these PR professionals to enhance their clients’ thought leadership in their respective industries were admirable, they fell flat because, to quote Ms. Rosenberg, they lacked “taste and good sense.” The pitches she included in her blog post failed not because they weren’t well-written or timely, but because they were too bold—and their blatant opportunism turned off the journalists who received them.

 

Ms. Rosenberg’s commentary proves that simply grabbing and keeping the attention of journalists is not enough for pitches to succeed. They also have to strike the right note.

 

Competition among PR professionals for journalists’ time is rapidly increasing—a recent Pew Research analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that PR professionals outnumbered journalists by a ratio of nearly 5 to 1 in 2013. Pitches like those described by Ms. Rosenberg do indeed win the attention of reporters, but for the wrong reason. Tactless pitches not only harm the reputations of the PR professionals who send them, but also the reputations of the clients they pitch.

 

Members of the PR industry should take Ms. Rosenberg’s words below to heart:

The examples of PR pitches that landed in my inbox succeeded at half of a publicist’s job: They cut through the noise. But the harder half is just as important. When sending out a pitch, you should think about how a signal might be transformed by context and what it might look like in a journalist’s inbox.