End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- Newsrooms are far more KPI-driven than most digital PRs realize. Journalists have daily and monthly unique-page-view targets.
- The “pub test” still rules. If you can’t explain your campaign in a punchy one-liner that would spark a conversation in a pub, you’ve overcomplicated it.
- Go social-first for ideation, not news sites. What’s getting engagement in local Facebook groups and on TikTok is a much better signal for what journalists will actually publish than what’s in a morning news roundup.
- The fake expert problem is an opportunity in disguise. Rather than panicking, use it as a reason to build out genuine expert profiles on your clients’ websites — verifiable, linkable, clearly credentialed.
- Before you pitch anything, ask yourself: could a reporter walk into their morning conference and sell this story to their boss?
Most digital PR professionals have never sat in a newsroom morning conference.
They’ve never watched a news editor scan 30 pitches in under a minute, or felt the pressure of being 100,000 page views behind target by noon with half the day still to go.
That gap in experience between the person sending the pitch and the person receiving it is where many digital PR campaigns quietly die.
We recently sat down with Jade Denby, head of digital PR at Marketing Signals, and Sam Forrester, who spent over 15 years as a news editor at Reach PLC before switching to agency life.
The conversation that followed was one of the most honest, practical breakdowns of the journalist-PR relationship we’ve had on the podcast.
This is a must-watch for everyone in digital PR.
Below is a slightly edited, AI-assisted transcript:
Jade, what is your role with Marketing Signals?
Jade Denby (02:27) Yeah, sure. I run a team of around four PRs at the moment. We have a roughly 50/50 split of clients across the UK and US, and some with more global remit. We do the full range of digital PR, really — media monitoring, reactive, proactive, newsjacking, hero campaigns. We do bespoke strategies based on each client’s needs at the time. At a top level, I just make sure the team’s happy, that all the strategies are in place, that clients feel well-serviced, and look across everything from above.
Vince Nero (03:12) Are you still in the day-to-day pitching these days, Jade?
Jade Denby (03:16) Only recently — only in the last two to three years of 15. I think you naturally reach a point where your skill set sits more in client servicing and making sure clients are happy and retained. There’s so much to keep up with in digital PR at the moment. We have to be upskilling everything — tools, AI, what we’re activating and why. Every PR knows there’s not much thinking space in a day when you’re on full delivery. So I’m sitting above it now. I’m always happy to muck in, but my team are amazing and do pretty much the majority of that.
Sam, what is your role with Marketing Signals?
Sam (04:06) Yeah, of course. At the moment I’m the acting head of content at Marketing Signals, on maternity cover for a friend of mine who was in the role before me. I’m responsible for all content output — everything from creating outlines to editing copy. I have one full-time writer on my team, but we also outsource to freelancers, so I manage a freelance writer list as well. It serves the aim of link inserts — not just new content, but also optimizing existing client content for SEO. The buck stops with me for all content deliverables while I’m here.
Prior to that, as you mentioned, I was at Reach PLC for over 15 years. It’s been bought out so many times — I worked under the brands News, Trinity Mirror, Local World, Northcliffe Media. I’ve been there since late 2007. I started when I was 19 and have done almost every role since I joined.
I started when it was very print-led — we didn’t even have a website when I began. I was a junior reporter straight out of college. I didn’t go to university or anything, so I lucked into that one. I did some work experience there, they liked me, and kept me on. I took my seniors exam, the NCTJ qualification, and became a senior reporter. A few years after that, I wanted more, so I moved to the news desk as assistant news editor. This was what was called the Western Gazette, which is now Somerset Live — one of the Live titles throughout the Reach brands.
Around the time I became assistant news editor, they were starting to bring in digital publishing and take online news much more seriously, which later led to Newsroom 2.0, where everything was digital first. I kind of saw the change from literally writing to shapes on newsprint to, eventually, managing a catalogue of websites for Reach PLC. Very briefly, I was at NewsQuest as well — not for long before I made the switch to agency life.
What is something that digital PR professionals consistently misunderstand about how newsrooms work?
Sam (06:36) This is an interesting one. When Jade and I first met — when she was new to the agency — we started talking about this, and she was shocked by some of the things I was saying.
The biggest one is that newsrooms are much more KPI-driven than you’d think, and more so than when it was print-only. It’s all about page views. They have monthly and daily unique page view targets.
When I was at Somerset Live — which is where I spent most of my time — we had a daily target of 250,000 unique page views and a monthly target of around 8 million. It’s not easy to achieve. And this is something I’ll get into a bit later: digital PR is actually in a really good position to appeal to journalists, because essentially you’re helping newsrooms achieve those targets.
