Pitching Impressions

A Phone

     As I continue my internship, I am always looking for things to do to gain new experiences in the public relations world.  Besides from writing and sending out press releases to news outlets, writing short pitch emails to different news outlets and following up with phone calls afterwards are two very important aspects of pubic relations.  Press releases are generally long and not individualized to a specific news outlet.  The purpose is to try to get information out about a story Rather, they are sent out to many news outlets with a more generalized type of information.  On the other hand, pitches are much shorter types of information that are much more specific to each news outlet.  Each potential story can be targeted to an individual news outlet, with the hopes that they will be interested in writing about it.  When an opportunity to pitch an annual event in Shepherdstown came up at Platinum PR, I immediately volunteered to write the pitches and email them out to several news outlets in the area.  I genuinely enjoyed writing the pitches and finding new ways to spin the same story to try to make different news outlets interested in it.  After successfully sending emails to many different news outlets, I was asked to make follow up phone calls to all of the outlets a couple days later.  Although I was incredibly apprehensive and somewhat intimidated to do this, I gave it my best shot and my boss even praised me for a job well done.  I was definitely nervous about making the calls, but after getting through the first several calls, I built up some confidence and it became more natural.  Most of the news outlets were friendly and happy to receive the information and some were not quite so nice.  However, I was proud of myself for doing it.  It is by no means something that I will look forward to doing in the future, but it is a prominent part of the job to better receive coverage of a story.