I met Amanda Walls, the founder/director of digital marketing agency Cedarwood Digital, at BrightonSEO last year, where we participated in a panel discussion. (She’s speaking at next month’s BrightonSEO as well!)
My ears perked up when she mentioned that she was a former journalist.
Any former journalist who has leaped into digital PR immediately gets my attention. Former journalists have a unique and valuable perspective on everything that we do because they know what it’s like to be on the other side.
Amanda proved that in this chat.
The first half is about her journey as a journalist into PR. The second is where we get some tactical information about pitch strategy, email crafting, and media list building.
Don’t miss this one!
Tell us a little bit about your path from journalist to PR
Amanda: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, so I grew up in Australia. I was originally from Melbourne, so I grew up there. I did school. I did university. And then at my school, I think I went through that stage that a lot of people go through where I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So in Australia, what you do when you finish school is you put down kind of eight, uh, Uh, you know, of course topics that you want and mine couldn’t have been more varied.
So I had like a journalism line. I had economics. I had commerce engineering. I had straight engineering. I had just like a general arts degree. I kind of put them all down. Um, and I remember when I looked at them, I was like, wow, I’m a really confused person right now. I don’t know. So I basically, I could have ended up as anything.
I could have ended up as like an engineer. I could have ended up as an economist. I could have ended up in any way, but I got an offer from, um, but when the first office I got was from a journalism university in Australia, um, called RMIT, which is based in Melbourne. And I took the offer. Um, it was a really great opportunity because there are only 45 people in my course.
So I thought that’s really good. It’s kind of hands-on. We do a lot of filming. There’s the opportunity to do radio journalism. There are really good internships in TV and print in Australia, kind of good places. So I did that for three years, and I covered everything from print to broadcast to things like communications law.
I also did German in my electives because I wanted to branch out in two languages. I’ve done French and Chinese in school, so I wanted to do something else. Um, so for about three years, I had a lot of fun. I, you know, it was university. Everyone has a lot of fun at uni, and I came out with a journalism degree, and I started to put it into practice.
So throughout my degree, I’d done a couple of different things. So I’d gone to kind of rule to in Australia, when you’re a journalist, what traditionally happens is you kind of go and do a year or two in like The Outback, I mean, not like the Outback that you see on like films, but say rural Australia, so like an hour and a half, two hours out of the city center, you work the kind of rural round. Then you move back to the city center.
And I really didn’t want to do that because I just didn’t want to have two years away from my friends. Um, so I took a role working with V8 Supercars in Australia, which is. People ask me what it is, and I say it’s like Formula One, but it’s really not like Formula One. Like, it’s not got the prestige of Formula One or anything like that, and I immediately think maybe it’s not. Still, it’s, it’s. Basically, it’s like, it’s just like big cars that race around, but in Australia, it’s our national series, and you have, like, 12 rounds, and they get all different cities.
And I had the pleasure of doing some track side reporting there. So I went into the garage, and they interviewed the drivers and I loved it because I was big into Formula One. So I was like, Oh, this is cool. You know, I could have a career in this as a journalist. And at the same time, I also worked for a local government publication.
In Melbourne, where I was responsible for kind of sourcing stories for the publication, particularly around what was impacting local councils. So I enjoyed that. I liaised with a lot of PRs to kind of send me information for that. I also liaised with a lot of PRs, you know, in the motorsport space as well.
I really enjoyed that and did all of that. Then I went back to university. I did a master’s in global communications, which is sort of a broader degree. In that degree, I started to get exposed to digital marketing, which was something that wasn’t really talked about in Australia at that time.
So, I think Australia is still a little way behind in terms of the online space. You know, we’re not really set up for e-commerce just due to logistics. We’re not very much like in-person kind of people. We’re not really like home delivery. Service. I think Australia is built on relationships.
It’s the way that people are, so I don’t think it naturally lent itself to that. But I started to learn about it, start to learn about things like social media, and I became really interested in it. At the end of my master’s, I decided that, and I kind of looked at the journalism space in Australia, and it was around the time when journalists were starting to get replaced by Social media, like citizen reporters.
So to put that into context, I didn’t have Facebook when I was at university. So that’s how old I’m, um, you know, I, so social media wasn’t really a thing, you know, when I was growing up, when I was in school, when I was at the start of university, when I was doing journalism, social media didn’t play a role in that.
But when I left my first degree. That’s when it started to take off. So we’d had gone through our kind of myspace era and we moved into Facebook and we’re getting kind of Twitter and those kind of platforms. And at that time as well, journalism changed a lot. So it changed from being really heavily reliant on reporters to the fact that everyone had a phone.
Which they could take a picture of. I also didn’t have a phone at school. I had a camera, I had like a Nokia 3310, I could play snake on it. That’s about all it did. Uh, you know, so I, I didn’t have the opportunity to take pictures. Still, now all of a sudden we had, you know, a whole host of citizen journalists who would be on the scene first, and we’d be there taking pictures and reporting on what was happening, you know, whether it was true or not, sort of, you don’t really know at that point. Still, it alleviated a lot of the things that journalists.
We found that in the Australian market, journalists started to get squeezed, which resulted in fewer jobs. At that point, I made the decision to move to marketing. It’s a really long-winded story, by the way. Sorry about that. Um, but then I sort of looked around, and I was like, right, Australia is not it.
Um, I also wanted to travel. So I then moved to Singapore where I traveled around Asia for a while. Quite a lot of time in Thailand and Indonesia, um, Singapore was starting to get the uptake for digital marketing. So, so I’ve had a chat to a lot of people there, picked up and then decided that the UK was the place to go.
So I moved back to the UK in 2012 and I, basically made the transition then from journalism into PR. So initially I did apply to work at the BBC. So I wanted to do the formula on coverage, but it was pretty sewn up. It was a really difficult space to get into and I just didn’t have much chance of, of getting that role.
