How to pitch to FT Globetrotter with Niki Blasina, Deputy Editor

Alessia Horwich (00:08):

Welcome to On the Rox, a podcast from Roxhill Media that asks some of the best journalists in the UK for their solutions to the kind of dilemmas that confront PRs daily. We know that there’s not a one size fits all way of communicating with journalists, so we’re going direct to the writers in the newsroom to hear how they like to work with PRs and how to stand out in their inboxes. My name is Alessia Horwich. I’m a former Sunday Times journalist, now the brand director at Roxhill. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to pitch stories to FT Globetrotter with the section’s deputy editor, Niki Blasina. Niki, we’ve not met before, but I know about Globetrotter, but do you want to tell me a little bit to start off just about you as a journalist and how you’ve come to be at the FT and what you were doing before?

Niki Blasina (00:50):

I joined the FT in 2018. I was one of the founding editors of Globetrotter. Before that, my background was in world news. I was at the Wall Street Journal for a long time before that.

Alessia Horwich (01:01):

Were you in New York doing that or?

Niki Blasina (01:02):

I was in London and in New York, so they actually moved me to London from New York. Yeah. And when I arrived here, everyone was like, “You must be so sad to have left New York for London.” And I was like, “Guys, you don’t know how good this is. London is a great city.” Yeah, I was absolutely thrilled to be here. And I was actually meant to go back to New York and never did clearly. So here I am.

Alessia Horwich (01:23):

Yeah. Did you always want to be a journalist?

Niki Blasina (01:26):

Yeah, I always had an interest in writing and I always had an interest in journalism. Even when I was really young, I used to write short stories and did really well in English and school. But then I think my parents actually discouraged me from doing it because they were like, “You’ll never be able to make a living,” which wasn’t an incorrect thought. But then eventually I kind of kept pursuing it, kept pushing and they’re really obviously really proud of me. Thanks while I’m done. But yeah, I always had an interest.

Alessia Horwich (01:54):

And travel though. Have you always been a real traveller?

Niki Blasina (01:57):

Always loved travel. Always had an interest in travel and in lifestyle journalism. And I think when I was younger, I used to sort of fantasise about maybe I could be a travel journalist one day and maybe I sort of manifested it in a way because I think at one point I was like, “Oh, maybe I could work for the Wall Street Journal one day and I ended up working there as well.” So I don’t know. I always had an interest in it and always loved doing it. And I think I really love food. I really love wine. I grew up in sort of an Italian immigrant family. So that’s always been a real part of our lives and that’s how I like to travel and experience other cultures as well.

Alessia Horwich (02:28):

Tell us about FT Globe Trotter. You’re one of the founding editors. What is the concept of it and how does it work?

Niki Blasina (02:35):

So it is essentially our sort of city travel desk, city guide section. The idea for it came about because we have, I think it might be helpful to kind of understand the structure of travel at the FT as well. It’s quite unique. We’re all under the FT weekend umbrella, but like Tom Robbins is our travel editor. Maria Shollenbarger is the travel editor for HTSI and basically looking at doing you know we have all this great restaurant content coming. We have reviews in our weekend magazine. We have such great arts coverage. We’re doing so much around cities that could live in some sort of city guide. And we could also just be covering cities more deeply than we are. And we thought we could focus a little bit on business travel and maybe FT Globetrotter could be the bridge between the Monday to Friday FT reader and the FT weekend reader.

(03:23):

We also realised that the people that were reading Globetrotter were primarily locals, which makes sense. I live in London. I read most about London restaurants and I want to know what’s happening in my city. So we decided to be more broad brush. And yeah, we’ll do a bit of kind of power dining, but we’ll also do good hotel coverage, stuff that’s like really insider in for locals.

Alessia Horwich (03:46):

So how is the coverage structured? Where is it appearing on the various platforms and how much per week, per month, whatever?

Niki Blasina (03:54):

So we are on ft.com and in print. On ft.com, you can get to us directly. If you go to ft.com/globetrotter, that’s also where you’ll find our digital city guides. We do big print specials, but those are more on an ad hoc basis.

Alessia Horwich (04:08):

How have they decided? I mean, you say on an ad hoc basis for a PR, is there any way to predict what you might be working on?

