Introducing Yourself to a New Journalist? Here's What to Keep in Mind

We've received a lot of questions on this topic lately. Here are our top dos and don'ts!

Hey Top Tier Consulting Community. Hope you’re all having a great week!

One piece of news that we wanted to call out is we just saw that the OG HARO is back.

Note that most writers we know have migrated to Source of Sources (SOS). And a lot of us are still using QWOTED. (Nicole chiming in here to say that I’ve had the best leads I’ve had in a while on QWOTED and am prioritizing that on my end these days - aside from my Substack of course, which is my go to these days - Jill too with hers).

But anyway, sounds like OG HARO and Featured merged and are a thing again in case you want another platform to check out. Seeing this email going around with more info and sharing in case you wanted to give it another try.

At the end of the day it can’t hurt to put your clients out there on more platforms. Just know this one is probably not going to have as many A list writers on it at least for the time being while it does its whole relaunch thing and gets going again. Curious to see how it goes. If you try it out, send us your feedback!

Recommend Reading: A 2025 Update on What Platforms Journalist Are Posting Calls for Sources on These Days

Now onto this week’s topic. Dos and Don’ts of Introducing Yourselves to New Journalists

At our last few Top Tier Talks (reminder these are a free monthly 1 hour Zoom call that Jill and Nicole do with paid subscribers where we talk about trending things happening in the media and answer all of your burning questions), people have been asking about introducing themselves to new journalists.

If you were too busy hopping full speed into the New Year and also just navigating the state of chaos on the world (politics, wildfires, etc.) in the first quarter, you’re not alone. But that makes the start of Quarter 2 a great time to turn the focus toward networking with new journalists.

So you have a new journalist you’ve come across and want to get your clients in front of them? Here are some of our best tips on how to make that a smooth process.

1. Send a pitch vs. ask a writer to hop on the phone to learn more about your clients

Writers get a TON of emails. And every day we get pitches from publicists that say “would love to hop on the phone to discuss our new clients.” Sadly these don’t typically give you much ROI as writers often ignore those types of emails for many reasons. The main reason is we simply don’t have the time to take those calls.

Another reason is that the key to landing your clients in a story is to pitch writers your client in the context of a story idea. Simply telling a writer that you have a cool client is not often enough to help a writer with a busy inbox make the connection as to what they can do with that client article-wise.

Your best bet is to pitch your client and tie them to something timely. That will give you much more bang for your buck.

2. Forgo the pre pitch

When writers open emails from publicists they are thinking 3 things: 1) Who is the client and what makes this person or product different than other products or experts we are getting pitched all day long? 2) Where could I pitch them? 3)What makes an interview with this person or a mention of this product timely?

If you want to pitch a writer, you don’t have to do a big hello email before the pitch. A pre-pitch isn’t necessary. The best way to dazzle is to put together a curated pitch for a writer who covers that beat with some story angles. You can introduce yourself as a publicist a writer has never worked with in that email.

It’s the same thing that happens when writers reach out to new editors. The emails where we say, “Hi I’m so and so and here are my clips and I want to write for you” largely get ignored. The ones where we do that PLUS send thoughtful story ideas that make sense for that outlet are the ones that land us new clients and new work.

Read on for more of our tips below.

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*Note: Our consulting sessions, workshops, Zooms and Substack newsletters are strictly educational. Signing up for anything has no bearing on landing coverage in any of our outlets. Our role is to fine-tune your approach and tactics so that you can apply these learnings when pitching other journalists.