Updated pitching guidelines

Over the last few months there’s been a significant increase in the number of pitches I’ve received, especially for Digital Business. So I thought it would be worth putting up some up to date guidelines for how to pitch story ideas, or how to pitch content for stories I’ve been commissioned to write.

The Independent on Sunday

Generally the best section for technology and telecoms stories is the “Business Interview” slot, although there’s also some scope for analysis or features, and news stories.

For interviews, the editors will generally only consider CEOs (or sometimes chairman or founders) of companies, though there might be some scope for others, such as chief scientists. As a rule, the paper will not cover VPs or country/regional managers. It helps if the company’s a well-known name in the UK, and if they are listed here, so much the better. In the pitch, give some idea of what they are willing to talk about and why they are likely to interest readers.

For analysis pieces, there does need to a strong topical hook — usually it’s best to discuss the story over the phone first. Deeply technical stories are unlikely to work.

For news, it needs to be an exclusive. Exclusives are a great help with interviews, too.

FT Digital Business

OK, OK calm down. The wait is over.
It’s actually been incredibly hard to decide exactly how to advise people to pitch.

To start, deadlines. The official guidance from the Digital Business website is that background information and offers of interviews should be with the writers six weeks prior to publication. That’s usually four weeks ahead of the copy deadline on the synopsis. The deadline on the synopsis is not the deadline for submitting PR content. I will not even read submissions after the copy deadline – they will be deleted. Sorry. The later you leave it, the less likely I am to be able to include your interviewee.

Second, pitches. A few people have said that the process of creating written submissions is time consuming. So, the best way to pitch is to:

Step 1: send a very brief email indicating your interest, with the name and job title of the spokesperson or persons, availability, and any background you have (white papers, bios, cuttings – better still links to these). Please don’t send any pictures or anything over 500KB.

Step 2: I will then email sources on a ’short list’ asking for a paragraph or two setting out their point of view. This shouldn’t take too long to compile.

Step 3: I will then email or call those people I want to speak to, to set up an interview. I won’t quote from ‘canned’ comment in any case. If I can contact the exec directly, that saves time.

Third, don’t call to ask if I’ve received any of this. I read all submissions. Calling just cuts into the time I have available to respond.

A couple of general pointers

If you are pitching a company, please include the URL. Quite a few people don’t do this, and search engines are not infallible.

If you are putting forward an executive for interview or comment, please either include a short bio (no pictures please) or a link to one. At the very least include their full job title and geographical areas of responsibility.

Usually I won’t be able to quote UK/EMEA or other regional officials, nor marketing officers/corporate comms types for features. Don’t gamble that by leaving this information out of the pitch, I will somehow bend the rules. I will check, and it wastes everyone’s time.

For Digital Business, it is pretty much a hard and fast rule that we don’t quote country or regional execs, or marketing types. The supplement has a global readership.

If this is unreasonable, unworkable or even helpful, please leave a comment or email me at the usual address.

Stephen

New training courses

Over the next month or two we will be launching some new training courses.

The first is a course aimed at PR professionals tasked with setting up and staffing multi-media interviews.

Not everyone has the luxury of a broadcast team (and nor do all clients have the luxury of retaining a broadcast agency). And although there is some overlap, the requirements of podcasters, videocasters and journalists working online do differ from those of the conventional broadcasters.

The course will be a one-day session covering both theory and practice (with a chance to try out some of the kit too), and is suitable for small groups of six to eight people.

Click here to contact us for more information.

Silly soft stuff (*)

The cause of all the trouble (and a little green, as white balance is not my Nokia's strong point)

So an overnight flurry of snow has brought one of the world’s great cities to a halt — yet again.

Leaving aside whether the transport network could be better prepared, how have online services coped?

The web site for my local train company, SouthWest Trains, as well as the pages for National Rail, were down or unreachable during this morning’s commuter peak.

The BBC’s London web pages also contained very little specific information this morning (old-tech Radio 5 Live was a more useful source). The mobile phone network was overloaded, so no luck there either.

So no chance of making it into London for an 08.30 meeting. Separately, the local authority decided to shut my son’s school but the only way to find out was to walk up there and see the queue of parents and kids heading away from the gates. No information on the Richmond Council web site until mid-morning, well after the school run. Apparently some parents sent emails to some other parents, but that rather falls down if the parent on the list doesn’t have a PDA.

The school website does actually say it’s closed today (though isn’t the council’s site a more obvious place to look?) And couldn’t we make better use of the technology? IM, SMS, Twitter even?

Also how many people are really set up for working from home, with secure VPN access and reliable broadband? It’s not just the major disasters that can catch businesses out.

