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Top Tips On Approaching A Journalist With A Story

Guest post by: Keredy Stott

Article Overview: Over the years it has become increasingly difficult to catch the eye of national journalists and those reporters working on busy consumer and trade magazines, mainly due to the pressures placed upon their time and the growing amount of press releases they are sent. If you do manage to contact them on the phone, you have just a few moments to grab their attention with your story and even then they will often tell you to email them the details. Here are a few top tips from leading UK PR company, Punch Communications, for the next time you want to sell your business to the media.

Top Tips On Approaching A Journalist With A Story

Over the years it has become increasingly difficult to catch the eye of national journalists and those reporters working on busy consumer and trade magazines, mainly due to the pressures placed upon their time and the growing amount of press releases they are sent. If you do manage to contact them on the phone, you have just a few moments to grab their attention with your story and even then they will often tell you to email them the details. Here are a few top tips from leading UK PR company, Punch Communications, for the next time you want to sell your business to the media. Over the telephone

• Don't spend a long time introducing yourself and your business, tell them the crux of your story succinctly
• Outline why you think they will want to run your story by linking it to another article they have written or the area they are interested in
• Explain what you can offer, whether that's an interesting interviewee, photographs or video content for their website

By email

• By all means send a traditional press release - in the body of the email rather than an attachment - but short, sharp bullet points can be just as good in selling a story
• Include links to your website, especially to relevant pages or to other external content, such as your twitter profile or videos on YouTube
• Don't forget that a well worded and grammatically correct email is vitally important, an email littered with typos might devalue your story

Through social networking sites

• Follow relevant journalists and publications on Twitter and if they tweet about a story they are about to write, @reply to introduce yourself to provide comment for the piece
• If they tweet about an article they have written and you enjoyed it retweet it or @reply to tell them
• Some publications and radio stations, especially local ones, have Facebook groups so like them and interact with them when they are discussing topics relevant to your business

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Article Tags: facebook, journalists, magazines, newspapers, PR, social media, twitter
Referred by: http://www.punchcomms.com



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