There have been a few rounds of redundancies at Reach PLC over the past few years.
These newsrooms are on a bit of a shoestring. When I was there, we had four news editors, 11 or 12 reporters, a sports person, and editors sitting above us. It was really busy — this was right after COVID, so it was all remote, but still felt busy. And I think it’s been further reduced since then. It was already a challenge with all those people to hit a quarter of a million unique page views a day.
I’m not there anymore, obviously, but it’s even harder for them to achieve these targets now.
There’s a huge window there for digital PR to essentially help out. As a news editor, you’re looking for stories that will help you reach a very lofty page view target. They need to be interesting, they need to appeal to the public — you need to be able to say with reasonable confidence that a story will help you hit that goal, because there’s no point writing stories nobody’s going to read.
If they’re not interesting, they won’t be shared, and you can’t put them on your Facebook channels — which is where the majority of traffic for these titles comes from.
I think that’s the bottom line: it’s all about achieving page views, and it’s much more KPI-driven than most people assume.
Jade, from your perspective, how does that change the strategy?
Jade Denby (10:32) I think it adds another layer for a PR. When I started out and was doing a lot of data storytelling, journalists would say, “I quite like this story, but what’s the cause and what’s the correlation?” That was the theme for a long time — you’ve got some great data, but tell me why it matters.
You really had to make the case for why your story had any kind of importance, because back then newsrooms were more focused on the story itself.
It just shows the cultural shift.
Journalists have gone from writing maybe five really well-considered stories a day to sheer volumes of stories a day.
And whilst we always think story first — balancing the story with the client — I do think the outlets we’re pitching to can sometimes feel like the last step. We’re trying to shoehorn a story in.
We talk a lot about personalizing each pitch to the journalist, but we’re still really working with one story and trying to make it fit.
Time is always against everyone — journalists and PRs alike.
Maybe, to Sam’s point, we need to look more at social media first.
Read the headlines on social media and ask: do we sometimes overcomplicate things with data storytelling?
Do we need to get back to human interest stories?
One thing I love that my colleagues and I talk about all the time is: does it pass the pub test? If you read a headline and it sparks a conversation in a pub, you’re onto something.
Sometimes with hero campaigns, especially, we can get lost — we have this great data, 10 different data points, scored and indexed, applied to XYZ — but if you still can’t explain it in a punchy one-liner, you’ve overcomplicated it.
I think we sometimes overcomplicate things for ourselves. In some ways, since COVID, we’ve seen a trend toward more reactive, quicker storytelling — more stories, more often, to match the pace of journalists. But we still get stuck in plans and ways of working: we’ll do a set number of activations this quarter, and we put all our eggs in one basket — one story that has to work in multiple ways.
Actually, do we just need multiple, simpler stories with executions that land more cleanly?
I think we have to change our thinking and become as agile as journalists now have to be. It has been eye-opening to realize that they’re under pressure just like we are.
It always felt like we were the ones at the mercy of journalists. But journalists are now at the mercy of their bosses and their audiences. People demand stories on social media, the comments can be brutal, and journalists have page view targets to hit just like we have coverage numbers and link targets.
Something Sam and I spoke about earlier — when I first started, journalists seemed quite scary to me. Maybe that was a youth thing, or just the way journalism was back then. But every time I ask Sam a question, he says, “I wouldn’t have minded that as a journalist,” and I think maybe journalists are just people too.
It can feel like an us-and-them dynamic, but in actual fact, we’re all trying to do the same thing and should be trying to help each other.
Sam (14:27) It does depend on when you have that experience. When I first came into a newsroom as a teenager, it was very scary. And maybe it’s the benefit of hindsight, but people did seem harsher back then — not cutthroat, but they didn’t really suffer fools. One thing I wanted to pick up on, Jade — the pub test is definitely still the way to go. If you had a story about police being called to a drug den, you wouldn’t write it as, “Police were called today at this time on this road for this reason.” You haven’t got to the point. It’s more like, “There was a drugs raid on this street today.” That’s what you’d say to somebody, and that’s when it clicks.
Just to pick up on something else: one thing Newsroom 2.0 did was allow editors and reporters to know which stories worked and which didn’t, because you’d have real-time data.
In print, everything was packaged together and you were judged by circulation figures.
