Earned Media Pitching in a World of AI Slop
When I left my last job as an energy reporter for E&E and Politico before joining Lot Sixteen, I had nearly 15,000 unread emails in my inbox.
From the perspective of my inbox-zero aspirations, the red icon on the email app was more akin to a scarlet letter of 21st century communication shame, a moral failing of correspondence laziness, a dereliction of my journalistic duty to leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth.
In reality, there wasn’t enough time in a working day to keep up with the onslaught of forgettable and often regrettable pitches/interview offers/product launches/press releases that would come my way daily. I also wasn’t the worst offender. I’ve seen former colleagues’ inboxes with unread emails in the 20,000 and 30,000s – gigabytes of unread messages clogging data center storage capacities across the country.
A reporter’s job responsibilities are by their very nature public facing. If you want the tips and scoops needed to make a name for yourself in the media industry, you need to keep your email as open and available as possible. But like the whack-a-mole that pops its head up, availability does not always translate to usability.
As the news industry shrinks and more companies invest in public relations help, the deluge only grows more concentrated. Estimates peg the number of PR pros outnumbering reporters nearly six to one, and that ratio is only growing. What that means in practice is a jostling of PR reps firing off emails to get reporters’ attention at rates that are overwhelming to say the least.
Add to the equation emerging artificial intelligence technologies that some PR companies are now touting as a new wave of mass pitching, it’s easy to see how your company announcement or thought leadership interview offer is almost certainly getting lost in an avalanche of inbox slop.
In an information overload environment, how can you break through?
Lot Sixteen’s strong bias is that whether you call it “spray and pray” or a so-called “shots on goal approach”, it’s a big mistake.
We take a different approach to reporter pitching.
Our opinion – and the recommendation we make to clients – is quality matters more than quantity – and a personal touch goes a long way to bridging the digital divide.
With former reporters on staff, almost all the pitches Lot Sixteen sends out go through a quality control sniff test before ever getting sent – all with the goal of answering a simple question: would I respond to this if it landed in my inbox? It seems like common sense, but news judgment is like a sixth sense – it needs to be honed over years of ink for it to have any value.
We also take time to carefully craft press lists – and actively work to keep them updated – to make sure the reporters receiving our pitches will actually care about what we have to say. Nothing will turn off a reporter quicker than a general lumping of their work into issues outside their beat.
Another common sense idea we keep top of mind but is too often forgotten is to remember that reporters are people too – not just bylines.
Taking the time to cultivate relationships with journalists on a personal level so you’re not showing up out of the blue with the offer of information is important. Lot Sixteen works hard to build relationships, hosting background briefing lunches, happy hours and get-to-know-you coffees frequently with reporters. That’s because when an email pops up in their inbox, they know the signature behind it is a real person who understands their beat, the realities of their day-to-day job responsibilities and is likely offering something of actual value.
Building that trust means understanding that not everything we send reporters ends up in their work. Shaping a story with historical perspective, being a resource to gut check information and flagging new developments without the expectation of a resulting story are as important to relationships as providing quotes and offers for on-the-record interviews.
Our approach isn’t easy – in fact, it takes effort and time. As much as sloppy agency pitching is doomed to failure, sloppy agency pitching using artificial intelligence is just a higher tech version of the same. And any PR flak or agency who think they can replicate a portion of the pitching process with a shotgun approach based on speed and sheer breadth of outreach is in for a rude awakening – not to mention unsatisfied clients.
For pitches to land, you’ve got to create value for the reporter, have unique and interesting angles, offer real news and target your pitches to the right reporters where you’ve built trusted relationships. It will be a while before an AI pitch bot can do all that.
