9 Mistakes You and Your Clients Are Making During Email-Based Interviews

Today's newsletter is based on a real-life example of a publicist dropping the ball this week ... learn from these mistakes to help position your client as an A+ source

Hello Top Tier Community!

This week, we want to talk about a topic that’s unfortunately top of mind for Jill: a PR team that dropped the ball on an interview, which almost caused her to miss a deadline.

Here’s what happened

Jill put a call for pitches in her recent newsletter and the in-house publicists from a nonprofit organization responded touting their expert as being the perfect source. After reviewing their well-organized and detailed pitch, she agreed.

Jill sent over interview questions the very same day (a Tuesday) and asked for responses the following Monday. So they had almost a full week.

On Thursday, Jill received an email from the publicist, stating they’d just recieved the answers from their source … they just needed to review them in-house before sharing as per their protocol.

Later that day, the publicist asked if she could have one more day (Friday) … that was still before deadline, so Jill said no problem.

Friday came and went … nothing.

Monday … nothing. The due date has come and gone.

Yes, it was a holiday, but they should have planned ahead for that.

On Tuesday, Jill followed up … no response.

On Wednesday (yesterday), Jill received an email apology … and a request to have until the end of the day (AGAIN) to submit so they could complete their in-house review!!!

Side note: Since this in-house publicist knew that internal review was part of their process for email quotes, they should have accounted for that time internally … and asked their source to submit even earlier to accommodate it. That extra time can’t impede on the writer’s deadline.

They finally submitted the info later that day (2 full days late).

Now, here’s the thing: As much as Jill wanted to NOT include them in the article because of the way this was handled, she found herself in the 11th hour of this assignment. She had no choice but to use this source versus search for another source with no time left on the clock. But this type of exchange is the perfect example of a situation in which she will not want to work with that publicist/brand ever again — even if they would be the perfect source for another article. This type of exchange is not a great way to have your writer become a writer’s go-to source. And these types of interactions are reasons why some writers may flat-out just delete pitches from a specific publicist in the future or not want to work with them. If they’ve been burned in the past, they don’t want to be burned again in the future. Trust is everything.

In light of this unfortunate real-life example, we’d like to discuss email-based faux pas today.

When an email interview is done well, it’s magic. When it’s not, it’s tragic.

Unfortunately a trend that we and our colleagues have been seeing lately (we often talk shop and trade stories with our writer pals) is that a lot of people are missing the mark lately on these email interviews. And they may not even be completely unaware that they are doing it. This can greatly reduce a source’s chance of being included in an article, can strain a relationship between a writer and a publicist, and can create all sorts of editorial chaos.

Let’s take a look at some of these common email interview no-nos that we’re seeing and do a deep dive into what to do instead in these situations.

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