I remember writing what I thought was a great front-page story, and when the circulation figures came in a few weeks later, we were up 3% that week — but then someone told me, “Yeah, but that was also the same week we had that free-sausage-roll-with-every-copy offer from Gregg’s.” So you never knew if it was your story, the offer, or a combination of both.
That completely changed.
Now every single story has a unique page view count next to it.
News editors sit — I guarantee it — with something like Chartbeat or Omniture open constantly, watching concurrent visitors on their websites.
A reporter writes a story that sounds okay, you publish it, share it on social media, and it might get a few hundred views that day. And you go, right, that kind of story just doesn’t work — and now you know instantly.
It’s a double-edged sword, and it’s something you alluded to before we started recording, Vince.
Those nice community stories sat really well in newspapers, but in the cold light of day, when you’re trying to get page views, nobody really cared.
That part of journalism is kind of going away, for better or worse. But ultimately it comes down to what people actually want to read.
Jade Denby (16:57) PRs would love to have access to that software in real time — knowing what’s working and what isn’t.
I think we still assume that journalists work from editorial planned calendars for the most part, and that everything else that lands in an inbox gets picked up just because a headline piqued their interest.
But it again shows that they’re quite data-driven in their approach, just like digital PRs have to be.
When Sam mentioned the software for tracking topics and performance — how a story that doesn’t do so well on day one might get moved down the homepage — that’s a high-pressure data environment that we can actually relate to. I found that really interesting.
What does a typical day look like as a news editor?
Sam (18:00) Yeah, so in my experience, we had a few news editors in the newsroom.
A typical day would run on shifts — early, mid, and late — from around 6 in the morning until 10 at night, with each of us overlapping. So someone would take the 6am–2pm shift, another 9–5, and another 2–10pm.
The first person in would check Chartbeat or similar software to see how the site was performing so far.
There would be some content from the day before possibly scheduled to go live.
We’d pick up any breaking news — and as we talked about just before we started recording, that’s a huge traffic driver. It sounds morbid, but if there’d been a crash on the M5 overnight, you’d almost think, “Good — that’s a live blog, and that’s going to get us off to a really good start today.” You’d cover the breaking news, pick up the overnight file logs, check emergency service stories, go through the inboxes, then start planning the day.
We’d normally schedule a homepage refresh the night before so that as soon as midnight ticked over, you’d have a fresh homepage ready to go.
One thing Jade was surprised to learn was that we have news conferences every single morning — not just weekly. It was: what’s going on today? I’d get my team — nine, ten, eleven reporters — on a call and go through them individually.
Essentially, they’d pitch to me. There’s a real similarity there between digital PR and what reporters do.
The reporters I had would pitch to me in much the same way anyone with a press release or campaign would pitch via inbox.
They’d come with a story, and I’d evaluate it: on average, we needed each story we wrote that day to do around 5,000 views each.
So it’s got to be good, it’s got to be shareable. I’d okay some and push back on others — maybe a story was in a town that doesn’t have a particularly big Facebook group, so you can’t share it as effectively. All these things go into consideration.
So a large part of that time was planning the day based on what reporters had pitched.
But it was very reactive as well. We planned ahead for big events and things we knew were coming, but it was much more day-to-day than you might think.
From there, my day was largely editing copy as it came in, which could take time — some stories might be legally contentious, for example.
And then a big part was scheduling social media. We’d say: if Emma turns around her story by 3pm, that’ll be our 3pm post, and we’d schedule social content throughout the day.
And then you’d react as you went. By midday you might think, “We’re in a really good spot — we’ve already hit 100,000 concurrent views.” Or it’d be, “Oh no, we’re at 50,000 — we need to pick up pace to hit the monthly target.” In between all that, there was weekend planning, looking for evergreen stories to hold back — something might be pitched on a Thursday and I’d think, “Actually, let’s save that for Saturday.”
Then the general management side: one-on-ones with reporters, mentoring.
Most reporters at a local level are trainees, many brand new.
A lot of them are very young, very capable, very intelligent people — but for many it’s their first job, so you’re managing and mentoring them, explaining why you’ve passed on a story or what made another one work.
And then dealing with the occasional complaint and answering to your bosses.
How has your pitching strategy changed?
Jade Denby (22:57) I think it’s pushed me toward thinking social-first — especially when we talk about Sam’s experience in regional news and Reach PLC and those beloved Facebook groups.
When Sam mentioned the size of the Facebook groups — not necessarily the Somerset Live group, but the general Somerset groups — it made me think.
