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Covering the country's business one city at a time, American City Business Journals take an in-depth look at 41 U.S. cities, serving more than 3 million readers total. Atlanta's Journal has the
highest circulation of the group at 28,723. The company recently expanded its operations to offer the best stories from its papers at http://www.bizjournals.com, a local-business clearinghouse that offers detailed demographics and other data about its areas of coverage. Overall, the
Journals' readers have a median age of 48, an average household income of $191,000 and 76% are college graduates.
Contacts
There's no magic button that sends pitches to all 41 editors. A complete staff list for each paper is available at the site under the "Contact Us" link. Each Journal offers an
electronic form for pitching through the main site, but you'll have better luck making direct contact.
Managing editors at select JournalsAtlanta: Mark Meltzer, 404/249-1020,
[email protected]
Baltimore: Craig Ey, 410/576-1161, ext. 115, [email protected]
Dallas: Karen Britton Nielsen, 214/696-5959 ext. 124, [email protected]
Minneapolis/St. Paul: Adam Weintraub, 612/288-2108, [email protected]
Sacramento: Lee Wessman, 916/447-7661
Washington: Douglas Fruehling, 703/312-8342, [email protected]
Pitch Tips
The key word for each of the publications is local.
"We prefer very local story pitches and we only write about companies that are either based here (in Dallas-Ft. Worth) or have a very large presence here," says Karen Britton
Nielsen, managing editor of the Dallas Businss Journal. "National stories would only work if we could localize them for our market."
"These days, email is the best way to reach us," says Craig Ey, managing editor of the Baltimore Business Journal.
Nielsen agrees, but isn't a fan of attachments. The Journals don't all have the latest technology, plus "When it's pasted in the face of the email, it makes it easier to see
right away if we are interested in the information," she says.
Comments
Story ideas should be focused on business, of course, but many of the journals run special sections several times a year.
"Any pitches that have an impact on our market or that involve local companies are fair game," Nielsen says. "We have more than 40 special sections a year, so trend ideas would
fit well with those."
Barth says story ideas or press releases should focus on anything from a new high-tech company to broader issues such as healthcare coverage, as long as it affects the local
area. A recent pitch that made it into print involved a
local judge. News often overlaps into areas such as law, healthcare and even crime.
"I usually tell reporters that almost every story has a business angle - crime, for example, has an impact on business," Ey says. He adds that an ideal pitch could be about a
company that just signed a lease for another 50,000 square feet of office space and is planning to hire 300 more people. "It doesn't always have to be that big, but we do always
want to know what the news is."
"We like breaking news," Ey says. "Even though we are a weekly, we have a very hard-edged front page-full of news that readers can't get anywhere else." And that means hard-
hitting business news. "No interviews for celebrity's sake," Barth warns.