So our role came up at an SEO agency. I didn’t know what SEO was then, but I was like, this looks cool. And it was a content and kind of content and PR based role. So I took that role. And that was kind of how I started, I guess. And I spent seven years in that agency before I moved to Cedarwood, but I actually applied for that job on Gumtree.
It’s a strange story, and I nearly didn’t get it because the response to it went into my junk mail. So I nearly didn’t get into marketing because, yeah, that, that happened. And then I went for the interview, and I had a load of disasters on the way to the interview. I split the leggings that I was wearing, and I basically arrived looking like I’d been dragged through a bush backwards.
Um, but I got the job in the end, and that’s why I’m here today.
Vince: And here we are. Yeah. What a journey. I love it. You said a handful of things in there. One of the things that was really interesting to me was this idea of Australia, you had to, you said, kind of do rural coverage first before getting into kind of more city metropolitan.
Why is that? What’s, what’s, uh, just to kind of, is it easier, more slow, you know, slower pace?
Can you explain what rural coverage is in Australia?
Amanda: It’s way more complicated. In a lot of instances, so basically all of the, the majors in Australia, we have like four major TV stations. Let’s say we have ABC. BBC. We have channel 7, channel 10. I don’t know why they’re those numbers.
It’s not very logical, but that’s kind of how we are. Each one has a regional subsidiary, and it’s the same with newspapers. Again, each one of those has a regional subsidiary. So the theory is that they send the journalists out to the regions. Transcribed You learn like you work hard.
So it’s long days.
You’re covering rural stories, which don’t have a high readership, but it’s designed to hone your skills. So that when you come back to the city center, and you’re in the city center newsrooms, whether it be for, you know, channel nine, channel 10, or like the Herald Sun, the Age, the sort of major daily newspapers, you’re right there and ready to go.
Kind of get up with that pace. Like you’re, you’re ready. You kind of trained, you’ve done your sort of, so I guess it’s almost like an internship, right? You’ve done like a year, two years where you’ve been trained and you know exactly how everything works. And then you’re ready to go straight into the newsrooms.
I did an internship at Wynn TV, which is like the original version of Channel Nine. And then I did an internship at Channel Nine itself. And at Wynn, you kind of drive around, you have to sign in a videographer to go with you, and then you have to edit a lot of content yourself.
Then you go into the city center, and instead of doing one story a day, you’re doing two stories a day. Instead of sourcing your own news, you’re being given news, and you have a, have a, like a video editor. But because you already know how to do that, you kind of learn that regionally, it’s easy for you to kind of mark the bits you want to pull out.
So I think a lot of it is that it’s a training ground. Um, you know, that works really well. It’s more so in TV. So my specialism was TV journalism at that point. In print, you can do like a local newspaper and there’s a lot of those kind of in Melbourne. So you can kind of stay in Melbourne for that if you want, but it’s still, again, you would get your, um, you would get your training, like the community newspapers, we call them leader in Melbourne.
You would then apply to the Herald Sun or the Age with a portfolio of work you’ve done at a regional level. That’s kind of how it’s always been.
Vince: Is that similar in UK journalism where there’s kind of you kept to cut your teeth and kind of more of like a, uh, internship type role where you’re really learning things before you can get into like the major newsroom.
Is getting started in UK journalism similar to getting started in Australia?
Amanda: I think, I think to a point, I think in the UK you’ve probably got more opportunities to get into bigger newsrooms as well because there’s more of an online news space. Whereas in Australia, the online news space again, isn’t as popular because traditionally we’ve always done things. In person. So you’re kind of competing for less spots.
Like there’s only three major, like three major TV channels. There’s only two major newspapers, let’s say, whereas here in the UK, you’ve got five or six. So naturally there is. There’s less jobs. So you kind of really need to refine your scope before you go into it. Like here in the UK, you can still do the same thing.
You can still work at the kind of, you know, at the JPI and the reach PLC is the local publications here. But I think a lot of it, you get a lot more freelancers here. So a lot of the major publications tend to work more with freelancers, whereas in Australia, we wouldn’t really use freelance as much at all.
It would always be people that are employed directly by the. The kind of publication.
Vince: Let’s continue your journey here to why you started Cedarwood. You know, you worked in an agency and then you just decided to start your own. What, what made you make that jump?
What made you make the jump to starting your own agency?
Amanda: So I’d spent nearly seven years at the agency that I worked at.
And I got to a point, which I think a lot of people get to where I kind of felt like I was doing a lot of work for someone else. And I wasn’t really getting a lot out of it. I didn’t feel like I could progress anymore with the head of digital. I’d kind of hit the ceiling. I was managing a lot of what happened in the agency.
So the structure of the agency at that point, when I started, there was kind of four owners of the agency, which is a lot of owners anyway. When I left, there was two, um, the agency was full service. So we did web design, web development, and digital marketing, which encompassed SEO, PPC, PR, et cetera. When I left there was me and I was managing the whole digital marketing.
There was another owner who did design and another owner who did development. So I sort of felt like I was managing a very lucrative part of the business, but I wasn’t an owner. I wasn’t ever going to be an owner. I wasn’t ever really going to be a director. So it was just kind of my time to move on. Um, I also felt like I wanted to move away from full service and I wanted to use more of my skill set in an agency.
So when I started Cedarwood, it was very much with the premise that we would only ever do SEO, PR, traditional and digital, and paid media. So that’s paid social and PPC. We were never going to do organic social, we were never going to do email, we weren’t going to do design or development. We didn’t want to focus on any of those things.
It was purely to focus on where my. It’s got the skillset was, and I think one of the reasons that I did that again was because if I was had this fear that let’s say, for example, we did design a development and something went wrong with the website and someone came to me, I would have no idea how to sort it out.
