Praxis Makes Perfect

In my 22 years of corporate, agency & nonprofit PR/public affairs, I have yet to encounter a client or employer’s media list—especially those created from commercial databases (Vocus, Cision, et. al.)—that has not contained a significant number of wildly inappropriate inclusions and inaccurate listings. Granted, much of this stems from operator error (GIGO) in selecting the wrong parameters for choosing various categories of outlets, niches, etc. But my point is that we can never rely on uncorroborated press contacts.

I used to be an editor and writer with The Associated Press and The Seattle Times. Getting unsolicited press releases was, and remains, part of the job for most journalists (and other influencers, such as analysts). But if you listen to most major-market reporters—and, especially, tech reporters—it’s plain they’re being inundated and that many of them resent receiving mistargeted pitches. As a result, an increasing number of them don’t want to be sent anything they don’t request.  

I have been telling PR students, new practitioners, junior staffers—even veteran PR pros—for years that sending an unsolicited press release to a stranger who’s never heard of you or your client, relying on a database of unknown accuracy (since you didn’t verify the media list before using it), is unprofessional and unacceptable behavior. Simply being included in someone’s database does not constitute agreement to be spammed.

The PR profession has long been plagued by lazy or uncaring practitioners who broadcast their announcements to as many media outlets and influencers as they have on their media lists, regardless of the story’s fit, and without bothering to confirm whether each name should even be on the list.

What puzzles me about this continuing practice is why anyone would blindly trust a media database, and send out material without confirming the media list’s accuracy. What if the media database upon which you’re relying has misspellings, incorrect titles and outdated contact info? How will you know that your pitch will reach its intended recipient if you don’t first verify the list?

In these times of shrinking newsrooms, with sudden reorganizations, mass layoffs and early-retirement buyouts, the information contained in any subscription-media database is potentially already out-of-date. Journalists might get briefly sick, go on medical leave or vacation, or take a sabbatical or fellowship. They could be reassigned, fired, quit or retire. Any PR practitioner who fails to confirm each person on her inherited media list, or a freshly generated, database-derived list, is doing a disservice to her client or employer that could have significant impacts on a PR initiative or campaign.

You only have a single opportunity to make a great first impression with a reporter. Thus, any pitching campaign needs to verify—before the first call is made or e-mail sent—every name on the list, along with its spelling (often pronunciation too), proper title, beat, contact info and pitching preference.

Even if reporters need PR content and contacts to do their job, we nonetheless can’t afford to irritate them, especially by sending them something that plainly has no value to their audiences—which we would have learned had we spent the time to research the media outlet’s audience(s), the reporter’s beat(s), favorite topics and what she’s written in the past. Journalists continually harp on this, but their advice too often falls on deaf, or closed, ears.

Journalists have little respect for anyone who doesn’t do her homework in approaching them, and practitioners who call to follow up on a mistargeted press release will only make matters worse for themselves and their client or employer.

Obviously, if you have a legitimate hard-news story that most outlets are going to be interested in covering, shotgunning your announcement may not cause any problems. But I think that we still should strive to find an acceptable line between best practice and operating solely on unconfirmed assumptions—IOW, between “good” and “good enough.”

In practice, this means every PR practitioner should introduce herself to each name on her media list, briefly describe the industry news which her client or employer can provide, and learn whether the journalist would like to be contacted in the future. And all of this should happen before any initial pitch is even contemplated, or made.

The most effective PR agencies have built successful relationships with their media contacts, who trust them to only send newsworthy stories. Regrettably, our profession still has its share of unscrupulous companies that continue to engage in spamming improperly targeted press releases to every media outlet far and wide, relying on the huge volume of their e-mails to produce results for clients who don’t care about what’s done in their name. Such PR firms often declare that complaints from spammed journalists are rare, but few journalists have the time to stop and call (or even e-mail) with a cease-and-desist demand. Most simply delete the spam announcement and look for something newsworthy to pursue.

One of the hardest things I ever have to do with clients or employers is inform them that the announcement they want to make will not interest the press. Clients rarely can see past their blinders, and assume that if something is impressive to them that it will be of interest to everyone else—which is why so many media lists are filled with every outlet under the sun that deals even tangentially with a given subject.

Too many practitioners are unwilling to deliver the bad news if it means a loss of income. They take the client’s money, write the best release possible promoting something with little or no news value, then send it out hoping for hits. This practice devalues our profession and reinforces the long-standing misperception that PR is only media relations, and that publicity is the chief benefit of PR.

Every practitioner frequently has to rely on her best guesses, based on years of professional experience. I’m not gainsaying that occasional necessity. But we are ethically compelled to deliver to our clients the best and most accurate data and work products that we can create. If we have to charge more for delivering our best effort—the comprehensive research required to create a completely accurate media list—then everybody wins, because the client will get more hits from a properly vetted list.

No one argues that the subscription databases are perfect, but no practitioner can afford to assume they are. With just a few fone calls to confirm names, spellings, titles, beats, contact info and pitching preferences, any media list can be transformed from something riddled with unknown inaccuracies into a perfect resource. If that sounds like a huge task, well—that’s why God makes interns. (And assistant A/Es.) The larger the organization, the easier such homework becomes.