End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- 99% of pitches are irrelevant to the person receiving them.
- TV needs visuals, graphics, and a real human guest who fits a tight time slot.
- Digital can go deeper, wants more data and research, and can work from quotes.
- Get in before the news, not four days after.
- Journalists line up sources ahead of known events.
- Write your subject line as the headline that outlet would run.
- Reporters want exclusives, embargoes, and time.
Most of what we cover on this podcast is the digital side of PR. I haven’t had many guests who can talk about TV, and I think it’s a really important piece of the puzzle that everyone in the business needs to know their way around.
So this week I talked to Jodi Gralnick. Jodi was a producer at CNBC for over 17 years, and before that she worked at Bloomberg and in local news.
These days she’s a media strategist, storyteller, and media trainer, and she just launched the website for her consultancy, Right Line Group.
We get into what a field producer does, how stories make it to air, how to pitch TV versus digital, and why a great pitch can still lose to the news cycle.
Let’s get into it.
Below is a slightly edited transcript:
What does a field producer do?
Jodi Gralnick: Producers at different stations do different things.
At CNBC, there are a lot of different types of producers.
There are supervising producers, executive producers, show producers, line producers, segment producers, field producers, and they all do slightly different things.
Field producers produce segments, but they develop them from the very beginning, when it’s just an idea, to getting it on TV.
So they’re involved in every aspect of getting a [story] on television.
Field producers actually do pretty much everything a reporter does. They just don’t put their face on the stories.
They’re pitching the stories, they’re researching the stories, sometimes they’re doing the interviews, they’re coming up with the graphics, sometimes they’re writing the scripts, they’re picking the videos, sometimes they’re picking the sound bites, and they’re seeing the whole thing through until it airs, and even as it airs on television.
How do story ideas come into a newsroom?
Jodi Gralnick: That’s a really good question. There are various ways that stories come up.
Sometimes you’re coming up with it on your own.
You’ve seen something going on in your life, or you’ve happened to notice something out in the wild, and you think, “I’ve never seen that before.
I wonder if there’s something there.” Then you start researching it and looking into it.
Sometimes it’s something that your news managers have come up with and they just assign it to you.
Sometimes your reporter comes up with the story and then you start working with them on it.
And sometimes it’s a pitch that you get that sparks an idea, and you follow through on that and it turns into something.
So there are a lot of different ways that stories come into newsrooms.
Vince Nero: Does it differ from newsroom to newsroom? I know you spent some time at Bloomberg and local pubs before CNBC. Was it a different process there?
Jodi Gralnick: I think that process is generally the same.
Whether you’re talking about TV, newspaper, or digital, the ways in which stories come up are pretty much the same.
It might be skewed more towards one than the other in some places, depending on resources.
But I think those general buckets are the same everywhere you go.
Vince Nero: Although I would imagine, and tell me if I’m wrong here, the types of stories you’re covering at CNBC might be different than at local or Bloomberg.
Jodi Gralnick: Hundred percent. Yes, definitely.
How do you make sure your pitch reaches the right person?
Jodi Gralnick: When I tell you that 99% of the pitches that come into newsrooms are irrelevant to the newsroom or the person it’s being pitched to, I don’t think I’m exaggerating.
At CNBC, I got pitches for things like, and I’m not making this up, nudist colonies and dwarf planets.
If you’ve ever watched CNBC for five minutes, you know that those things are not going to make air.
They’re just going to end up in the garbage. It’s kind of ridiculous, some of the things that come through.
The days of spray and pray are long gone.
You can’t do that.
There are so many people pitching, there’s so much going on, there’s so much email coming in, and journalists just don’t have time to go through all of it.
So you need to be really targeted.
You need to understand what that outlet covers and, within that outlet, who covers what.
If you’re sending the crypto reporter a story about health tech, it’s useless.
It’s a waste of your time and it’s a waste of their time.
You need to find out who the health tech reporter is and send it to the health tech reporter.
I think what surprises people a lot when I explain this is that even within CNBC, we had to pitch stories.
If I had a story that I wanted to air and it got approved by the news managers, I then had to sell it to the shows.
And I pitched the shows differently.
I didn’t pitch Squawk Box the same way that I pitched Halftime Report, or the same way that I pitched Closing Bell, or the same way that I pitched the Shep show when we had it.
They’re completely different shows within the outlet.
So if I have to pitch each show differently, imagine how you have to pitch each outlet differently.
How do you determine who to pitch: a producer or a reporter?
Jodi Gralnick: There are a few factors that go into that.
It depends on the newsroom.