I would just be like, I don’t know how I’m going to help you with that. Whereas with SEO and paid media and digital power, they were all things I could do. So, you know, if worse came to worse, and this doesn’t really happen, but let’s say from an owner’s perspective, it’s something that you want to have confidence you can do.
I could help out. So it got to the point where I just decided, right, I’m going to start CityWood. So I sort of went off and started it, originally as a freelance role. So I’ve done a lot of traveling. And I wanted to do a lot more. There were a lot of parts of Asia in particular that I hadn’t explored.
So I, thought, well, you know, I’ll do a couple of years freelance and then I’ll see what happens. And within a year of freelancing, it got really busy. So I just got a lot of inquiries. Um, I was kind of putting myself out a lot, got some good word of mouth referrals, and got some good conversations from clients I’d previously worked with.
At the agency, because the agency then kind of went into no longer offering digital marketing, there was a lot of it as well. So I guess that was kind of fortuitous, maybe for me. And so I very quickly realized that I needed to take on other people to help me out, and I kind of started to hire people.
And as a result of that, Cedarwood kind of became an agency. Uh, so it wasn’t really planned as such kind of happened. And then I got to like four people and I was like, right, we’re kind of an agency now. So I need to start doing things like building a website with Boogerstar. Um, so then I built a website and I built an awful website on Wix.
Um, like, no, there was nothing wrong with Wix. It was just my design skills that were terrible. And I look back on it now and I think, my goodness, that logo, what was I thinking? Um, if I’m not a designer.
Vince: It’s like most agency owners do that.
Amanda: Honestly, I’m not that, you know, now we’ve had a professional designer come in and sort all of that out for us, thank goodness.
But back then, we didn’t, so it was just a website I put together. And then we kind of had to get an office in a shipping container because I was trying to keep costs down. You know, we had a very, very lean start, but that was when we really started to build as an agency, and then that’s kind of. I guess we’ve kind of gone on from there.
Vince: Yeah. How many people do you have now?
Amanda: So we’ve got 14 now.
Vince: Nice. Let’s get into the kind of meat of some of my questions stemming from your jump from, uh, as a journalist and like what you’ve learned. Digital PR. Like you spent time as a journalist. You went to university to study communications.
Do you think having a background in journalism is necessary to be a good PR?
Amanda: I would use the word need necessarily. I think it always needs a powerful word. I believe anyone can do PR and don’t necessarily need a journalistic background, but it helps. I think it helps you understand what you’re dealing with because I often think that as a PR, you’re trained to look for new ideas and pull together media lists.
I’m to create campaigns and send them to a journalist. But a lot of the time it’s hard to understand, well, actually, how does that person on the other side of the email feel? You know, sometimes you can go, right, why have I got a low open rate or not getting much engagement? Why hasn’t this campaign got any coverage?
What is it about this particular email that a journalist might not like? And I think if you’ve had experience on the other side of that, then it’s easier. Obviously, it’s not an exact science because journalists work in different ways, and they work under various pressures and different timescales. Still, it’s easier to understand what the potential issues might be.
So, I think that’s definitely helped me get where I’m at, but there are also other elements to it.
So, for example, when you create that press release, I think it helps to know what to include because I know what I would have wanted and needed.
As well from a PR and I think sometimes, you know, when I, when I see people send things out, they send out a really great story, but it’s maybe missing an expert quote or it’s missing an image that needs to accompany or is missing an excellent graph or a really good chart that the journalist would want to kind of put in the article to make it really kind of like, you know, push home that the point that they’re trying to make or that user interest angle, or it’s missing a hook.
You know, a lot of journalists are now being online. People need clicks. They need views.
So I think knowing all of that and knowing what people are actually trying to, um, achieve is important. And that’s, you know, it’s no different to having a client. When we sit down with our clients initially, we talk to them about their goals and what they’re trying to achieve.
I think it’s about knowing what a journalist goals are and what they’re trying to achieve.
And it differs for publication, by country, and by, you know, what their role is freelance or permanent. So, definitely, the background helps. It’s certainly not a be all and end-all, but I think it helps to give that insight, which can be particularly useful if, you know, for example here at Cedarwood, we do something called campaign clinic every two weeks where we look through campaigns, which haven’t performed as well as we’d like them to.
And we kind of analyze as a team, why that might’ve happened. And I think that’s one area where that probably really helps because I can say, Oh, actually, do you know what, that I probably wouldn’t have covered that because of this, this and this.
Vince: What are, you know, some of the things that come out of that campaign clinic?
I mean, I’m sure that probably coincides with the main things that digital PRs tend to get wrong. You mentioned a couple of them, but what would you say is the main issue most of the time?
What big takeaways to you get from reviewing your work as a group?
Amanda: I would say sometimes it’s timeliness. Sometimes, campaigns just take too long to get signed off, and then they’ve missed their hook.
We did a piece last week, which was a data piece on I’m a celeb, and then we sent it out. Literally the day we sent it out, someone else did exactly the same thing. There’s not a lot that we can really do about that, but if someone else has got there first, then that’s just kind of how it is. So I think that plays a really big role in it.
Perhaps sometimes we’ll find a gap in the research, so we’ll identify that, yeah, they’ve been covered elsewhere. Or maybe it was less than a year ago, less than 18 months ago, so the journalist hasn’t seen it as recent. But I would say the majority of the time, what we tend to find is that it’s been covered elsewhere or the hook or the human interest angle is no longer relevant because it’s past its time.
That’s I guess the two biggest issues that we find.
Vince: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I want to get back to one of the things you said earlier about like a journalism background. It seems like they’re, it’s almost like this. I feel like empathy is like a too strong of a word, but like talk about like just knowing what a journalist needs, right?
Like putting yourself in their shoes.
