On Tuesday February 20th, 2024, Britt Klontz & I interviewed freelance journalist, Surena Chande about a range of topics, live on Zoom, before opening up questions to the audience.
We had the best time chatting to Surena, and I wanted to share a few key highlights from our conversations with her. If you couldn’t make the session, but would like to access the recording, just drop me an email – hannah@worderist.com, and I’ll send it over to you.
Before I get into it, here’s a quick introduction to Surena:
Surena Chande
Surena was the SEO Editor at the Mirror and Daily Star, has worked for OK!, and Reach PLC regional titles, and has bylines on the Evening Standard, Metro.co.uk, and many other international publications. Most recently, she worked as a Copywriter at British Airways.
In addition to this, she has also worked as an agency-side PR at Verve Search, and Re:signal, conceiving campaigns and landing linked coverage for a range of clients including ASICS, GoCompare, Tide, BuzzBingo, and more – so she understands better than most the pressures that both PRs and journalists face!
Here are the highlights from our conversation…
Journalists get A LOT of pitches from PRs:
We asked Surena how many PR pitches she used to receive each day when she was working as an SEO Editor at the Mirror:
Do you recall approximately how many pitch emails you were getting a day?
Between 150 to 300 a day.
Plus, it’s likely that many staff journalists are receiving even more pitches than this – check out this tweet from Neil Shaw, Network Content Editor for Reach PLC:
Given the volume of pitches journalists are receiving, how do they feel about follow-ups?
Here’s what Surena had to say:
I don’t mind a follow up at all! Plus, I found that when I was doing digital PR, follow-ups brought me a lot of success as well.
I would say probably send a maximum of two follow-ups. Leave it like a day or two, (never send a follow-up on the same day), and then send one more follow-up after that.
But don’t send more than two follow-ups. I’m still on a lot of news databases, and sometimes I’ll get like six follow-ups, and I’m like, well, clearly I’m not interested.
Relevance is more important than personalisation
Do you need to personalise your PR pitches? Many folks recommend things like referencing articles previously written by the journalist you’re pitching, but Surena said that’s not necessary. She’s far more interested in relevancy (i.e. whether or not this is a suitable story for the beat she’s working), than personalisation:
Saying that you loved 10 of my last articles or whatever makes no difference at all.
I can only cover a story if it’s well-researched, and a good fit for my desk in terms of what we cover. What I care most about is page views. If it’s not going to get me views, I can’t put the time into writing an article.
So personalisation isn’t important in my opinion, but sending pitches which are relevant to my beat really is.
Also, relationships aren’t as important as many people make out:
Got a client who provides you with a big old list of journalist you’re NOT allowed to contact because they’re keen to preserve their relationships with the press? Here’s what Surena has to say:
If someone says, we’ve already got a relationship with that journalist, so you can’t contact them, tell them this:
I couldn’t care less who’s emailing me, and nor could any other journalist.
If the story is a good fit for my beat, and I think it’ll get me page views, I’ll write it up. It doesn’t matter who sends the story to me.
But, being responsive really is important
Whilst Surena highlighted that relationships aren’t important (i.e. she doesn’t mind who’s sending her the pitch); being responsive to any requests she makes really is:
Some PRs will send you a fantastic press release, and you’ll respond asking for say a follow-up comment, or further information from them, but then you don’t hear back for hours, or even days!
That’s embarrassing for you as the journalist, and can cause major problems, e.g. your editor starts losing patience with you.
Make sure you respond quickly to any requests from journalists.
What can PRs do to make journalists’ lives easier?
This was a fantastic question from Laura Mallinson – here it is in full:
“It’s a tough world out there for journalists right now, with lots of redundancies and increased pressures, lots of PRs feel our job will get harder as the pool of people to pitch to gets smaller. What’s your take on the changes in the industry and how can PRs be most helpful, and/or cut through the madness of inboxes for the journalists who are left?”
Here’s Surena’s response:
I think good prospecting is more important now than ever before.
The amount of irrelevant releases I got back then and still do daily is obscene. So please take the time to prospect properly – look at the recent stories each journalist has published, check their socials, etc. Really try to make sure you’re sending your pitches only to the most relevant journalists – we’re already battling insane inboxes and a lot of pressure. Getting loads of irrelevant pitches is so frustrating because it means we miss good stories – there are so many PRs that I’ve marked as spam because I consistently got irrelevant releases from them.
Also, think about your pitch structure and what you’re including: give us the story in the first line, tell us how and where you sourced your data from, give us expert quotes, and provide images if you can. Keep everything in the body of the email, and don’t send attachments – provide a dropbox or google drive link so we can download things like the full data and/or images.
Finally, think about relevance above all else – i.e. how does this story complement or sit alongside the other stories we’re already writing?
I hope you found these highlights interesting!
We covered a whole bunch more in the live session, which I’d be happy to share. If you’d like access to the recording, just drop me an email – hannah@worderist.com, and I’ll send it over to you.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to pitch journalists, you might like to check out my latest article for Buzzstream: How to Write a Media Pitch, and/or sign up for my PR Pitch Writing course.