Here are two tidbit’s from yesterday’s Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference on email/online pitching (which I moderated):

• Dave Satterfield of Sitrick & Co. said that he has texted reporters to answer questions and make clarifications  during major announcement events, while they were all in the room together
• The Vatican has been send text messages to followers and the media since 2003. Kevin Dugan of the Bad Pitch Blog said one of the reasons was to reduce the possibility of Vatican-related hoaxes being picked up by the media as legit.

I love the title of this post: “clear is the new clever.” There — I said it again.

I’m not a particularly “clever” PR person. I don’t come up with lame excuses, I don’t misdirect people to divert their attention. I like to help clients sort out their story, position themselves strongly, and then tell the world about it.

So I loved picking up this line from journalist/author Sarah Lacy on a recent Bulldog audio conference. Like me, she prefers that people just give it to her straight and clear, rather than trying to grab her attention with something they think is “clever.”

Love it.

Why send a plain old written PR pitch when you can send a “vitch” — a video pitch?

That’s right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It’s certainly simple enough to do — plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.

Makes a lot of sense, too. Video is such an incredibly powerful medium, and now, through the evolution of technology, we can all be fast and cheap video producers.

The key thing here is that a “vitch” can’t just be you reading your boring, stilted press release into the camera. You need to show something — the newsmakers, the location, something, anything tangible. This, by itself, takes PR people out of their jargon-filed comfort zone.

I just picked up on this word so I don’t have any good examples of video pitches and their results, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. I plan to try it this month just to see what happens.

Here’s another free online database of journalists, covering the UK media: journalisted.com

It’s pretty simple: just go to that page, type in as much of the name as you know, and get a set of matches. For instance, here’s a link to a search for Smith.

And here’s a page for one of the journalists on the site, Nick Parker of The Sun. They post whatever contact info they have, as well as links to recent articles and other similar journalists.

For a free resource, it’s pretty cool.

Most media directories cost money, but not this one: the Society of Professional Journalists’ online directory of freelance journalists.

The directory lists 914 professional journalists who make a living as independents, and gives their names, coverage areas and best of all, contact info [including email], right there on the web. It’s true.

The reason it’s out there for free is that the directory is intended first and foremost for media editors who are looking for freelancers to hire. But that doesn’t mean we PR folks can also scan the directory for potential journalists to pitch our stories to.

One more tip, an obvious but important one: do some homework on the freelancers you are pitching to see if they would be a good fit for your story. They usually have samples of their work posted on a web site and sheesh, you can always Google them.

Part of my media training curriculum is explaining to people that the media covers only a set group of topics — they are broad, but they are really all you will find in American mainstream media, so if you want coverage, you better figure out which buckets your story fits in.

They are:

• Novelty: things that don’t happen everyday
• Familiarity: things that DO happen every day, such as the weather, the City Council and the stock market
• Big money and winners: the ups and downs of public and private institutions are always grist for news stories; everyone loves a winner
• Risk-takers: people who put their money, reputation, health or safety at risk
• Cat-fights: want coverage? Pick a fight
• Your wallet: everyone likes to learn more about how to make money, save it or spend it
• Sex, celebrities and scandal: because they have universal appeal

The story that prompted this post is this: cute blond female twins who want to work in journalism. This story appeared in the New York Times. Seriously.

Bucket analysis of this story:

• Cute blond twins = sex
• Want to work in the media = the media’s favorite big institution, itself.
• Killing themselves to get a job = risk-takers, esp. if you are a cute blond twin
• And don’t forget novelty! They’re cute young blond girl twins! How unusual!

Here’s another story making the rounds: Rush Limbaugh’s desire to become a minority owner of the St. Louis Rams of the NFL. It has generated, for sure, the most publicity ever for someone who wants to buy a non-controlling interest in an NFL team. Limbaugh knows exactly what he’s doing — here’s an interview to that effect.

Bucket analysis:

• Limbaugh = celebrity
• NFL = familiarity and big money
• Wants to buy small piece of NFL team = catfight!

See how easy it is!

The embargo is one of my favorite PR tactics, but it looks like it will soon be another casualty of the Internet, if it isn’t already.

In the ooollllddd days, you could hand out embargoed news and assuming you had a good relationship with the media, the news would sit in the can until the agreed-upon time. But the Internet and online media changed all that, for good.

In the tech news space, in particular, the embargo has become a cause celebre. TechCrunch, one of the gorillas in the tech media space, has been pushing for the death of embargoes for awhile, and their wish may be coming true. TechCrunch may be a little early in writing an obit, but in the end, they may be right.