One of the things that I think a lot of people get wrong, um, or maybe not even get wrong, but like, it’s a tough spot that you’re in, right?
Especially at an agency where you’re trying to hit goals. You’re trying to hit KPIs. You’re trying to get out as get, get as much coverage as possible, right?
So what ends up happening is that you try to scale, scale, scale, and you’re sending emails to people that you maybe don’t know, their goals, their specific, uh, you know, what they’ve written about specifically, unless you’re taking the time to do all these checks.
I guess the challenge then becomes like, right, like, how do you scale, but still kind of meet that, like, empathy need, like, hitting what the journalist knows.
And to me, the way that you’re talking makes it sound like maybe having that background as a journalist helps you write a better pitch, right?
It almost seems like a shortcut, or it may safeguard and allow you to send out more emails at scale without necessarily knowing every single article that your target journalist has hit.
Does that make sense?
Does having a background as a journalist help your outreach strategy?
Amanda: Yeah. For sure. And I actually think the number of emails question is, is really interesting as well because I’ve, you know, we talk a lot internally about how many emails we should be sending out per campaign. You know, how much, what is the perfect number in, you know, I was at a talk a couple of weeks ago at Trust Evolve where, um, Fery Kaszoni was talking about Search Intelligence and he said that they send, I think five, I think it’s number 5, 000.
I was like, Oh my goodness, are we not sending that?
Vince: Per campaign?,
Amanda: yeah, yeah.
Amanda: I was like, wow, that’s, that’s a lot of emails. We don’t send that many. And I’ve, I’ve heard about the bigger agencies in the space in the sense of the 700 to a thousand. And I understand at some point it becomes a numbers game, right?
Like the more that the law of averages is, the more emails you send out, the more times you’re going to get hit, but also the more times you’re probably going to annoy a journalist if it’s really irrelevant and they’re probably going to blacklist you. So I think that what I would say with this is that.
I’ve always had the approach that if you do your research well, and you create a practical list of journalists, it doesn’t have to be big, then I think that works really well, because you know that they’ve covered what you’re looking for. And I think they will also know that you’ve taken the time to understand that it’s probably relevant to them.
What frustrates journalists is being constantly inundated with press releases that are irrelevant to what they cover or their particular section.
They’re on a list of X number of thousand journalists that hasn’t been properly curated. And I’m not saying that anyone’s sort of doing that, but I’m just using that as an example.
I think that becomes a source of frustration from a journalistic background perspective. I guess I would say that it’s really easy to know what to start with on a press release when you’re a journalist.
I immediately know exactly what I want to know from this. And a lot of the time, it’s the hook.
A lot of the time, it’s the, you know, alarming statistic or the figure, the money monetary figure.
Most of the time, the cost of living, particularly here in the UK, is a huge topic in the press. And I think, you know, part of that comes from being a journalist, but part of that also comes from just knowing what’s going on with the news and being aware of what people want to digest.
And there’s a lot of studies that people can to understand that as well.
When I spoke at Brighton last time, I mentioned a study that said, “You know, these are the topics that people want to talk about. And it’s kind of, you know, the royals and famous people. These are the topics that people have had enough of.”
And it was things like Harry and Meghan, um, Phillip Schofield. And then there was also, you know, this is the one topic that people say they talk about most at home and it was cost of living crisis.
So even just having that information and putting that into a press release is like that kind of data. I know immediately if I’ve got a press release involving any of those things, I know what to and what to not put in it and in what order.
Vince: Seems like it maybe saves research, or it saves some of those other things that I’ve heard, like tips. Uh, pre-pitching ideas to a journalist, it’s like you kind of have that innate sense already.
What about, so it sounds like the two major kind of hurdles are getting the pitch right. But then, you know, there’s this like amorphous thing of like finding the right people to reach out to.
Right. And there are so many different ways to do it. You can do it manually. I never worked with a media list. I always did it manually, mainly by looking at previous articles. But plenty of people use media lists. And so, obviously, like the way I did it, it was very hard to scale.
It took a long time, right?
But when you’re talking about sending 500, 5000 emails, or whatever, per campaign, you have to get smart about curating your lists.
Are there things you know from being a journalist that make it easier to curate a list? Let’s start there. How do you curate your lists? The second part is, what have you taken from your journalism background?
How do you curate your media lists?
Amanda: Sure. So, in terms of curating a list, I think this gets easier with time because, over time, you start to understand what journalists want to cover in what particular topics. Sometimes, it can be a little bit of trial and error at the start to get a feel for what kind of content people want to take on board.
I’ve been doing this for a really, really long time now. So if I have a piece of content that’s going out, I immediately have in my head maybe 10 to 20 journalists that I feel like this content will be ready for.
From then on, going on to curate a list, I’m quite active on Twitter. Not so much in terms of actually tweeting unless I’m complaining about the trains or something like that, which is not necessarily to my credit, but I am active in digesting information from Twitter.
A considerable number of journalists, particularly here in the UK, are on Twitter.
They are on Twitter with their email addresses, asking for you to send them information.
I always think the best place to start with a journalist is a journalist who wants information because when you’re working as a journalist, you work in a number of different spaces, right?
So you’ve got the journalists who are kind of freelance, and they’re being commissioned to do pieces. They probably need information, and they need it quickly.
You’ve got the journalists who are working on rounds, so they might need something, but it’s very topical to that particular round, maybe like politics, business, finance, whatever that case might be.
Then, you have the journalists who are pre-allocated stories. For example, when I was working in Australia, and I was at Network 10, I often pre-allocated stories.
And once I was pre-allocated to interview Roger Federer, which was amazing, by the way, but I actually didn’t turn the microphone on. So that was. I enjoyed speaking to him, even though I did honestly get to report back on it. It was absolutely humiliating, and I got in a lot of trouble for it, but nevertheless.
