Hello - I have to confess that I hate pitching, but it seems to be the holy grail of journalism. Seems to me that if u can nail it, you're laughing, and if not, well...
I picked up some good tips in an eBook called How To Be A Journalist (
www.howtobeajournalist.com). Here's a potentially useful snippet:
My three golden rules of pitching are as follows:
1/ Give them the headline
2/ Give them the sell
3/ Knock ’em dead. Quickly
Great – so what does that mean? Well, remember I told you before that you don’t normally have to come up with headlines for your articles? Well, one of the few times you do have to write headlines is now. I’ll explain more and give you some examples in a moment, but what a headline does is show that you have a way with words and understand their publication (hopefully), and it also grabs their attention. Because they will NOT read this: “Hi, Don – I had an idea for something on the Olympics because I was thinking that there must be so many people in the Olympic village who take drugs and I was wondering if there was some sort of ‘dealer’ network and etc etc etc). You’ve lost them already.
The book then explains that instead of writing a rambling "Hello, I've got a vague idea", you should do it like this:
THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE DRUG DEALERS (this is the headline)
12,000 athletes, no booze and lots of adrenaline – it’s a pressure-cooker and only one man can lift the lid (this is the sell)
Ed Smith was the dealer of choice in Atlanta, and the dealer of choice in Seoul. He will be travelling to Beijing this summer with a small team of helpers and the keys to a safety deposit box, the contents of which will be sold to a small band of athletes who risk everything if they get caught. This is drug-running at its most dramatic, but Smith says he is untouchable. He is, after all, the son of a diplomat… (this is the ‘knock ‘em dead’ bit)
No idea if this helps, but I liked it, and it seems to be a solid way of making contact and coming across professionally.
PBR