Eric Lundquist, editor-in-chief (since 1999) of eWeek, doesn't want to hear about the latest in MP3 technology. For the purposes of eWeek (400,000-circ) he's strictly
interested in stories about b2b technology. The publication, which in 1999 morphed into eWeek from PC Week amid the Internet craze, survived the tech market meltdown and remains
one of Ziff Davis Media's franchise titles. It covers business technology across-the-board and has an in-house lab operation for product testing. But when it comes to effectively
pitching the publication Lundquist says many PR execs fail the test.
Lundquist's Bugaboos
- Calls without context. Lundquist likes story pitches to dovetail with some existing b2b technology trends, but all too often he gets calls from PR people who are,
essentially, dialing for dollars. "I get an awful lot of calls that start off, 'Hey, I have a new product. You want to do a story on it?' and my response is, 'Well, why?'" When
confronted with the question PR execs often respond with silence, which "makes it easier for me to say no," Lundquist says. - The PR equivalent to unwanted telephone solicitations. Blind e-mails followed by voice-mails, which alienate Lundquist. Such calls smack of annoying solicitations. "They're
not unlike the calls you get just as you're about to sit down to dinner at 6 p.m., and the callers have the same mentality," he says. "You're just on some list and too often [the
PR execs] don't even know what they're doing." - Failing to see the forest for the [Web] trees. Lundquist says communication execs are good at using the "front-end" of the Web, i.e. staying on top of e-mails, but fail to
take advantage of the "back-end" in terms of researching the publication before pitching. "All they have to do is take four of five minutes to study the Web site, look at the
competitors and do a bit of research," he says. "Not everybody has a subscription to the publication but everyone has access to the Web...Saying you didn't have the time is no
excuse."
What Works
For Lundquist, simply reverse all of the above bugaboos.