But the point that I’m trying to make is that you don’t want to target that third journalist because that third journalist already has their work sorted.
They don’t need your pitch, and sending your pitch to them is a waste of time because they’re getting their pitch from their editor.
And they’re already covering it.
And if they need more information for that pitch, they’ll probably put it on Twitter and say, Oh, I need a quote for this. I need a quote for that.
So, I think the first thing to do when building a media list is to identify people in those first two categories.
So, freelancers are commissioning pieces that need information, and more general news reporters or specific ground reporters need information on particular topics.
Once you’ve done that, you can build a media list.
Yes, for sure.
We would use a media database because it’s a really great way to get that information. I also tend to use Twitter.
We also spend a lot of time building our media lists. It wouldn’t be unusual to spend a day to two days on a media list, which probably sounds like a lot of time, but it’s such an essential part of the average process.
We’ve also spent a lot of time focusing on the outreach element of digital PR.
I think a lot of people, you know, they bring this. There’s been loads of time researching data, loads of time putting the data together, and loads of time writing an amazing press release. And then they whip together a media list.
And they send it out, but it’s almost like they’re disadvantaging themselves at that final hurdle by not putting the extra time into putting that list together.
whereas for us, we would spend, say, one to two days, especially if it was a bigger piece, at least going through Twitter, pulling out the relevant details, understanding, you know, and we, within our database, we will have marked and we will have it.
Okay. Tagged and labeled, you know, which journalist falls into which of those three buckets.
So we understand which ones are the best ones to reach out to. And then, of course, we go online and research and scrape and understand which content people have covered previously.
And there’s a lot of different tools that you can use to pull that information kind of together.
Um, but that’s in a nutshell, I guess, how we would do it. And where the journalism side of it comes in is really being able to identify which of those three buckets that journalists fall into and making sure we’re just not wasting our time with bucket three.
Vince: What are some tips you have for identifying bucket three?
What are some tips for building a proper media list using a database?
Amanda: So bucket three is probably not on Twitter. That’s probably a good start because they don’t need to be. Because they are already kind of full in terms of their day. They don’t have much time to spend on things like social media, and they’re not actively using tags like journal requests and PR requests because they’ve already got a lot of the information they need.
They might be sent out to interview someone who’s already lined up or something similar.
For bucket one for freelancers, a lot again, I would use a lot of Twitter. You can also, um, Like, if you find a particular journalist, if you Google them and find that they’re writing for a number of different publications, that’s another great way to do it.
You can use, you know, there’s a load of different websites that list journalists, and they tell you the kind of publications that they work for. Again, you can identify that.
The media databases are also pretty handy at giving you that information. You can also just correspond with them.
You’ll be able to find it in their email footer. And I think a big part of it is once you’ve spoken to that journalist, noting that information in your CRM or in your media list, wherever you store all of those contacts, so everyone has it. Over time, you will start to understand where those people fall.
Vince: Yeah. That seems like such a big distinction that I, I feel like I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about kind of bucketing them into those three camps. I mean, is it, is it like also title specific, you know, like editors versus reporters versus. I mean like freelance journalists are obviously like easier to find but like when you’re building with a media list do you look at specific or do you ignore specific titles for that reason as well?
Do you ignore any specific journalist roles and titles when building a list?
Amanda: I would, I would stay more away from an editor because I feel like an editor’s got a lot on their plate. So when someone reaches kind of editorial level, especially here in the UK, a lot of their work is amending and fact checking and kind of proofreading, let’s say, existing content, and therefore they don’t often have a huge amount of time to do their own content or their own research.
A lot of that goes into looking at what existing journalists have done.
So, yes, potentially I would stay away from that.
I think reporter in general is, it’s hugely broad because a reporter could be a general news reporter or a reporter could be a property reporter or a reporter could be someone that just covers, like for some publications here in the UK, we have reporters that just cover the Royals and they just write about the Royals 24 seven and that’s, you know, that’s what they do.
And if you don’t have anything that’s related to that, then sending them a press release probably isn’t going to get very far. So I wouldn’t say there’s anything specific in the title itself, I think, although it probably sounds like a really long winded process over time, you know, you become familiar with where these people sit.
And I think in the UK, we’re fortunate because most journalists here are freelance.
So, most of the bigger publications here in the UK use freelance reporters for a lot of their content. Anyway.
Vince: Yeah. This makes me think I must do a couple of pieces. I feel like it would be beneficial for people to know and understand some of these nuances that, you know, you learn over time.
Right. But you’d also learn from being there. Um, and I’m sure it’s different in the U.S. I mean, I’m showing my gaps in my knowledge as well here. I’ve talked to more digital PRs in the UK in the past year than I have in the U.S. And, uh, you know, my, my time pitching the U.S. again, I mainly did it based on articles and never used a media list.
So, I know plenty of people use media lists. So I kind of know and understand those nuances. So, okay, the pitches, let’s get into a little bit of that because there is this idea, I think of. You know, knowing what to put in a pitch versus, like, having that, that sense for what is going to be most interesting.
I’ve seen the two approaches where most people will put just about every bit of information they can, right? You end up writing an entire post, right? If you take this content-led approach, maybe you have a piece of content on your client’s blog or your own site somewhere, and then you’re pitching that.
It’s like maybe it’s a data study, the best cities for XYZ and you’re pitching it to a journalist. Some PRs will actually cut and paste that whole article and put it right in the pitch. Is there such thing as too much information in a pitch is what I’m getting at here.
What are some best practices for email pitches (based on your time as a journalist)?
Amanda: So that the cut and paste thing is frustrating for a lot of PRs.
Um, the reason being here in the UK, a number of our major media outlets have an email defender software on, and when they cut and paste the content from the email into the story, the link doesn’t go through to the website. It goes to the email defender software, because what has happened is when the contents come in, it has automatically changed that link so that the person doesn’t click on it and potentially go through to it.
