Wot the ethical one said, plus -
Journalists and section editors WANT to run your story!
NEVER FORGET these people have to make a living. They have mortgages to pay and children to feed. They need good stories, so that they can meet next month's bills.
BUT
You MUST send them a story. i.e. the whole thing must have a 'hook'.
A hook is that key to a story on which the whole piece hangs. That is the ethical one's master cheese maker.
"Sony looks to the future." is the classic non-story.
"Champion cheese maker develops new video chip!" is a story.
"Studio buys new piano!" is never a story.
"Andre Previn's piano comes to Scunthorpe!" is a story.
Also, make life easy for them, throw these poor guys a bone! Proper hi-res pictures taken by a professional photographer. Full background info, full pics, all relevant links and key contacts with telephone numbers both within the email and on a website page.
AND NO DOC FILES (or any other strange formats)!!!
These guys are on Macs and they need to place the story within a page in Quark or InDesign, that means just unformatted text and hi-res pics in CMYK as either TIFs or very high quality JPGs.
Imagine, you are section editor for the Daily Blast - the paper that rips the lid off! You need a feel-good for page 17. Time is short. It's three and your pages go to bed at five. There are several stories in your in-tray. One requires a quick telephone call and a visit to a website. The others require a write-up and a drive out to a location with photographer (whose costs will be against your section and therefore endanger your end-of-year profit bonus) and what info you have needs Microsoft Word that leaves all sorts of strange hieroglyphics when you do a simple cut-n-paste into Quark or ID.
Which one will help pay the mortgage?
