Effective year-end pitch ideas

There’s a little more than a week left in 2014, and newsrooms are slammed with stories. How can your pitch get through? Try one of these.

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The holiday crush affects newsrooms, too.

Our job as PR professionals is to push back against clients who want to ramp up the PR machine during the holidays as they try to boost news hits before the end of the year. Pitches without strong news hooks will probably never see the light of day.

Remind your clients that shorthanded newsrooms are even more stretched during the holidays, as editors scramble to fill programs and news pages around all those holiday ads. Here are a few topics that can legitimately be sold this week and next:

Shopping: You can pitch stories for clients who are part of the shopping frenzy, but clients should be ready to offer an honest take on the day’s business. Reporters and their audiences hate businesses that paint an overly optimistic picture that is not borne out by facts.

Online shipping: Online retailers, and those who keep them running smoothly, are quickly taking center stage as shoppers avoid crowded stores and misleading door-busters.

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