With PR’s many facets, sometimes the essentials, such as PR professionals’ relationships with reporters, get crowded out. Yet at its essence PR is about transmitting a message or a story. And the recipient sometimes is a journalist—in fact, your clients or CEO might say journalists are the only recipients who matter. We asked journalists and PR pros about ways to build better relationships with each other.
Thomas Heath
Columnist/Reporter, The Washington Post
At first glance you wouldn’t think of The Washington Post's Tom Heath as a favorite of PR professionals. Yet one of our sources, a highly respected PR and communications professional, raves about him. “He’s a great reporter,” the source says. “He’s tough, but fair,” she adds. We approach with trepidation. The last thing we expect to hear comes next: “I have a core group of smart, experienced PR people who help me all the time…I can give you example after example,” says Heath, a veteran reporter and columnist at The Washington Post. “They know me, they know my column, they know how I like to work,” he says. Heath reports and writes columns about local business, entrepreneurs and companies large and small in the Washington area. Previously, he wrote about the business of sports for the Post’s sports section for most of a decade. “They know I want numbers, so they’ll talk numbers” early in their pitches, he says. When members of this group of PR pros propose that Heath interview a local business leader “they’ve done their homework and they’ve screened [and prepared the interview subject],” Heath adds. After that, “they stay out of the way [and let me do my job]…they know I don’t like conference calls.”
Good PR people also “know I’m local (translation: he wants local stories) and they have a good sniff detector (we’ll leave that translation to you). So many of my columns have come from suggestions from PR people.” He mentions a June 28 column about the Boland family, which brought air conditioning to the nation’s capital and today controls the climate inside The Kennedy Center, several Smithsonian museums and Reagan National Airport among many other venues. “Their pitch was just a few sentences.” He also points to Christopher Ullman, managing director of communications at The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. “He knows his stuff inside and out, knows my needs and sets me up with good sources.” Ullman also is available promptly and during off-hours, when editors are apt to question Heath about something. “Generally PR people are very good about wanting to get stuff right.”
Rookie Pitchers: How does a PR person, someone he doesn’t know, get admitted to Heath’s inner circle? “Send me a short pitch by email, personalize it by telling me about something you read that I’ve written recently. You can do that in a line or two, and then get to your point, fast,” he says. There’s a practical reason behind his requirements. “With the constraints of the newsroom, reporters need to be efficient with their time these days,” he says. “There aren’t as many of us as there used to be. The days are gone when you had time to chat on the phone” [with PR people]. About the note you send him, “it better not look like you wrote my name at the top and then sent me a note that you’ve sent to 200 other reporters. I won’t read it.” That’s too close to “spray and pray,” he says. He also routinely hangs up on “robo calls.” Rookie mistakes? “They’ve not done their homework. They don’t know me or what I’ve written recently and haven’t taken the time to learn.”
Joseph Anselmo
Editor-in-Chief
Aviation Week and Space Technology
An award-winning journalist, Joe Anselmo leads the team at arguably the leading magazine of the global aviation and space industries, whose former owner was McGraw-Hill. Its current owner is Penton. Still, he receives errant pitches. “You wouldn’t believe it. There are so many bad [PR people] out there…and lazy ones. They send you a form letter” instead of personalizing a pitch, he says. Similar to Heath, Anselmo groups PR people into two categories, insiders and outsiders. “We rarely get a good pitch from outsiders.” He adds, “but we get blitzed with 100 pitches a day.”
For outsiders to become insiders Anselmo counsels PR people “to learn what we write about, pay attention to the publication you’re pitching.” A 25-year veteran of trade journalism, Anselmo also has an inner circle of PR people he trusts and who trust him, pointing to Bill Reavis, late of Honeywell, as an example. “It all boils down to relationships. [Good PR people] will talk on background and trust that you won’t burn their confidence,” he says. “They also won’t waste your time.”
