Straight from The Wall Street Journal: How to make your pitches stand out

For the most part, journalists don’t have a lot of time to read email. They start their day with a full workload. For them to cover your story, you must convince them to change their schedule.

In other words, your pitch better be good.

To chat through what makes a good pitch, I thought it would be wise to pick up the phone and call a former colleague from my days at the Cincinnati Enquirer. That colleague, Bowdeya Tweh, is now the deputy corporate bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal. Here are a few pointers we landed on in our discussion.

The first step in effective pitching is making sure you are pitching to the right journalists.

Say you have a strong pitch of an expert who just completed research on inflation. You believe this expert would be perfect for The Wall Street Journal. Now, imagine your pitch went to the sports editor.

That is just one example of poor pitching Tweh provided in our conversation.

Another mistake Tweh sees a lot are pitches that are written to no one in particular. For example, the email is addressed to “The Wall Street Journal” or simply begins with “Hi.”

“Nothing gets deleted faster than something that looks like a form letter,” Tweh said.