Each newsroom works a little bit differently.
It depends on your relationships.
If you have a relationship with a reporter, then you should pitch that reporter, but only if you really think the story is worthwhile.
If you have no relationships, you’re probably better off trying to find a producer in a big newsroom like CNBC.
But you need to find the right producers.
Some producers have beats.
Some producers work specifically with certain shows.
Some producers are general assignment and you can kind of send them anything.
They may pass it on to somebody else or they may ignore it. But you have to take the time to find the right person and find who does what.
And no matter who you pitch, I think this is a huge misconception: that person might think the story is good.
They might follow up with you. They might ask some questions and say, “You know what? I think there’s something here, I’m going to pursue it.”
That doesn’t mean it’s going to end up on CNBC, because there’s a whole other bunch of layers that it still needs to go through, and a whole bunch of other people who need to say, “Yeah, I think that’s a good story,” before it gets on television.
Is the bar different for local news than for CNBC?
Jodi Gralnick: The bar tends to be a lot lower for local news.
CNBC has the whole world to choose from.
Local news has a very small area that it’s covering, for the most part.
So I think the bar is a little bit lower.
From day to day, there’s less that it’s competing against.
Local news likes to do feel-good stuff and featurey kinds of things.
With CNBC, it has to have a business angle. It has to have some kind of relevance to the audience, specifically investors.
Are there shortcuts to learning what an outlet or journalist covers?
Jodi Gralnick: First of all, I think you need to watch or read the outlet that you’re thinking of pitching.
The real way to understand it is to take the time to watch it.
You don’t have to watch it for days on end.
Watch CNBC for a couple of hours, or watch each show for 10 minutes, and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what’s going on there.
Same thing with reading a newspaper, digital, whatever.
You look for bylines.
You look for who’s covering what, who’s doing what.
I think it’s a lot easier these days than it used to be.
You’ve got ChatGPT and Gemini, which can help you find those people. You have to research and make sure they’re not leading you down the wrong path, but they can at least give you a starting place.
You can try reaching out to an assignment desk and saying, “Hey, who’s the best producer for a crypto story?” or “Who’s the best producer for this story?”
Sometimes they’ll just tell you to send it directly to the assignment desk, but sometimes they’ll tell you exactly who it is.
LinkedIn profiles, too. It’s so much easier today than it used to be. There’s so much information out there. You just need to take a few minutes to go and find it.
How should you think about pitching TV versus digital?
Jodi Gralnick: I would say that, at least at CNBC, there’s a lot of collaboration and a lot of cross-platform work. So if you’re pitching one, you may end up on the other one anyway.
But there are definitely different decision-making processes between the two.
TV is a visual medium and it has very specific time constraints.
So producers have to think: Can I tell this story in the amount of time that I have? What am I going to show?
I need visuals.
I need video.
I need somebody to talk to. I need something I can make graphics out of.
I can’t just put a talking head on TV for four minutes and have absolutely nothing else to show.
Digital doesn’t necessarily need all of that.
Digital can go deeper. They can spend more time, so to speak.
They have, to some degree, an unlimited amount of space and time that they can use.
So they don’t necessarily need to work within the same constraints that TV does.
That being said, it still needs to be a good story. It still needs to be audience-relevant.
And sometimes you get crossovers. Sometimes something starts as a digital story, and it’s really strong or it performs really well on the website, and suddenly TV wants it.
On the other side of that, sometimes something starts on TV and you just don’t get to everything that you want to talk about.
Then you’re able to take what you didn’t use and make it a bigger story on digital.
So sometimes there is some cross-pollination there. I don’t think you should limit yourself to one or the other, because you never know where it’s going to end up.
Should you pitch the TV side and the digital side differently?
Jodi Gralnick: I think it’s the same thing we were talking about with pitching different outlets differently.
You can think the same way about pitching digital versus TV.
You have to think about what they need to make it a good story.
TV needs visuals, or they need graphics.
They need something that they can put on TV. So you have to think about that differently, and you can pitch digital and TV in a different way.
TV wants data too, but digital wants a lot more data, a lot more research.
Digital can take quotes as opposed to an actual guest, whereas TV would much prefer to have that guest either live or on tape: an actual human being talking to you. So that’s a difference also.
You have to think about what you have, how you can package it, and the different needs of the different mediums.
Have you ever had a fake expert or fake story get through?
Jodi Gralnick: We hope. Not yet.
Vince Nero: There are always people trying to game the system. Have you ever had something like that get through, where it’s like, “This isn’t a real story”?
Jodi Gralnick: Not personally. Not that I remember happening at CNBC while I was there.
