How Do Writers Vet Sources? Your Behind-the-Scenes Guide Into That Process
Plus, last chance to book a 1:1 consulting session this month for 20 percent off!
Happy Thursday all! Hope everyone is having a great week.
In today’s Substack, we’re diving into a topic we get asked a lot about: How exactly do writers decide on the sources that they choose?
We’ll get into that below, but first, a quick few announcements:
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Now Onto This Week’s Topic: How a Writer Vets a Source
You submit your client for a story and then a writer doesn’t choose them. You may be asking yourself what went wrong?
Was it something about your pitch?
Was your source not qualified enough?
Did someone beat you to the punch and pitch faster?
The answer could be YES to all of the above.
When a writer is looking for a source to quote in their articles, they do tend to prioritize sources that come in faster and sources that have more impressive titles/backgrounds/experience. They also like to work with publicists who make things easy and include all the helpful info they need about a source in an initial response to a call for sources.
For more on that last topic, we recommend check out this past TTC Substack:
8 Ways to Stand Out From the Crowd When Replying to a Writer's Call for Sources
Before saying yes or no to your source being right for an article, a writer goes through a whole analysis of a publicist’s prospective source. So what do they look for? How do they decide? Here are some things a writer looks for when deciding if an expert is right for their story.
#1: Do they have the right credentials?
A writer is working on a story and looking to speak to a relationship expert. What does that mean? They have to have the training to back that up. A lot of publicists try to slide experts in for a story like this that don’t have the right fit. So what makes someone “a relationship expert?”
They have a degree like a LMFT, which makes them a certified licensed marriage and family therapist.
They have authored a best-selling book on relationships
They run a high-ranking podcast on relationships
They have done a popular TED Talk on relationships
Some other fancy degree we’re not listing here that makes them licensed, certified, trained in relationships
Oftentimes, we’ll get pitched relationship experts who are basically self-proclaimed relationship experts. They don’t have any of the credentials that we’re looking for. Or maybe they are a life coach or a writer who has written about relationships. And very often, we’ll get pitched the CEO of a vibrator company who has no licensed training and is merely a person who got into the business side of running a sex toy company. If a source doesn’t have the credentials, a writer’s editor is going to poo poo them— thus that writer is going to pass.
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