How to follow-up an email pitch

by Jaimie Abbott

How to follow up an email pitch! If you don’t hear back from the journalist after you send your press release to them, it is definitely worth following it up with an email or text.

You need to think about timings. A general rule is call in the morning for any newsroom, even if they are 24/7. So check what deadlines your target media is working to and make sure you avoid them. For example, if it’s the evening news round up on TV, don’t call them late afternoon.

I used to work in a TV newsroom in regional New South Wales, people would call us in the afternoon when we were busy writing, editing and voicing our stories. Don’t call TV newsrooms after lunchtime unless you have to. So mornings are the best time around 9:30am is when I would say is the best time to call.

For radio, don’t call them as you’re leading up to the hour. Radio journalists are often on hourly and sometimes half hourly bulletins, but generally hourly. So if they may be working to get their bulletin up right up until 11am. Don’t call them at 10:50am and try to talk to them to get to pitch your story. It’ll annoy them because it’s a stressful time in that second half of the hour.

If you are trying to get in a national newspaper, don’t call last thing in the day. Print journos are busy or they might have later deadlines at 8pm. With regional newspapers they sometimes have a weekly deadline. Don’t call them on that deadline day. It’s very, very busy. Where I live we have a weekly paper and they go to print on Tuesday afternoon. If I’m organising a story, I’m not going to organise it on a Tuesday because their journalists are heavily under the pump to put the paper together. They probably won’t come out to cover my story because they’ve already put together the majority of the upcoming edition. But similarly I probably wouldn’t organise an event on a Wednesday because often it’s the time the paper comes out a week later, it’s too late. It’s old news. So generally I’ll do something on a Friday or Monday for that newspaper who goes to print on a Tuesday afternoon.

Always prepare before you call. My media pitch guide which I sell (or FREE as a Public Relations Academy Member) is going to help you do that. It takes you step by step to prepare for your media pitch. It’s really important that you prepare because a journalist might say “not interested” or “haven’t read it.” That’s not the final “no.” It just means that you haven’t either pitched the story properly and they may not know the newsworthiness value. So in that case you need to convince them of that or they just genuinely have not seen the press release or your email.

You need to be infectious. You need to be so excited about your story because that enthusiasm will catch on and the reporter will be interested in covering a story. Don’t overdo it. But you do want to have some sort of excitement in your voice and in your pitch. And crucially they need to hear that there is a wide interest in the story. Think about their readers and your audience because the journalist is the conduit to your audience, also known as your ideal customer avatar.