I’m on those kinds of local Facebook groups myself, and it’s made me think we should probably start doing more grassroots Facebook research to see what gets engagement, what people comment on, and then ask: can we take that and make it work for a client?
We have to remember that a lot of clients want to be super brand-safe and positive, and we know from experience that the best, most conversation-sparking stories can be slightly divisive.
You pit older drivers against younger drivers, or you say something a little more controversial. Some brands I work with don’t even want to say anything is “the worst” — they’ll only say these are the best places and won’t touch the negative angle.
Some clients are a better fit for that kind of thing than others. If a client can be that agile — if they can do social-first headlines that really engage people on an everyday level — that strategy will work for them. But we always have to remember there’s a layer of blue-chip corporate clients that are never going to fit that model. You have to find ways to make digital PR work for them too.
It’s possible — it’s just a longer game.
Speaking to Sam, it was interesting to realize that newsrooms have KPIs, and that they’re trend-led, because we’re going more trend-led too.
It used to be about checking a set number of news sites in the morning, but now I check TikTok creator insights and Pinterest trend reports. I think going social-first from an ideation standpoint, and being a little more human in how we storytell — as opposed to purely data-led — is really valuable.
We can all be a bit guilty of leading with “X percent of the population,” which can feel cold. Humanizing and lightening up stories a little, where the brand allows — I think that’s a really interesting space for 2026, because what works in digital PR and how to approach it does change every one to two years. You can’t just reuse the same strategies and tactics. You have to refresh constantly.
A social-first lens is a good starting point for sparking ideas, and then you reverse-engineer it based on what works for the client.
Sam (25:50) Yeah, and journalism has changed so much too.
Just to give you an example — some of the biggest stories we’d do would be things like when Nando’s opened somewhere new.
That would get thousands and thousands of clicks because people were genuinely excited: When’s it opening? Where’s it going? That kind of thing.
When I was coming up in print, you would not have done that story.
That’s advertising — you just wouldn’t pitch that to a news editor. They’d say, “They can pay for an advert.”
Whereas now it’s so much more audience-led than it ever was.
When I was in print, we were sort of — not dictating to people, but more like: this is the news, this is what we found, this is what’s going on.
Whereas now, there’s much more room for that audience-led stuff. Some stories that would historically be considered journalistically relevant you might not do because they won’t perform as well as, say, a KFC opening in Yeovil.
So you’re thinking outlet-specific rather than story-first?
Jade Denby (27:59) Yeah, I think one thing digital PR doesn’t get enough time for is general research. Unlike some other teams, our whole fee is time — and digital PR is so time-intensive.
It can look quite pricey compared to other marketing channels, where someone might be taking a commission on a media buy.
We’re pure time.
So what we tend to do is cut out anything that’s hard to justify simply: here’s how we do the work, here’s how we activate, here’s how we do the outreach — and here are your hours in a nicely packaged campaign.
I think that’s the biggest battle I always have internally: giving us time to do proper research upfront.
Unlike more traditional PR, where you might spend years embedded in a client sector, our client base can change so regularly that by the time you’ve dug into the weeds and figured out the formula, that client might be gone and you’re onto the next one. News research is probably where we fall down most.
We try to reverse-engineer at the end — we’ve got to get activations underway, align with the brand, make it seasonal and on-trend.
And then we get there and think, “Now we need to make this work for the masses without coming across as fake or over-personalizing pitches.” So a lot of it comes back to strategy, to educating clients, and to budgeting — not underselling our hours, because underselling hours leads to a lot of pressure.
What’s your take on the fake expert debacle at ReachPLC?
Sam (31:13) I think it all comes down to angles. A good journalist is going to recognize a good story.
It’s a tricky one, because the fake experts situation really escalated after I left. But I would always say that the strength of a digital PR campaign will get past the noise.
As long as digital PR professionals stick to their guns — and there are some really, really good people in this industry who know what a good story is, even without direct newsroom experience — it comes down to being true to that and making sure that what they’re offering is the best it can be.
To pick up on what Jade said about how much work goes in at that research stage — how much do you localize the outreach?
I remember when there was a real focus within Reach on hyper-local content. We were talking before the podcast about the kinds of stories where journalists will do some of that legwork for you.
For example, if you had a story with national education figures showing that school attendance had fallen 20% since COVID, you could break that down by region.
A good journalist and a good news editor will recognize that they can take that, build off of it, and use the national data as a baseline — then go interview a local head teacher about it.
Suddenly that story becomes very relevant to the local audience. You get a picture with the head teacher outside the school, and every parent in that town is asking, “What’s going on here?” It immediately appeals to that audience in a way that pure statistics never would.
