For me, at least, Twitter is the way to get hold of me—my DMs are open, and most journalists’ are. But emails are good too and most journalists will make them publicly available.
Send us an email or a DM! But first make sure that the journalist in question is interested in the sort of thing you’re pitching. I keep marking PR emails as spam, because they’re obviously just auto-sending to some list, and I don’t give a toss if some tech company is having a roundtable meeting about some acquisition or whatever. If, however, I get a personalised email from someone who obviously knows my work and has thought that whatever they’re emailing might actually be of interest, I’ll always at least reply, even if I don’t use the info in a piece.
Yes, but don’t spam them out—see 2. Get the journalist’s attention and ask if he or she would be interested. (Although: it’s just occurred to me that this is like the breeding habits of elephants vs the breeding habits of frogs. Either spend years raising the baby and getting high rates of survival but low rates of actual birth, or fire out tens of thousands of eggs and fertilise them all at once and hope that one or two survive. Maybe the latter works and I am giving you a survivorship bias-tainted account because I, obviously, ignore the large majority of them, as they expect.)
Approaching journalists:
How can we reach them?
What is the best way to pitch an idea to a journalist?
Do press releases still work? (Is it worth sending them to the contact emails, since it’s hard often to get direct contact)
Maybe Twitter is a good idea?
For me, at least, Twitter is the way to get hold of me—my DMs are open, and most journalists’ are. But emails are good too and most journalists will make them publicly available.
Send us an email or a DM! But first make sure that the journalist in question is interested in the sort of thing you’re pitching. I keep marking PR emails as spam, because they’re obviously just auto-sending to some list, and I don’t give a toss if some tech company is having a roundtable meeting about some acquisition or whatever. If, however, I get a personalised email from someone who obviously knows my work and has thought that whatever they’re emailing might actually be of interest, I’ll always at least reply, even if I don’t use the info in a piece.
Yes, but don’t spam them out—see 2. Get the journalist’s attention and ask if he or she would be interested. (Although: it’s just occurred to me that this is like the breeding habits of elephants vs the breeding habits of frogs. Either spend years raising the baby and getting high rates of survival but low rates of actual birth, or fire out tens of thousands of eggs and fertilise them all at once and hope that one or two survive. Maybe the latter works and I am giving you a survivorship bias-tainted account because I, obviously, ignore the large majority of them, as they expect.)
Indeed it is: see 1.