For other tech journalists, however, it’s still something of an open issue — and one we’ll discuss next Wednesday (along with many other topics of interest to tech PR) on the PR University webinar, Tech Media and Trends PR Can’t Afford to Miss: Top Tech Influencers Reveal Best PR Practices for Reaching Consumers in Today’s Economy. Panelists include:

• Nancy Blair, Senior Assignment Editor/Technology, USA Today
• Spencer Ante, Computers Department Editor, BusinessWeek
• Jim Kerstetter, Executive Editor, CNET News
• David Lidsky, Articles Editor, Fast Company
• Tom Foremski, Author, “Silicon Valley Watcher”

How do I know we’ll be talking about this? Two reasons: it came up today on our pre-webinar prep call, and I’m the moderator and get to ask the questions.

I almost didn’t even react to this latest example of journalists giving businesspeople bad advice about PR, but I couldn’t help it. I figured it was better to blog about it than to leave a comment on someone else’s blog.

Here’s the story: a Boston web trade group held an event on Tuesday called, “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR.” All the panelists came from the media, in other words, the people being pitched, not the people with any experience at pitching (panelists: Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe, Wade Roush from Xconomy, Peter Kafka from AllThingsD, and Bob Brown of Network World). Working journalists were recruited to give profit-seeking businesspeople advice on conducting PR, a marketing department function.

For fun, let me ask: would a right-thinking trade group ask a panel of business writers to opine on “bootstrapping R&D,” “bootstrapping legal,” or “bootstrapping HR?”

But journalists think they know something about PR, so they opined on what cash-strapped companies ought to do to maximize publicity without hiring those expensive, pesky, clueless PR people who presumably bug them all the time with useless pitches. Here’s the moderator’s summary of the panel:

As far as these reporter/bloggers were concerned, PR agencies aren’t worth much.

BTW, his post was titled, “PR Bashing Harsh but Fair.” Excuse me, but was that the title and intent of the panel? I thought the idea was to give sound business advice, right? [Here's a longer and more nuanced summary of the proceedings]

Anyway, enough. In my experience, the vast majority of journalists know nothing about how PR works or why companies need it. That’s not to say that a lot of PR isn’t overpriced garbage or that PR people don’t annoy journos with stupid pitches. It is to say that there is a perfectly normal role for communications and PR in a growing company, and smart entrepreneurs will figure out how to use it to build their businesses. But don’t ask a working reporter — you’re wasting your time.

Tip: it’s actually pretty hard to do PR right without some professional help. It’s time-consuming and can be unproductive if you don’t know what you’re doing. But if you’re sure that you want to do it and don’t have squat in the bank, at least buy a book like “PR for Dummies” or one of the others in my “Recommended” ad from Amazon to the right.

Almost all journalists say they want to be pitched by email. So guess what — they are deluged with email pitches! And to make matters worse, most of them are bloated, non-news pitches that get deleted faster than you can say, “did you get my email?”

How to avoid the trash bin? That’s easy — pitch real news, facts and figures, information that the journalist’s audience really might want to know. Skip the self-serving pseudo ads — those are the ones that get deleted FAST.

But the title of this post is 3 no-nos, so here’s a list of other no-nos:

1. Using ALL CAPs in the subject line — why are ya yellin’ at me?
2. Putting the words “press release” or “news release” in the subject line — yer wastin’ precious space, pardner.
3. Including attachments — send links, not attachments. Repeat — send links, not attachments.

For more handy email pitching tips, tune in to PR University next Wednesday, September 16, for a lively webinar called, “Perfect Email Pitches: Master PR Scribes Reveal How to Craft Copy That Boosts Opens and Media Coverage in Today’s Shrinking News Hole.” I’m moderating, and the panelists will include:

• Harry Medved, Head of Public Relations, Fandango
• Jane Mazur, Executive Vice President/Director of Media Relations, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
• Dan Beeson Director of Media Relations for Mother Nature Network
• Nancy Brenner, Senior Vice President/Director of Media Relations, MS&L Global Public Relations

As promised, here’s a link to the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2013, i.e., 18-year-old freshmen born in 1991 who are now entering college. According to this super-helpful list:

• There has always been a Cartoon Network.
• The status of gays in the military has always been a topic of political debate.
• The nation’s key economic indicator has always been the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
• The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
• They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
• Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister.
• Salsa has always outsold ketchup.
• Earvin “Magic” Johnson has always been HIV-positive.

And on and on. A few weeks back, I gave you a link to the report for now-19-year-olds in the Class of 2012. The Beloit Mindset list gets published annually to remind those us who are a bit older than the newest adults have very different world views than we do.