Niki Blasina (04:15):

Honestly, no. But we will tell you if you are working on something. If you email me about a client in Rome, I will kind of come back to you and say, “We’re actually working on this big Rome special.” But there’s no real way to find out. A lot of it’s actually just advertiser dependent to print more paper. Someone has to pay for it essentially, as uninspiring as that sounds. Everything’s digital for us and the print stuff has kind of come after. And yeah, that’s just because that’s kind of the nature of the business now, isn’t it? Everything is digital and yeah.

Alessia Horwich (04:44):

How do you select what’s going to go into the print slots?

Niki Blasina (04:47):

It’s interesting because we commission different. You have a lot more flexibility and format for online and because we’re really good at, you can commission longer lists, you’re not as restricted in terms of word count. You don’t necessarily have to write sort of really long write through narrative features, but for print we usually, that’s what people want is kind of more sort of storytelling and a narrative feature. The sort of list style guide doesn’t quite work for print, but we’ve made them work for print before. And yeah, it depends what’s in our schedule for the week and we kind of say what’s the best candidate for print.

Alessia Horwich (05:17):

Can you tell me a bit about how you go about commissioning? Is it news hooks? What kind of process do you follow to come up with the ideas for the stories you’re doing?

Niki Blasina (05:28):

It’s a bit of a mix. It could be a writer pitch. It could be us kind of coming up with an idea and pursuing it, kind of approaching a writer or having more of a think about it that way. But basically we want all of our pieces to be smart. We want them to be sharp, insidery, exclusive, the kind of usual, informative, entertaining, inspiring. But I think that in terms of pitching and in terms of how I think about commissioning, I always want to know why now and why should we care? I want everything to have some sort of element of kind of newness or nowness to it. And then it’s that insideriness that I think, which is kind of hard to explain, which is sort of understanding our reader and what they want.

Alessia Horwich (06:07):

Can you tell me a bit about your reader and what do they want?

Niki Blasina (06:10):

Yeah. So our readers, they’re really well travelled and they’re affluent and they’ve kind of been everywhere and done everything. So we really think like, is this kind of a bit too 101 on a topic or a destination or a subject matter? What can we be doing that will offer them more value? We know that they’re affluent. They’re, I think a third of them are kind of C-suite executives. Average age is 50 and they’re predominantly male, which we’re working really hard as a company on the whole to increase our gender balance among our readership and attract more women readers.

Alessia Horwich (06:46):

Does that mean if a PR is going to pitch a story which they feel is overtly female, they should still go ahead.

Niki Blasina (06:50):

Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think like with our section as well, we’ve been really successful at kind of driving up the average. We know that our pieces index really well with women readers and we also index more with younger readers as well.

Alessia Horwich (07:03):

I was going to say, I mean, I enjoy your content.

Niki Blasina (07:05):

Thank you. No, exactly. We know and we’re an all women team basically.

Alessia Horwich (07:09):

Can you tell me who is on your team and who kind of does what I think in terms of commissioning?

Niki Blasina (07:14):

Me, obviously. And Rebecca Rose is the editor of the section. So if you’re pitching ideas, that would be who you would pitch to.

Alessia Horwich (07:22):

Is there anything that you cover more than Rebecca or …

Niki Blasina (07:27):

A little bit, yeah. I would say we tend to divide and conquer a bit in terms of our individual interests. I think I probably tend to focus more on food and drink and more that side of things. Becca has an art history background. I think she kind of focuses a bit more on maybe the cultural side of things, but generally we’re both commissioning across all the destinations we cover and across all of the topics that we cover.

Alessia Horwich (07:49):

In terms of budgets, what kind of budgets do your readers have to spend? I mean, do you even think about it?

Niki Blasina (07:54):

I always say this, and maybe I shouldn’t, but you don’t get rich by spending all your money. And our readers actually are not … They’re not price blind. We do cover a lot of luxury experiences and hotels and fine dining. And one of the kind of most common, not complaints, but our readers will comment and say, “All of your restaurant recommendations are too expensive. These hotels are too expensive.” And they will kind of say, “We want more mid-range options.” So we’ve really been focusing on making sure we’re ticking that box as well.

Alessia Horwich (08:27):

You’ve mentioned exclusivity. Is that really important for you guys?

Niki Blasina (08:30):

It is important. Yeah.

Alessia Horwich (08:32):

And what does that actually mean for you? Because you’ve got this global audience. In what ways is it exclusive?