Back in the day you used to have the Baba Booey phone calls, the phone-ins.
Do you remember those?
People would call into a TV show live, and they’d be fake, and then they’d yell “Baba Booey” or whatever.
I think this is probably the modern version of that.
So yeah, you have to do your due diligence. But I think it’s probably getting harder to spot that kind of stuff.
When should you not pitch a newsroom?
Jodi Gralnick: I will say this: field producers, or any producers at places like CNBC, were kind of experts at coming up with visual ways to tell things if we thought the story was good enough.
But look, the baseline for a story changes day to day. Let’s start there.
You have to look at what else is going on in the world.
Recent example: you know that SpaceX is going public.
That’s all CNBC is going to cover all day long that day.
Don’t pitch something else, because it’s not going to get on television.
So you have to know what the environment is, to the degree that you can know it.
There’s always breaking news. Sometimes it’s just not your fault.
You have a pretty decent story; it’s just that the world it’s being pitched into at that time is not favorable.
That being said, what makes it a good story? First of all, what’s the audience? A story for one outlet, as we’ve said, is not necessarily a story for another outlet.
Your client may think it’s a good story because it’s really important to them, but it’s not really important to anybody else. It’s an incremental change.
Vince Nero: Every client.
Jodi Gralnick: Right?
It’s something so internal that nobody else would care.
Those kinds of things you don’t want to pitch.
Don’t pitch things where you’re trying to make up a news peg.
Sometimes those quirky things work, but just because it’s national whatever day, don’t try to force some fake parallel in there, where all of a sudden there’s a connection and you’re trying to tie it to some irrelevant story that you really have no reason to pitch me.
So you really have to look at the objective news value and then the relative news value.
If you’re trying to newsjack, you need to do that quickly.
Sending me newsjacking four days after the fact is too late.
You need to do that immediately.
And sometimes you can anticipate those newsjacking opportunities, because you know there’s a Supreme Court decision coming down, or somebody is making a speech about something, or an IPO is happening. You might be able to pre-newsjack that.
But waiting four days after? Not helpful.
Sending a pitch to CNBC telling them all about your client’s recent appearance on Bloomberg?
That’s not going to get you on CNBC.
In fact, that’s the first thing that’s going to kill you at CNBC.
Reporters like exclusives.
Reporters like embargoed information.
Reporters like things that nobody else has.
And they love to have as much time to get it together as possible.
Do producers line up sources ahead of big news events?
Jodi Gralnick: Hundred percent. Especially big stuff like tariff decisions.
That was a big one that I covered. I was doing retail, and tariff decisions were coming out every few weeks, and we knew they were happening.
We had people lined up.
We had stories lined up that we could go to.
If the decision went this way, we would talk to these people. If the decision went that way, we would have this ready to go.
Yes, journalists a hundred percent prepare for those things that they know are coming up and that they know they’re probably going to cover.
So if you can get in there and say, “Hey, this tariff decision’s coming up, and my client thinks that if it passes, here are the implications,” and they have a unique point of view and something interesting to say, it’s a lot easier to be like, “The decision’s out. Vince had that client. Let me call Vince and get that guy on the air.”
As opposed to, “OK, let’s now start going through our Rolodex and see who wants to talk about it.”
Or all of a sudden people start pitching us the next day. It’s too late.
Of course journalists do that. It baffles me that people don’t understand that journalists would do that.
Are producers looking for talking heads or just commentary?
Jodi Gralnick: Again, it depends on the situation. Sometimes you want talking heads, sometimes you want data, sometimes you want a full story.
We had situations where we went out in the field and stood in warehouses and talked about how tariffs were impacting companies.
Sometimes you want the visuals. You want the whole thing.
It depends on how quickly the news is breaking, what your deadlines are, what the shows are looking for, what your managers are looking for, and what your budget will allow you to do.
But I think PR pros spend too much time thinking like marketers instead of thinking like the journalists they’re pitching.
If PR people could put themselves in the journalist’s shoes more often, they’d probably be more successful.
One of the things they could also do better: when you send a subject line, you should write it as if it were the headline that outlet was going to put out.
So not the same subject line for every outlet, like we talked about. If I was CNBC, how would I probably frame the story? That should be your pitch.
Not “It’s National Tax Day.
Are you looking for a story tied to National Tax Day?” I would literally get a subject line like that.
My answer is no, and I’m not going to open your email.
Do you have a playbook for how to present a story visually?
Jodi Gralnick: Not necessarily a playbook.
I do think some of it is intuition.
