When you think about “pitching the media,” what comes to mind? Finding a journalist’s email or social page and sending a message? Calling the local outlet’s news desk?

Before either of those steps happen, there are three essential tasks that can make your pitch stand out – and make the journalist want to work with you.

1. Craft Your Story.

Likely the most important of these essentials, creating a concise, clear, and strong story is vital for a good media pitch.

Using Henrich Communications Four Questions strategy to creating compelling messages: think through your goals, your audience’s goals (that’s for both the journalist and, in turn, their audience), the overlap between your goals and your audience’s goals, and, finally, any curveballs – things that will make the journalist less likely to move forward with your story.

Using these HC Four Questions, you can feel confident that you’re crafting a message that will resonate.
(For a deeper dive into the steps of building your message, check out our blog – The Four Questions to Ask When Building Powerful Messages.)

2. Get Permission.

The next step before pitching an idea to media is to get permission to reach out to media from all involved partners.

While you will, no doubt, pitch an idea that sheds a positive light on your story, the fact is that once a journalist comes into play, that person will make the story his or her own. You will no longer have complete control of the end product that is published or produced.

For this reason, we recommend confirming permission from your partners prior to reaching out to journalists. Unfortunately, we have heard of cases when a great story captures the interest of a journalist, only for the organization not to be able to deliver on their pitch. That is pretty hard to come back from when it comes to building rapport with that journalist and their media outlet.

3. Provide Availability.

The third task before reaching out to media is to fully understand the availability of the major players in the story that you’re pitching.

Journalists are among the many professionals who are typically working on tight deadline with an exceedingly heavy workload. For this reason, anything you can do to make their job a little bit easier is greatly appreciated by the journalist.

Including in your pitch that this expert on the topic (someone from your organization, perhaps) is available to talk on the topic on X, Y, and Z days shows the journalist that you can be a true asset to them and will likely be easier to schedule with – especially when you’ve already given them an idea of availability.

The big takeaway from this task is to make sure once you put the idea out there to a journalist, you should be prepared and willing to adapt to the journalist’s needs for getting the information for the story.

With these three steps, you will be very well prepared to send that email, make that call, or DM the journalist whose coverage can help provide the third-party validation that earned media delivers!