Nobody in a digital PR agency is going to interview head teachers in every region of the UK just to get 76 localized versions of that story — that’s an enormous amount of work and frankly unnecessary, because you can do that story once, give the regional breakdown by area, and send it to the newsrooms.
They should pick up on the fact that these are shocking figures and go localize it themselves. That’s how they make it a story worth reporting and worth sharing — rather than every Reach title running the same data-led story, which while worthy, won’t have the same impact as a genuinely localized take.
Vince Nero (35:30) Let me flip that a bit, because the feedback digital PR teams have gotten is that journalists are so time-poor that you should be including expert quotes and case studies in your pitches to take that legwork off their plate. I think people have run with that advice — and you end up building an entire strategy around that pain point, inserting your brand into every commentary opportunity. But what I’m hearing from you is that it still needs to be as localized and as authentic as possible. Your random brand reviewing headphones doesn’t need to be commenting on something in Yorkshire.
If journalists are time-poor, should you include expert commentary and whatnot in your pitch?
Sam (36:38) Yeah, absolutely right.
Journalists are time-poor.
In my experience, it was very reactive and there wasn’t much time to plan far ahead.
And because of the redundancies and how much smaller news teams are now, that’s even more true.
But I would say — and I’ll come back to my original point — it’s still something journalists should be doing.
It doesn’t take an enormous amount of time for a reporter to reach out to a local contact to localize a story.
And that work is much more efficiently done on that side. One or two people at a digital PR agency simply can’t ring head teachers across the whole country. That’s not a good use of their time. But a reporter in each of those cities can and should — that’s how they add value, that’s how they make it shareable. That work should be done by the journalist, and as it should be.
Has expert commentary worked for pitching, even with fake experts?
Jade Denby (37:57) Yeah. I think if you’ve relied heavily on media monitoring, product gifting, and expert commentary since COVID, you might feel slightly panicked by what’s happening right now.
But for me, every time a big update like this happens, it gives me a sigh of relief — because it always comes back to SEO, and it always helps strengthen E-E-A-T factors that we’ve been telling clients to focus on in more technical terms for a long time.
I can’t tell you how many SEO meetings I’ve been in with clients where we’ve said, “Authorship in your sector is really important.
Competitors are doing it.
Update the blog, spotlight some experts you can attribute to content repeatedly, build that profile — search engines love it, it’s going to help you rank.”
And it’s met with tumbleweed.
It’s one of those SEO strategy items that never gets actioned.
But then you add in the layer of: journalists are crying out for experts now, but there are so many fake ones that there’s a bit of scaremongering.
So we just need to make it super easy for journalists to identify someone as a genuine expert. That could start with the website — digital profiles that are clearly verifiable, so journalists can vet them quickly. We just make it simpler.
The onus has been on journalists to do that vetting until now, and now we can add that layer of ease in for them, while at the same time reinforcing to clients that authors and experts aren’t going anywhere — they’re important for PR and they’re important for SEO.
A lot of what’s changing is about bringing it all together.
Some things felt like they were very technical SEO recommendations that never quite made it into the PR conversation. But for the first time, I feel like the whole SEO picture is merging with PR quite nicely. So while it’s a slightly unsettled time, if you’re doing all the right things there’s no reason any agency should be blacklisted. Yes, your experts might not have a digital footprint right now — but you just need to work a little harder to explain that to the journalist upfront.
Give them the context: this person is in a niche industry, they haven’t spoken up much publicly before, but here’s why they are genuinely experienced to speak on this topic.
Give the journalist all of that so they don’t have to question anything. All good for SEO in the long term, I think.
Do newsrooms understand SEO?
Sam (41:19) Yeah, it’s definitely something digital PR professionals can capitalize on.
I had the benefit of going from a newsroom — where we tried to do SEO, though it was quite limited, which I’ll touch on — to a dedicated SEO agency before Marketing Signals.
I learned a lot, and a lot of what I learned was what newsrooms were doing wrong.
As far as I could tell, there was no keyword research at the local newsroom level.
There was a central team that wrote articles around trending SEO topics — you know, around the time of Strictly Come Dancing or similar, all the Reach sites would have articles about it.
It might work for The Mirror or the Manchester Evening News with their larger audiences, but it doesn’t really work for the smaller regional titles. All it does is drag things down by publishing essentially the same article across many sites.
When I was there, we didn’t do any real keyword research.