Let’s say spammy website to the email defense, um, URL. And that’s something that we’ve had a lot of problems with in the last year. At first, I was like, what is this URL defense thing? Um, and then I realized that a number of the publications here in the UK use it like fair play to them as you would.
So we kind of want to discourage copying and pasting it because you can end up with that.
So, you know, we’ve got some great coverage on publications and then all of a sudden the link goes to that and it’s like, no, what’s going on?
And then you’re asking them to change it and they’re just kind of like, no.
Vince: Just to clarify, you’re saying the cut-and-paste. I would think it would be the other way around, right? You do want to cut and paste your entire article because then it’s discouraging them from clicking that link, but you’re saying the journalist will actually use that link and put it in their posts.
And it’s a link to the email defender software, not the link to your actual.
Amanda: Yeah. So, what must happen, and we figured that when we send the email to the journalist, when it comes to the generalist’s inbox, rather than that link being to the client’s website, that link changes to go through email defender software.
When they copy and paste that information into the article, that link again goes through the email defender software, which is really frustrating.
One thing that we’ve been doing recently—well, I mean, we’ve done it for a while—is using media packs. So, we’ll do a kind of pitch in our emails.
We’ll include if it’s like a table, graphic, or something that really stands out. So we’ll do the pitch. We’ll kind of give it a hook. These are intent, angle, key like dot points of information and any key documented information.
And then we’ll link to an external file, which will be a media pack, usually on something like Google Drive. This file will have any additional information, additional creative, and a link to the data.
So, you know, where our data sets are, so they can have a look at that. And that means the email is not crowded.
It’s less likely to be caught as spam, but also they can then go in and have a look through that, pull out any information they need, hopefully create an article that doesn’t. Then link through to that, the URL defense.
Vince: Yeah. I love that. So it’s almost like just a shorter article and that place, too. You’re not necessarily. Yeah. Uh, I wonder, I don’t know. And again, like, this is a great idea for posts too. I need to get into this. I’m taking notes here. The idea of, like, you know, spam filters and longer emails, do they get caught up in spam filters?
I just, I know personally right now with BuzzStream, we’re seeing, you know, there’s all of a sudden Microsoft 365. Anytime people use that email client or email provider, they, for whatever reason, the past month or so, their spam filtering has been really bad and great.
You know, real emails are getting, and it’s not just in the digital PR space, it’s, you know, personal emails. Like people are saying all of a sudden, for whatever reason, they switch something and people are just having a lot of trouble with, with, you know, uh, Microsoft 365 spam filtering. So yeah, I wonder how much of that gets into, but that sounds like a great way to kind of get around some of that potential concern about like file size and email size is just.
Just use that Google link and Google Drive link and put everything.
Amanda: Google Drive is pretty friendly as well. There are obviously other ways to do it, too, but we’ve never really had a problem with that. I would actually go as far as to say that the data campaigns in particular we’ve had the most success with have been the ones that have had the media packs.
Vince: Love that. Um, okay. I want to get into, I guess the biggest things here. I’m thinking, you know, putting myself in the shoe of the journalist, right? And I know, I’m sure you felt this right on the other side of things, but. The overall sense, I think, from journalists is like, oh, not another SEO pitch, right?
Like, you can kind of tell, right? And you hear this when you talk, when I talk to journalists, when I listen to interviews with journalists, it’s like, oh, and you know, now there’s these agencies pitching on behalf of so and so. Tell me a little bit, just, just give me a sense of what is the feeling towards.
Towards kind of SEO in the journalism world. And how do you kind of navigate that with given your journalism background? And, you know, you work in an agency, obviously.
Do journalists dislike SEOs?
Amanda: No, I mean, I think first the journalist has to know what SEO was, because to be fair, when I started out in journalism, I had no idea what it was.
When I received press releases with random information and links embedded in them, I was just a bit confused, if I’m being completely honest, because my journalism brain was saying immediately, right? What’s the human interest point of this? How many people are going to click on this article and read it?
And that’s the first thing that I’m thinking about. I’m not particularly thinking about like what the format of it is. I’m not particularly thinking about what the findings are.
My first and foremost thought is right. Okay. You know, I need to get clicks on this, people reading it, and engagement with it.
What? You know, how does it work from that perspective? And I think the most frustrating thing from a journalist comes down to the relevance of the information. So, you know, if I’m a journalist that’s riding on the property around and I get, you know, the 10 most beautiful beaches in the UK, I’m just going to be like, what?
What is going on here? It’s going to be a source of frustration because if I’m getting 300 emails a day and 20 of them are related to property and 280 of them are related to, you know, the top 10 best skylines, cinemas, shopping centers, whatever the case might be, that’s going to be really annoying because I’ve got to actually sift through those emails to find the ones that I want.
It’s also possible that within that, I could miss the ones that I want.
So, I think there’s definitely an element of frustration on the relevancy side of things. You know, from being sent things that aren’t relevant, and it really wouldn’t surprise me if journalists just marked them off and blocked them as spam.
Because I do that.
To be fair, my work email is blocked straight away if someone sends me a lead generation email.
I don’t give them more than a second thought because I don’t have time for it. I don’t want it clogging up my email. I’ve got enough emails going on as it is.
And I think that approach is very similar for a journalist. Like, I think people. You know, you have sort of one chance to make a first impression, right? Like you only ever have one chance.
And if that first impression is that something isn’t relevant, it’s a very quick way to offside a journalist or something that’s annoying to them.
And, you know, we get emails that say, take me off this list. Don’t email me again, do not contact. And thankfully we’ve got the ability, you know, within our sort of mailing platforms to mark that with our, um, CRM so that we can make sure that we don’t contact them again, because obviously we don’t want to further kind of.
