My name is Monica Rosenfeld. I’m a professional speaker and the founder of WordStorm PR.In today’s video I’m going to be talking all about exclusives and whether you should offer the media an exclusive for your story idea.
Now chances are if you’ve come up with a great angle and a great story for the media that journalists will want to pick it up because you’re providing them content that will add value to their audience. Once you have this, I would suggest that you always offer an exclusive when you’re pitching to TV because if they want a story they will always want an exclusive.
The best thing to do is prioritize the TV shows that you think your story would be best on. Prioritize them from 1 to 8 and then start pitching to your first preference in the e-mail pitch. Make it clear that you’re offering them an exclusive by putting in the subject line say exclusive story for Sunrise so to speak and then again repeat that it’s an exclusive as part of the first line in the body of your e-mail pitch.
Leave it with them for about a day and in 24 hours follow up your pitch with another email. If you haven’t heard back from your email to them saying ‘Follow up: exclusive story pitch for Sunrise”, then continue to go down the list and chances are your story if it’s relevant and tailored to the audience of that TV show will get picked up.
If you’re pitching to print or online news sites you can use the same idea. If you really want to be in a certain newspaper or news site like AFR or news.com.au or maybe SMH or any other media title – I would pitch your angle to them first letting them know and making it very clear that you’re offering them an exclusive.
Once they have run the story, you can pitch to everyone else at the same time and if they don’t get back to you and they don’t get back to your follow up then I would suggest sending it out to a few other media outlets at the same time without offering an exclusive.
I hope this has been helpful. I know it’s a funny area so if you do have any questions about it please don’t hesitate to get in touch I will help you through this as best as I can and in the meantime if you found this video helpful and think it will help others feel free to like comment or share.
Thank you and look forward to talking to you next week.