An example of this is when “a PR person invites us to their company’s headquarters; we’ll get an in-depth tour and access to top executives. And then they’ll send us home with something” (translation: a bit of SWAG, sure, but far more important is an exclusive story, perhaps one that can go on the magazine’s cover). “Feed us a scoop. We love exclusives because we can get our readers information that they can’t get free, on the Internet,” he says.
Still, he doesn’t mind writing a story with an embargo that also will get pitched to other publications. “We like embargoes. They give us time to write and double-check stories.” Unlike Heath, he’ll participate in a briefing alongside other publications. “They’re fine, except you have to worry that someone’s going to break the embargo.”
Pitching Coach: Anselmo takes pitches from newcomers via email, although if he doesn’t recognize your phone number, “I won’t answer your call.” Besides doing your homework, Anselmo urges PR people to send pitches in bulletpoints “and tell me quickly why this will be important to our readers. In other words, why I should care about your pitch.” And don’t be afraid to “include some color in your pitch…be creative.”
Brenda Siler
Associate State Director, Communications, AARP
Clearly AARP's Brenda Siler’s been listening to journalists like Heath and Anselmo. “I’m definitely an old-school girl, but I realize times change and so does the way we do our jobs.” She says relationships with journalists remain critical to PR pros, but constructing bridges with writers has to be done differently now. “You can’t wine and dine reporters,” she says. “Most reporters don’t have time to leave the office.” Instead she reaches out to journalists on social media. “Read what they write and then re-tweet their story or their feed,” she says. “That butters them up, but it also shows that you’re out there and interested in them. It works better than taking them out to lunch, although some executives [and clients] don’t understand that.”
She also stresses relationship building “before you have an event or news you want a journalist to cover. You have to lay the groundwork.” Another tip: Find out what a journalist would like to cover besides what he/she is reporting. “Ask about a story they’d like to write. That can give you ideas for a pitch.”
Inside Pitch: Siler thinks like a journalist when pitching, via social media. She’ll tweet an item that links to her blog, where the larger story is located. She makes sure to add a “.” at the start of her tweet, before the reporter’s Twitter handle, so the reporter and his/her followers see her message. “I’m pitching the media, but also pitching the general public.”
She also thinks like a journalist when composing news releases. “Instead of making it a standard release, organize it with the 5 W’s. Make sure you let reporters know why this story is important to their readers. Who is impacted by the story? Focus on the why.”
An example occurred with an AARP report that was released nationally. The report rated various cities for their liveability for people older than 50. Siler excerpted sections that were relevant to Washington, D.C., residents since the city received a high rating and then contacted D.C.-based reporters with links to that section of the report. The links also were on her blog post. “With so few reporters writing so many stories these days, you have to figure out how to get your news to the head of the line,” she says. “And don’t invite reporters to events that are not going to be “change events,” they don’t have time to cover them.”
Elizabeth Hillman
SVP, Communications, Discovery Education
Like Siler, Liz Hillman, who leads communications for Discovery’s education arm, is a combination of old school and modern thinking.
“Nothing replaces the ability to sit down in person with someone and build a professional relationship,” she says.
“Recently, I was able to sit down with a wonderful editor [at a trade show] with whom I talk on a regular basis but this was the first time that we met in person…the brainstorming that we did is proving very beneficial for both of us.”
On the other hand, “reporters are incredibly stretched these days and so it’s harder and harder for them to get out of the office. Be sensitive to that, don’t waste their time. Try to volunteer to come to their office for a quick coffee. Or only reach out to them when you have a strong story to tell and you know that it fits their purview.”
Her bosses understand this, she says. “I’m lucky to work for a company where our executives truly value the important role that the communications teams play in the overall strategy of the company. They trust our opinion and expertise.”
Relationships: “It’s important to me that there is mutual respect [between us and the reporter] and that reporters know if one of us is reaching out, there is a real story there,” she says. “And visa versa, if they tell me that [a pitch] doesn’t work… and the reasons why, I will use that information to try to find a better fit in the future.”
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This article originally appeared in the October 5, 2015 issue of PR News. Read more subscriber-only content by becoming a PR News subscriber today.