You see a story pitch come through, or something you’ve noticed, or something you’re assigned, and you automatically start thinking, “OK, I have to think visually. What can I put on TV for this story?”
Sometimes it’s just, “I wonder if we could go somewhere and show this thing.”
Some stories just lend themselves to being visual.
They’re just better with video and graphics. And it’s more interesting when you can be out in the field.
We did a tariff story where we went to a Bath & Body Works factory.
We’re standing live in the factory with all these bottles running behind us and things filling them with lotions, and the reporter’s in a hairnet and a lab coat.
You’re going to sit up and look at that when it comes across the TV.
You might have CNBC on mute that day, and you glance up and see a reporter standing there in a hairnet, and you’re like, “What is going on?” And you’re going to watch that segment.
Those are the ones I would get the most feedback from.
I would hear the control room being like, “That looks so cool.”
You know you made the right decision going.
So there are some stories that you just know instinctively need to be done live.
That doesn’t always mean that your bosses agree. You might think so.
They might even think so.
I had a great pitch once.
I was pitched a CEO who we’d been wanting to get on television, and they finally wanted to do it live in conjunction with their earnings.
They offered us the chance to come out and do it in an amazing location tied to a big national event.
We thought it was great.
We pitched it to the shows, and the shows came back and said, “That is only the 19th biggest company by market cap reporting on that day.”
There were 18 bigger companies reporting that day.
This was a household-name company, and we couldn’t go and do it because it wasn’t going to be worth it.
There was no ROI there. It was barely going to get on.
We weren’t even sure we could get it on live. It wasn’t worth going out there, so we didn’t.
It was so frustrating.
But field producers have the same problem that PR people have.
It’s the same exact thing.
Can a great location help win coverage?
Jodi Gralnick: It’s not so much, “It’s beautiful and I can have a trip to Hawaii.”
For most places, that’s not what’s going to do it.
The location and the coolness need to tell the story. It needs to be part of the story and it needs to add to the story.
When it looks really cool and it makes people look, that’s what’s going to get them out there.
But it’s not just because it’s pretty, or because I get to get on a plane and go to Hawaii and it’s a boondoggle.
Your boss is not going to buy that. They’re going to see right through that.
It needs to add to the story.
But yes, if you can pick your timing based on knowing what else is going on, or you can pick your location because it’s got some super cool visual that helps tell the story, do it.
If you’re doing a story about, I don’t know, a new 747, you’re not going to do it in a conference room.
You’re going to do it at the airport and you’re going to have the plane take off.
That’s what you need to do to get people to come and see it.
If you’ve just got the CEO talking in front of their building, it’s not very interesting.
You’ve got to think about what you have and how you can use it.
What was the coolest story you ever covered?
Jodi Gralnick: I was very fortunate, because I got to cover a lot of really cool stuff.
One of the things I did that I absolutely loved was space.
I did space for a while, so I’ve been to quite a few launches, and I’ve been inside quite a few rocket factories, including SpaceX and ULA.
So it’s probably somewhere in there.
Maybe the coolest thing I ever did was that we were the very first people to ever be live on a launch pad with a rocket behind us.
Obviously not with the rocket taking off; it was the day before.
We were the first ones ever to convince NASA and SpaceX to allow us to be on the launch pad.
So we were doing live shots literally standing in front of this huge rocket the day before it took off.
And then we were there when it took off, obviously.
That was pretty cool.
Vince Nero: I bet it’s even bigger than you can imagine.
Jodi Gralnick: It’s huge. It’s so cool.
Actually, no, even cooler than that.
When astronauts actually get on the space vehicle, there’s this white room that they go into at the top of the launch pad.
They go up in an elevator to the top of the launch pad, and then they spend some time in this white room, which is basically just a box, before they get into the capsule.
We got to go up on the elevator, go up in the white room, and be up there. It is so high.
The reporter I was with was gripping the side of the thing, and I’m a little scared of heights too, so I was kind of right there with her.
It was a little bit scary, but it was really cool to be up there and see right where the astronauts would be right before they got into the capsule.
I’ve gotten to do some really cool things in my job.
Vince Nero: Now that you’re working with clients, it must feel like small potatoes next to that.
Jodi Gralnick: No, it’s just a different kind of fun and challenge. It’s fun. It’s different, though.
Vince Nero: I think there are so many transferable skills no matter what you’re doing.
Jodi Gralnick: So many transferable skills. It’s the same storytelling. I’ve always done corporate storytelling at CNBC.
It’s just flipping it and seeing it from another perspective now.
Check out the BuzzStream Podcast
