Suppose you are a journalist receiving around two-three dozens of PR pitches. How nice it would be if all these could be automatically categorised according to industries, investment announcements, feature stories, technology related, HR related, etc? Additionally, if you can tell all the PR people what you like being pitched about, what kind of stories you like doing or are doing, and how do you want to be pitched, it will be great.

Now for the PR folks, imagine that we have a ready list where we can scan a list of journalists in our contact list waiting for pitches, doing stories on particular subjects, etc. Most of the media pitches could be conducted with ease.

This is what a new service called Pitchwire seeks to provide. It positions itself as ‘an online community for influencers – journalists, bloggers, analysts – and publicists – PR professionals, and company officials – that promotes responsible pitching and transparency. The results are more successful ‘hits’ and a better relationship between influencers and publicists.’

How does it work? We can register ourselves on the site in two categories, either as an influencer, or as a publicist. If we are an influencer, we will get our own Pitchwire page that will display our profile, a pitch-me form, current stories that we are working on, and our writing beats. Check out mine here. We will also have our own Pitchwire email address and inbox where we can see all the pitches. These pitches are categorised according to beats and companies.

Now if we are registered as a publicist, we can get our own inbox from where we can categorised our pitch accordingly and send it to the influencer. Through Pitchwire, we can even send a pitch to the regular email address of a journalist who is not yet registered with Pitchwire. In this case, Pitchwire will send a mail to that journalist/ blogger to introduce the service and also display our pitch.

How well will this service work? I think it is primarily the influencers who will drive site and how many known and important journalists and bloggers are using this service. Pitchwire regularly keeps sending me mails that a certain journalist is working on such and such stories, so I guess there are already some sign-ups from among the journalists and bloggers community.

Is the service international? One thing I noticed is that on the influencer sign-up form, the options given in the State box are all US States. Does this mean that Pitchwire is looking at an US audience only?

Secondly, if I am a publicist and an influencer both, what should I do? Sign up for two different accounts or can I do with one where in I can get both the influencer’s and publicist’s tools in my page?

Apart from these, the site is unique idea and well worth having a look. Check it out here – Pitchwire.

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