What does it take to sell a story to a journalist? These are some key points that I gathered from my interactions with the scribes over the years:

1. The quality of the story peg – Wherever you go and whichever media we pitch to, it is a good story that sells. What makes a good story peg are relevancy, topicality, and how useful will the story be to the business community and/or newspaper readers. When we offer a good story to a journalist, not only are we helping ourselves but also the journalist in getting a byline or maybe to the front page. For instance, if you give an exclusive to a young journalist, you are helping him/her get noticed in the market and among his/her peers and he/she will remember you for that.

2. Relationship with the journalist - A good relationship with the journalist opens doors quickly for you. This empowers you to call the journalist on his/ her mobile phone, or at odd times occasionally and he/she will forgive you for it. Relationship alone however doesn’t work always. We cannot be good friends with a journalist and expect him/her to do a story for us everytime. That’s mixing personal and professional matters and nobody appreciates that in the long run.

3. Knowing what the journalist writes on - We are not only talking about knowing what particular beat a journalist writes on, but also his/ her writing style, the type of issues he/she picks up in that particular beat, the angles that he/she gives to his/her stories. Let’s take an IT journalist in say The Economic Times for example. We can study which IT vertical he/she writes on predominantly, does he/she concentrates more on consumer technology or B2B technology? If he/she writes a column, what is the theme that connects the last five stories in that column? Does he/she writes for the ET weekday paper but also writes for The Sunday ET edition? Does he/she concentrates more on exclusives, interviews, personal profiling, or industry stories? Are his/her stories more of fact reporting or does he/she tend to put in his/her opinions into his/her stories?

4. Industry knowledge - Often when we pitch supposedly-new-industry-trend-stories to a journalist, he/she knows about it already. That’s what happens when we don’t study and analyse the industry and the market developments, and tend to blindly pass on what our clients briefed us. When we have a good knowledge of the industry and our clients and can figure out ourselves correctly what makes news and what doesn’t, then only we can actually pitch a good industry story to the media.

5. Media list - Having an updated and exhaustive media list can be quite a boon. Our media lists should contain details of all the journalists in a) that particular beat b) the weekday and weekend editions c) all newspapers, and d) all cities. That way when your pitch fails with one journalist or in one particular city say Delhi, you can pick up the phone to a journalist in Mumbai or Bangalore.

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