Key Components to Telling Your Story (and Getting the Press and Public to Listen) ...Form and Function (Design and Content)
Part 3 of 3
-Eric Mack

In my first two posts, I covered some of the more conceptual components of the perfect pitch, including finding the right voices, angles and framing for telling your stories, and not forgetting to tell the other side too! Now, for this final installment, let's get down to a few of the remaining nuts and bolts - taking those key facts that hold an entire story together at its core and making them really pop out of your release.

5. Highlight your key facts: I mean literally highlight them. Put those important tidbits, statistics, numbers or other data in a box or a bullet list or at least boldface. Do something to make them stand out. Putting together a box or even a graphic is also enticing to publishers that are always looking for some extra 'fill' material for print or their web presence. You might even put together a bulleted list of short anecdotes or summaries of supporting points that help make your case. While providing that filler, this also serves to summarize your pitch for an overworked and underpaid journalist - so make sure that you're highlighting only the juiciest tidbits to entice the reporter to read the entire release.

There is one caveat to all this, and this is probably a debatable point, but in my experience, it's essential that all the facts you choose to highlight are just that - objective, verifiable facts. In my experience, unless you're highlighting the opinions of some major newsmakers, boldfacing or listing your major arguments or emotional appeals is a turn off. If youv'e done your work, the facts will be compelling enough and you'll gained my interest if you just lay them out and let them speak for themselves.

6. Tell your reporter " where to go " next: Hard to believe but too often I see a release in my inbox without any contact info for further information. Other times, no one answers the contact phone number and/or there's no futher information about reaching anyone quickly. This can kill an otherwise brilliant pitch. Most people reading this post wouldn't dream of sending anything to a reporter without an office, cell and e-mail contact at minimum, but going the extra mile to help lead a reporter in the right direction is likely to pay big dividends .over a longer period of time. And falling short not only wastes an opportunity, it lessens your credibility for the next time.

Next, if your pitch or release has succeeded in piquing the interest of a reporter, the next thing she/he's likely to do is pick up the phone or g et on the web to start researching.

This is a key opportunity to point your intrepid journalist in the right direction, so on the original pitch don't hesitate to include possible interview sources, relevant reports or surveys, websites, other media articles, photos, Youtube videos or just about anything else. Of course, there is a danger of overdoing it - try to cram as many resources into as little space as possible is tricky so be discerning. Forwarding several large documents or articles in the body of an e-mail or attached to multiple e-mails is likely to lead to deletion, either by a spam filter or a human.
Links are gold, shortened links using a tool like TinyURL are even better. A good rule of thumb is to limit your list of links and additional resources to less than half a page, well labeled and organized.

I look forward to receiving your perfect pitches soon!