Poke that situation, but it’s definitely a problem. I think SEO has made that a problem, and the rise of digital PR has also made that an issue because, you know, five years ago, we were link building and we were link building and we were emailing bloggers and we were emailing. I mean, we weren’t because we haven’t traditionally done link building, but I’m saying in the industry as a whole.
You’re emailing bloggers, you’re emailing guest posts, you are spinning articles into 200 different variations and posting them on God knows how many websites. Um, you know, we’re harassing different people basically. And maybe in five years time we’ll be harassing someone else. I don’t know. But I think, you know, when all of a sudden this kind of digital PR got coined as like You know, a buzzword, let’s say, within the industry and all of a sudden everyone’s doing it, everyone’s sending out press releases, even the websites and companies that are traditionally link buyers are now offering a digital PR service that’s often unrelated to what?
You know, the particular they’ve taken the wrong skill set into the market is just incredibly, incredibly saturated and, you know, for journalists who are increasingly short of time and they’re still increasing industries in the journalism, increasing redundancy, sorry, in the generalist market, I think it’s easy to feel frustrated about it.
Still, equally on the flip side of that, if you find a PR that provides you with something that’s genuinely useful.
We have a number of really good relationships with clients. In particular, we’ve got a garden center client and a personal finance provider client, and journalists come to us now for that information because they know that they can get it from us.
We’ve got an expert hand and will just give them what they need. And I think that, you know, the flip side of that is if you can actually provide something that’s valuable and a journalist know they can come to you as a reliable source, that that is really valuable to them. So it’s about establishing, like, focusing on establishing that as the first point of contact.
Actually, how can we help you? You know, how can we provide you with something that’s genuinely valuable? And if you need any more support, let me know, because I know as a journalist, if I have someone, you know, if I’m covering home and gardening and I’ve got someone from a garden center that can talk to me about pretty much anything that’s like relevant to gardening, because hey, they’re a garden center, that’s perfect because I have an expert comment now for all of my articles.
Um, so I think thinking about that from a PR perspective can help as well.
Vince: Yeah. I love that. I, um, I wrote down just one of the first things you said was, you know, just thinking about when you’re pitching, thinking about the journalist and how many clicks you said, how many people are going actually to click on this story, right?
Like I feel like that, keeping that as your kind of guiding light feels like a really simple way to think about the whole process. And I want to get back to a very specific thing you said, though, getting back to the journalist who does rounds, right? So I feel like we come across this a lot. You know, we’re building, um, refining our tool all the time.
Buzzstream and the prospecting, we’re building like a prospecting tool. And a lot of the mistakes I see people make are, I think this is where you’re getting at. So say someone writes, like you cover motor, motor sports, right? But your focus was, what did you say? Not, not F1. So super car.
So you’re covering this very specific thing, but maybe on a media list you show up as automotive or sports, right?
So knowing kind of that you have to take that extra step to look at, I mean, I see this a lot where it’s like. You know, this person covers technology, but really you, you go in and it’s a columnist who just has like, you know, technology today and he only lists trending technology of the day, but you’re trying to pitch him, you know, uh, digital detox survey or something because you think, you know, he’s in writes about technology, but I feel like that is a step that a lot of people don’t take is knowing.
And so, when you say around, like a specific journalist who only has that very specific type of article, is that what a round is?
What is a journalist’s “round”?
Amanda: Yeah, so, so I guess traditionally a round would maybe be a little bit more broad than that. So it would be like a property or government or, you know, um, health and beauty.
Lifestyle, et cetera.
So, you know, traditionally within particularly in publications that I’ve worked at, you might have someone that covers like all the government stories and someone that covers anything related to property and someone that covers anything related to health and beauty and someone that covers anyone related to like famous people or the royals or something along those lines.
So that would be a specific round.
But you tend to find particularly at national and regional newspapers that those rounds are quite broad. I think when you would run into more of an issue with the niche, it is that very specific publications.
So, for example, I was employed directly by the Supercars.
So, for me, that is my only focus because I’m employed directly by that company. The same as maybe someone who was employed by Formula 1 or someone who was, you know, someone who’s employed by, let’s say, Buckingham Palace, my only focus is on the king and the queen—um, not necessarily some of the royals who don’t live there.
When we talk about journalists from a round perspective, I’m referring more to the kind of national and regional publications that have a slightly broader round.
Vince: Got it. Got it. And the only way you can really know that is if you. Look into what they’ve written, right?
Amanda: Yeah, but you know what?
I think that’s a really big part of being a PR and I think it’s something that gets overlooked.
One thing that I would say is that digital PR has become a bit of a numbers game for a lot of people in the last couple of years, but it should never have been that way.
So, you know, it’s not a case of, you know, how many emails can we send out and how many links can we get
It should be about, you know, understanding what the journalist wants.
Understanding what journalists are covering, sort of what, which areas, like if you’re a PR, I mean, at Cedarwood, normally our PRs will have maybe three clients each, potentially four. So I would expect them with those clients to know those clients and the people that do those rounds, the people that work in the media and the journalists really, really well.
I think when you run into an issue, it’s when you have agencies. People are managing 30 clients or 40 clients, and they have absolutely no chance of getting to know each other.
I don’t mean to disrespect those agencies in any way, but I do think it’s really difficult to get to know those journalists if you’re working with such a broad range of topics.
Whereas traditionally, PR is about building relationships with journalists.
Maybe you are an in-house PR and you work with a particular brand, and you are building that relationship, or even as an agency PR, you are working with three or four core clients, and they know that they can come to you for that.
And you are really familiar with who is covering, you know, that content in that space. And I think as a PR part of the job is knowing that, and that’s really important.
Vince: Would a journalist, in your opinion, get upset with you if you ask them what types of stories they’d prefer, you know, like in the case that you do get to through to a journalist who, you know, your pitch say the thing that stuck out to me was like, say someone’s in a property round, you said, but then you sent them like something on the best hotels and that same area that they work in.
