More than twenty years of experience as a magazine editor, freelance writer, columnist, and ghostwriter. What has it taught me? Most attempts to capture the attention of the media are ill-advised and ineffective. They may even convince editors never to look at an email from that source ever again.
In this blog, I cover some of the gross errors and suggest better ways to do it. Every single day, pitches flood in from PRs that are nothing to do with anything I will ever cover. I have to dig through countless numbers of press releases hoping for something of value. I also pitch editors from time to time and have to deal with everything from rejection to rudeness, and indifference to indecision. As an editor, I suffer through piles of contributed articles. Some good, many deficient.
But let’s kick things off with a few pet peeves:
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PRs who sent me pitches and don’t reply after I respond
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Random pitches about subject I never cover
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Pitchers who clearly have no reality about the audience or subject matter of the publication they hope to appear in
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Lengthy press releases that say very little
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Press releases with NO contact information or no email
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Web contact forms that no one responds to
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Info@blah.com email addresses that no ever answers
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Articles that mention the company’s name or product in almost every paragraph
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Experts whose insistence on complexity gets in the way of effective communication
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Cluttering articles with dozens of equations or obscure screenshots
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Technical papers that cite dozens of other papers but don’t actually say anything new
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Companies that use their legal departments to kill just about any article content of value
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Companies that require weeks to answer a couple of simple questions
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Companies that can’t get their act together to provide basic content
I could go on, but those will do for now. You’ll be hearing a lot more about such things in my regular posts. I’ll cover each one and a whole lot more besides. The goal? To increase the quality of communication in media interactions. And perhaps to reduce the volume of unwanted traffic in my mailbox.
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