How do you pitch the media? You write them a pitch they can actually use. Most news is written on an 8th grade level. This is so everyone watching can understand, even rushed or distracted. When it’s easy to follow, you are more likely to keep someone’s attention.
This is important for you to know when pitching the media. You want your pitch to reflect this simplicity. If you write it to “wordsmithy” and it’s hard for the journalist to follow, how can you expect their audience to understand it? Always remember, our goal as media experts is to provide value to a journalist’s audience. When you do this, it’s a win-win-win. The reader/viewer gets a story they want to learn about. The journalist had made their audience happy. And you have reaped the benefit of being positioned as the expert in your industry.
Click on the video above and/or read the transcript below to hear this week’s Free Publicity Friday tip which is all about how to write pitches the media will love. If you have’n’t joined the PR Challenge yet, make sure you do at www.YourPRChallenge.com . Give me 10 minutes a day for 10 days and see yourself in the media!
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Transcript
Hey there everybody. It’s Christina Daves with this weeks Free Publicity Friday PR Tip.
This week I want to talk about how you write a pitch. It’s really important that when you write your pitch you’re writing it to an eighth grader. Most news writers write news stories at the eighth grade level. Now, if you’re pitching a very advanced business type program, you could up level that a little bit but for most mainstream media, really do your pitch in very simplified terms. Don’t use really big words. Keep it very simple so that the majority of the people watching, and watching quickly, and watching distractedly, could still get it and understand and comprehend the story.
So pitch to the media just like you would pitch to an eighth grader. So that is this week’s PR Tip. I hope you like that. We’ve been doing these every Friday for about two and a half years so there’s a whole library of them on YouTube. You can check them out.
And I also encourage you to join our Challenge. If you haven’t done that yet. It’s at YourPRChallenge.com. It’s a 10-day PR Challenge. We work on branding, positioning you as an influencer, pitching local, then pitching nationally. You should get quite a bit out of ten days of that and be able to really comfortably start pitching the media. So I cannot wait to see you in the Challenge and I can’t wait to see you in the media.