But like, it’s not necessarily property related, you know, if they do reject it instead of just, you know, ignoring your email completely, do you ever recommend people to saying like, “Oh, you know, sorry, what, what kind of stories would you prefer in the future?”
I remember personally doing that for mainly when people would cover things for me, especially like a freelancer, you’d just be like, what are your ideal kind of stories that I’ll keep you in mind?
And then you would just like build this little rolodex on the side where you have kind of those, those tricks and tips for, for how to pitch a certain person. I mean, is that something that would be off putting for a journalist?
Do you ever ask a journalist what their preference is?
Amanda: I mean, I think you can definitely ask the question. If I was a journalist and I was receiving that kind of email, if I had the time to respond to it and I felt that it was worth it, I would definitely respond to it.
I don’t know if you will necessarily get a response because, again, I think that we journalists are just so inundated with emails that chances are something that’s been sent to them probably is super relevant to what they’re looking to do that day. And I think if they’re, you know, again, you’re creating a lot of back-and-forth.
I think the back-and-forth is a good thing traditionally for journalists and PR, but I’m not a hundred percent sure whether it’s what’s actually happening today.
Vince: Yeah, I feel like you’re right. Like. The example I was giving was maybe when I first started. So that’s like seven, eight years ago.
And I feel like maybe journalists and it was some of those sites, but don’t really necessarily see as much around where it was. We call them just like fun sites where it was just like they cover fun kind of pop culture stuff and, you know, just like the, the really creative hero campaigns and stuff that you don’t necessarily see a lot of, yeah, maybe those types of journalists, they also probably don’t have as much time, but they probably don’t really exist that a lot of the sites don’t exist anymore.
Okay. Last thing to kind of put a bow on this. I want to get your thought on where you think things are moving with journalism, relationship building, given, again, your background as a journalist, where are things moving and how can digital PRs kind of take advantage of this and succeed.
What tips do you have for digital PRs who want to build relationships with journalists?
Amanda: I think.
Digital PRs and journalists need to connect more offline. I think that that’s something that’s been lost a lot since COVID. I think I think it’s been lost in general across all industries across all sectors. You know, we see even the client meetings. People don’t necessarily want to meet face to face.
They want to meet online. I do a lot of virtual coffees with people. It’s kind of weird, but it works. I mean, I don’t drink coffee. I sit here with a glass of water, but that’s how it is. Um, but I think, you know, there’s a lot of journalists actually that are out there on Twitter saying, you know, I’m in London today.
If you’re around, give me a bell. Let’s catch up for half an hour. I think if you are a PR and you’re in a particular space, you know, say you’ve got those three or four clients and some of the more specific verticals and the long-term clients and you want to invest in that relationship, I would definitely encourage you to take the journalist for a coffee.
I don’t think there’s any harm in doing that.
Why not get out there?
Why not get to know them?
Maybe go to some networking events. You know, put yourself out there, familiarize yourself. I think that the people that will do the best are the people that form those in person relationships because, you know, it’s cutting through the noise, isn’t it?
So, for example, we host a digital marketing meetup every two months called Manchester DM.
At the end of the last one, I had a number of people come up to me saying that they wanted to get into digital marketing, but they’re struggling to break through the noise because they’re sending an application.
Again, there are about 700 applications for every job that we put out.
And it’s really, really hard to sift our way through those CVs, but it’s an awful lot easier if we’ve met those people, had a chat with them, and can put a name to a face. I think it’s the same with journalists and PRs again; they’re getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails every day from them.
Essentially like faceless people because they don’t know who these people are. But if they’ve met that person, or they have some familiarity, some awareness, they’ve met a networking event, or potentially they’ve even seen them in an online webinar or a seminar, they, they can actually put a name and a personality in the face of that person.
I think it’s a lot easier for them to open that dialogue and have that conversation. So I think that’s going to be like a big part of it.
I think that’s definitely important moving forward. I think it used to be more of a cornerstone regarding what was happening. I don’t think it’s necessarily so much that anymore.
Then I still think there will be an element moving forward of this practical exchange. I think journalists are going to become increasingly squeezed.
I think there will still be more challenges in that space. And, you know, I’ve even seen publications now that are asking PRs to upload their press releases.
And they’re going through and saying, yes, no, yes, no.
And those that they approve, they just put straight on the website, almost cutting the journalist out altogether. So that, yeah.
So basically, the PR is writing the story, and they’re putting it onto the website. And I mean, that to me, it’s usually concerning because, you know, the whole thing that I learned when I was a journalist was about how to be unbiased, how to be, you know, as a journalist, you should be offering an objective view on something.
And I think a lot of the time, PR is probably not going to be a hundred percent objective because they’ve got a product or a service or something that they want to push, right?
Like fair play to them, but that’s what journalists are there for. Journalists are the gatekeepers of news. Um, and taking them out is, is difficult, but, you know, some places have decided to do that to cut costs, whatever the case might be.
So that element is going to come in, and that’s going to be challenging because we’re going to have to work out how we’re going to deal with that, you know, as an industry to make sure that we’re fact checking information to make sure there’s no, you know, the right rise of fake news is a disaster. Like, we have to get a grip on that for a start.
That kind of platform does not help in any way, shape, or form. Um, and yeah, and I just really think that it’s going to be about the relationships and I, and I think it should be because at the end of the day, you know, that’s PR and journalism always had that, right? Like, they always had, even though they sat on technically different sides, they always had that connected relationship.
When they work together, the best content is created because PR can provide the expertise and insight that the journalist needs to create a really good story. So I hope that as an industry, we go that way. I hope that we work together in a more connected space.
But to do that, we have to get out, talk to people more.
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