We got lucky with a few things. One of the biggest accidental SEO successes at Somerset Live was when there was a Channel 5 show called Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country. She bought this big fixer-upper in Bruton, Somerset, so there was a local link — we wrote a few articles just because of that.
We weren’t thinking about SEO at all. But because it wasn’t the biggest show, and it was on Channel 5, for a few months we were the only ones writing about it.
When it was on TV, people were Googling it — and we did really well. Eventually the bigger titles noticed, wrote their own articles, and outranked us because of their domain authority, but for a while it was genuinely excellent.
The thing is, that happened by accident. We wrote it to share on Facebook, and the search traffic was a happy bonus.
Nobody thought, “This will be great for SEO because nobody else is covering it.” Knowing now what I know about SEO, if I had my time again, I think we could have done an awful lot more with it.
There are so many easy wins — quick informational posts about things people search for all the time: Stonehenge, local events, all sorts of things you could rank for with relatively little effort.
We also didn’t really know about link building. We knew it was good if people linked to you, but we didn’t do outreach — we didn’t even know about it. So what Jade mentioned about getting SEO-led stories into newsrooms is, I think, a huge potential win.
Unless things have changed dramatically since I left and everyone’s much more clued up now, it’s something newsrooms are not doing — and digital PR could be doing it for them.
How do you communicate SEO value to a journalist without turning them off?
Jade Denby (46:03) Yeah. Weirdly, when I’m actually pitching a story, I’m not thinking about the SEO.
I’m treating it like I need to pitch a story to a journalist and meeting them where they are.
We do a lot of backend keyword research and create landing pages and optimize where the traffic is going to land — that’s where I think digital PRs wear two hats.
It’s being more like a traditional PR when you’re doing the outreach, but also being technical SEO when you’re compiling campaign landing pages or thinking about where to drive links for maximum impact.
It’s interesting what Sam said about the SEO and trending articles across regionals, because that was actually a bit of a relief for me as a digital PR.
They’ve always had some level of awareness — there are people who pop up with stories clearly designed around search — and they must have been piecing things together when we keep asking for links after coverage.
You can see the knowledge building over time.
I found that when I was pitching data-led stories to SEO journalists or trending news journalists, they took them straight away.
It was like an unspoken understanding: this is more data-backed and about what people are talking about right now, and I’ve given you solid data to back it up.
That kind of bridged the gap. There was still a strong story, and they wanted it for that reason, but they were accepting of the data angle because it was a data story.
When Great British Bake Off was on, for example, I could constantly pitch my baking clients’ recipes and expert chef tips — “here’s what not to do when you bake those jammy dodgers” or whatever was on the show the night before.
That was such a successful run for the entire length of the show. We sent in the expert tips but backed them with search data — a two-pronged approach.
That hit a really nice sweet spot.
I don’t think we need to get too bogged down in the weeds, because something that passes the pub test, feels trendy, and that anyone scrolling on their phone would recognize — that’s the goal.
Keep the PR side about trends and what people actually want to talk about. Keep the technical stuff to the website, the strategy meetings, and the big-picture conversations with clients. It’s a two-pronged approach, really.
Anything you want to leave us with that we didn’t discuss?
Jade Denby (49:41) Ha! Yeah. On a positive note — digital PRs and journalists have started to merge.
I see way more journalists speaking at digital PR conferences and sharing knowledge with us.
We probably need to do the same and hear more from journalists and people who work in actual newsrooms. I feel like the last few years have broken down some of those barriers between “us and them.” It’s going in the right direction. We just have to keep learning from each other — which sounds cheesy, but it’s true.
Sam (50:06) It’s really good to see. And I’ll add to that — I think journalists need digital PR now more than ever.
If I could give anyone in digital PR one piece of advice, it would be: pretend you’re a reporter at that publication, pitching a campaign to a news editor as if you didn’t work in digital PR — as if you were in that newsroom — because that’s essentially what will happen with what you send them.
If you send a reporter a campaign, a press release, a story — whatever it is — it has to pass muster with them, but they then have to pitch it to their news editors and say, “I think this could do really well.”
And like I say, there are now much smaller teams trying to hit very lofty page view targets, and digital PR is helping them do that.
That’s probably one of the reasons the barriers are starting to break down — newsrooms are genuinely grateful for it. In fact, just as I was leaving, they were starting to bring in individual page view targets for reporters too, not just the team as a whole. So these reporters are really held to account. Anything you can do to help them, they’ll be your best friend.
Act like you’re there to help them achieve their page views, and I don’t think you’ll go wrong.
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