In fact, this story from the New York Post almost went unnoticed.* In his December 25th article, "A gift to all the p.r. people who were blown off in 2014," business reporter John Crudele turns a dozen pitches into a story and outs the 12 folks that sent them his way.
Facebook comments ranged from the expected "he's mean" and "these people are just trying to do their jobs" to the more snarky "bet they include this in their wrap reports" and a deeper comment noting the "mean generation of faceless relationship building" we're forced to deal with these days.
Is the story, and Crudele's approach, mean? I'll leave that up to you to decide. But let's remember two things before you weigh in.
1) Consider the Source: The New York Post notes it's a "tabloid-format" newspaper. And we all know what tabloids tend to be really good at, picking a fight.
2) Target the Pitch: Based on his profile in Cision, you'd wonder why anyone of these folks are pitching Crudele in the first place.** He focuses on topics like stocks, finance issues and related topics. So why in the hell are pitches about beans and regifting being sent his way? Many of the pitches he singled out are clearly not related to his beat.
Do Your Homework
Let's say your pitch does cross his topics of coverage. If I looked up a reporter and read that he has an aggressive writing style and thrives on issue-oriented controversy? I'm reading his last few articles, at a minimum, before deciding to send him something.
Crudele wrote the piece on Christmas Eve. And by wrote, I mean he phoned it in. So he was being lazy to be sure. But I'm not so sure he was being mean as he was simply being himself. And there are an endless number of ways these 12 pitches, and the people that sent them, could have avoided becoming the story.
Thanks to Traci Coulter for the NY Post link. She's one of the good PR folks we like to highlight on this blog because they are most excellent professionals.
**This post was edited to take out Crudele's profile information.
:: Kevin Dugan, @prblog
Can't comment on John Crudele specifically since I've never had the need to pitch the NY Post ... but as to point #2 - I wouldn't be surprised if his Cision profile was extremely vague. And like it or not, most kids working in agency, simply don't have the luxury of time under agency's billable hour models to thoroughly research the right reporters ... especially reporters working generalist beats. Cision makes a lot of money from the PR industry yet their profile information is more often than not woefully "under-reported" - Is it time for Cision to open their databases to let included journalists easily add to (or change) their profile information what they cover, what kind of stories interest them, etc. Seems like it could cut down on a lot of misdirected pitches and overflowing inboxes that seem to piss reporters off.
ReplyDelete