Update

The rail companies’ sites now seem to be up and running again.

If you use and want to follow train services updates that way, you can do so by following this link to Ben Smith’s uktrains wiki.

(*) For the non parents out there, that’s a Thomas the Tank Engine quote. But at least he tried to get through, even though he wouldn’t wear his snowplough.

Are Sterling’s ills an opportunity?

Here’s a thought to kick of 2009.

Clients might be under pressure to cut costs and make their communications budgets go further. How about turning this into an opportunity?

For companies that do business in dollars or euros, the low pound makes doing business with UK suppliers very attractive. A US firm commissioning work here will see their budgets stretch 25 per cent further than a year ago.

That applies to freelance writers — so it probably applies across the communications sphere.

Combine that with the wealth of talent in communications, production and marketing in the UK, and isn’t there is a real chance to win (or keep) work that might otherwise have gone to suppliers in the US or the euro-zone?

And if companies are saving on head count costs, and need to outsource work for international campaigns, the UK also looks highly competitive.

I’m up for the challenge, if you are.

Happy new year to you all

Stephen

Switching on to 90m viewers

According to research firm Gartner, the audience for online video now stands at 90m viewers. Around three-quarters of Internet users watch video content online at least once a month. Moreover, the firm predicts that over a quarter of all online content will be audio or video by 2013.

The analyst behind the research — Whit Andrews — is a respected authority in his field. Of course there will still be a place for written content online, and for print publications too, but Internet video (and audio) is increasingly viable and attractive.

That changes the game for publishers, journalists and marketers. Is our industry ready to play its part?

See here for Gartner’s release on the research.

Point and shoot video journalism

The economies of scale in the consumer electronics business are opening up some interesting possibilities — not just in technology but also in news gathering.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying out a hard-disk based HD video camera for field reporting, mostly recording interviews.

(For those who are interested in this kind of thing, the model we’ve been using is the JVC GZ-HD3

The GZ-HD3. Pic courtesy of JVC.

And no this is not a plug for JVC — the unit was paid for with hard cash.)

The results have been interesting, if somewhat mixed. The camera is relatively compact, at least when set against the professional units we tend to use most of the time, such as Sony’s venerable PD-170 and Z1 cameras. The idea of recording to a hard disk (the Everio also supports a memory card) is also attractive. Tape costs are an issue, especially for editorial projects where budgets are tight, and tape stock is bulky. Instant access to recordings should make a real difference to the time it takes to turn a project around.

But there are downsides. Here’s a summary of my (highly subjective) findings – based purely on using the camera for journalistic applications.

Picture quality is good — certainly more than good enough for web use. The Everio uses an MPEG-2 based file format, rather than AVCHD. This is meant to offer higher quality in some circumstances, for example with movement. That said, the camera did show some motion blurring when interviewees were speaking, especially in close up.

Lighting is crucial. Any lighting-cameraman will tell you this, of course. In a well-lit room the Everio performed really well. In the same room, but using only ambient, artificial light, results were only just useable.

Sound quality, which I expected to be a weakness, surprised me. Using an external mic (the Rode NT2 – which has its own battery power, see here for details) sound quality is more than acceptable, even though the Everio has no manual gain control for audio. An external mic adapter would solve the gain control anyway. It would be great to have a proper headphone socket, though, for monitoring, as on JVC’s GZ-HD6.

The software, and the file format, still leave a lot to be desired, however. The JVC format is not supported directly by most video editing software. They supply software for a PC, and on the Mac the workround is to convert the clip via Quicktime. This has the unfortunate effect of making files about 25 per cent larger. So it’s not a case of dragging and dropping the clips into an edit, which is the real point of using a tapeless system in the first place.

As with most consumer kit, it is actually slower to set up in many ways than a pro camera (no manual controls, lots of LCD menus). And although the camera is pretty compact, the need for proper mics, mic cables, some form of lighting and, of course, a tripod means it won’t all fit in a backpack.

But we’ll probably hang on to the Everio, if only for use as a second camera during interviews and for filming vox pops and b-roll. It would be interesting to hear the views of other journalists and communications professionals on this type of kit.

Update: I’ve just added a Beachtek mic adapter, courtesy of eBay, to the above kit, which largely solves the microphone problem…

New blog pages for Stephen Pritchard’s media blog

Welcome to our new home…

Previous posts, from the old hosting provider, are on the right. It’s clunky but it works well enough for now.

Please do bookmark this new address, though, as the feed on the right will vanish when the old blog system is switched off.

Stephen Pritchard