Tailoring pitches only goes so far. I do my best to only send relevant releases to journalists, but its not a perfect science… nor should it be.

Chris argues that we should only send material to editors and journalist that reflect their sensibilities and taste. Over the years, i have learned that while the writers I work with stick within certain beats, that doesn’t always reflect their sensibilities. Most writers are still writing outside of their taste, or have a much wider splay of interests than their editors give them freedom to explore.

And why not push an editor’s/writer’s envelope? Isn’t the idea to expand and learn and introduce NEW idea’s and events and product and story to the reader? Not the already trampled parameters the writers/editors set for themselves? Should we not try to expand the narrow road some writers and editors traverse?

We as publicists also have an obligation to our clients to at least try and find the angle… to do our best to explore the outer rim of plausible placement. We also do not ALWAYS know what stories are in the pipeline and when a pitch we are servicing might be more relevant than expected…

…to be honest, some of my very best placements have come from sending out ’shot in the dark’ emails…. of which some would clearly have found me on Chris’s list for sending…

*shrugs*

But journalists could not do their jobs without PR people feeding them information and pre-written copy. Sure, there are still some hard nosed old-school journalists out there. But mostly, they just run press releases.

Even in Wired.

Another thought: why don’t PR agencies have digital news feeds that work nicely – ideally i’d like to just subscribe to something relevent to what i’m writing about.

Final thought i’ve worked with some great PRs that often know their clients industry better than the media and delight in being challenged on a release – there are good prs out there. Promise.