Flip the script with media-first pitching

The standard way of crafting a pitch is to start with your organization. You have a business need, a new product or a bit of data you want to get out there. Then you reverse-engineer the pitch list based on who might be interested in that particular story.

But what if you flipped the script and started with the journalist in mind? Not just ever-popular client demand to appear in the New York Times, but finding exactly the right journalist to help tell your story, rather than crafting a story and then retrofitting it to a journalist?

Campbell Levy, founder and CEO of Denver-based Campstories, calls this “media-first pitching.”

“We don’t come up with a pitch first,” he told PR Daily in a recent interview. “Instead, we come up with, what are the top targets? How are they going to move the needle for our clients? And what is the story that we can write specifically for that outlet? And then we usually go further and we say, who is the person or what is the section that we feel like is perfect for telling our client’s story?”

Start with research and audience in mind

Your end goal, of course, is not to impress a journalist. It’s to impress an audience. Which is why the audience should be the first place to start your pitch, Levy said.

“Ideally, you’re starting with insights, research, data. You’re starting with personas,” Levy said. “I realize that not all clients are going to have personas. But that is ideally where you want to start, down to the demographic who is buying this product. Are their aspirational audiences where you’re seeing incremental uptick? You can affect those in a big way.”

For instance, Campstories works with a company that operates self-guided adventure tours. The natural inclination might be to think its most common customer is young and fit. But the average customer is actually over 55 years old, with some in their 80s. Wanting to reach more of these customers, Campbell’s team segmented them geographically and found that New York and Colorado were hotspots. Then they began to target local media in those areas.

Know your journalist

The Wall Street Journal is a Holy Grail media hit for many, many clients. Media-first pitching meant that Campstories closely studied the Journal to better understand what they looked for in a data story.

While Levy’s client had some good data, he’d noticed that one data set isn’t enough for the Wall Street Journal. They always want multiple numbers that support one another and tell a broader story, he said. So, his team found another study from a travel association that parallelled and reinforced their own, proprietary data and set their sights on a freelancer who frequently worked with the Journal.

“Listen, I know editors love multiple sides of the story,” Levy said he told the freelancer. “And so, what I’ve gone ahead and done is, I put all this data together for you to show that much older people are going on these adventure trips than you would otherwise think. We all love a perception-bending story.”

Armed with the data Levy provided in a tidy package, the freelancer was able to pitch the story, which Levy said will likely run in the next few weeks.

There’s another component to making sure you’re putting the media first in your pitches: having all the sources ready to go. This can not only make a pitch more attractive, but it can also help a story go from idea to ink much faster. In the case of the Wall Street Journal article, the reporter needed to conduct all their interviews in a two-day span. If the data and interviewees weren’t ready to go, the whole thing could have fallen through.

“A lot of times it’s just realizing (journalists) are wearing so many hats at this point. What can I do to take work off their plate and sort of put it onto my plate?” Levy said.

Getting started with media-first pitching

Once you’ve identified the audience you want to reach, Levy suggests creating a document with 20 or more of the outlets you believe will impact that demographic. From there, work backward on each pitch. What story will best fit that journalist’s needs? What will speak to their audience?

Using this approach instead of matching a story to the journalist after it’s fully formed can save time, Levy said.

“What I find is when you write that pitch, and then you go to send it to somebody at Conde Nast Traveler, you realize that it’s not right for them. You’re gonna have to rewrite it anyway. And so going hyper-tailored that way works,” Levy said.

He said about every third email pitch he uses this approach with gets opened. Even if it isn’t exactly right, showing that you’ve done your research can open a conversation to another story.

“I love the chase, as most PR people do,” Levy said. “And so, I think this is a good way to create relationships.”

Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.