Niki Blasina (08:37):

How I think about exclusivity, it’s again, that sort of insideriness thing as well. It’s I want our readers to get something from us that they can’t get from anywhere else. We are a subscription based business. The FT subscription is, it’s more expensive. People do pay a lot for it. So I think we want to make that subscription be really valuable. I don’t want to cover something and someone say, “Well, I saw this in X, Y, and Z already.” That’s not really adding value. So that’s something we think about. We think about a lot.

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Alessia Horwich (10:02):

One of the other questions that I wanted to ask you is about overexposure of cities. How do you go about … I mean, Paris, it’s written about a lot. Yeah. What is your approach to those situations?

Niki Blasina (10:16):

So I think we think about the destinations that are a bit overexposed. You think about London, we probably, some people might say we do cover London too much, but we know we live here and we’re excited about it. This Paris, New York, these are all these places that are not struggling for people to want to write about them or publish great pieces on them. But for us, we know we have a huge readership in those places. So we’re meeting our readers where they are, and it’s all about finding that interesting angle or that interesting story that our readers will appreciate. Maybe when we first started, we sort of leaned more on kind of best of lists or something like that because we were building an archive of content, but we won’t do the five best natural wine bars in Paris. You can find that absolutely anywhere.

Alessia Horwich (11:01):

And I guess that’s the same way that the PR should approach it.

Niki Blasina (11:04):

Yeah, exactly

Alessia Horwich (11:04):

And pitching ideas.

Niki Blasina (11:05):

Yeah.

Alessia Horwich (11:06):

Are you interested in PRs pitching data or stats to you? Do you use them in your stories?

Niki Blasina (11:11):

We could, yeah. Having some sort of data to back up a pitch can help. When I’m thinking about pieces that I might want to do or I might want to commission, I think wine tourism is something that is actually growing. And I’ve seen, I think it was either Expedia or booking.com or like whoever the big travel companies are that do the big surveys every year said that they’re seeing an increase in interest in that. And I thought that was really interesting and I thought that was quite valuable to know about because we keep hearing that people are drinking less. I’m like, well, they want to drink less, but maybe they want to drink better and have more kind of experiential drinking. Sort of a weird example. But yeah, I think it’s valuable. I want to know. I do find that stuff helpful. And I think because I have a news background as well, I’m always like, “Oh, okay, that’s interesting.” If all of a sudden searches for Athens have gone up 600%, that’s good to know.

(12:06):

That helps us, that informs our decision. So even if we might not use it in a piece, it’s always helpful.

Alessia Horwich (12:12):

Is there anything else that PRs can put in a pitch that’s going to make them more likely to get your attention?

Niki Blasina (12:18):

Ultra targeting is really helpful. We get sent so much and we get sent so much that is not relevant to our section. The number of pitches that I will get about National Burger Day or National Pizza Day, for example, which is a sort of a silly example to use, but the Financial Times is not going to cover National Pizza Day. It’s just not going to happen. So please don’t send it to me and please don’t send me four follow-ups. I just don’t have the kind of capacity to respond and just say, thank you, but no, thank you. I wish I did. Familiarise yourself with the section and the destinations that we cover. If there are destinations that we don’t cover, but you want to know if we might be thinking about them or if we might consider covering them, just shoot me an email and I’ll say, “Not at the moment.” Or, “Yes, we are thinking about it for next year or something.” And if you can say, “This is super exclusive.” Again, the exclusive thing, but no one else has covered this yet.

(13:17):

We think your readers will love it.

Alessia Horwich (13:18):

In the subject line, would you want exclusive written or is there another thing that someone can put in a subject line to make you open the email? Yeah,

Niki Blasina (13:24):

That would definitely catch my attention for sure. Literally, Niki, exclusive for you, FT Globetrotter, the most amazing hotel to ever open. I am opening that email.

Alessia Horwich (13:35):

And once you’ve opened that email, what does it look like inside? How much information do you want? Do you need imagery? What’s the perfect pitch email?

Niki Blasina (13:43):

Imagery definitely helps. I think about it as the sort of inverted triangle and almost like the sort of lead and nut par. Just kind of, what’s the story and then give me the sort of five W’s and then again, sort of why now and why should we care? Ideally, keep it to under 150 words, which sounds really prescriptive, but I think people get really excited and I do this. Even when I pitch stories, I sort of look at my pitches and I’m like, “This is unhinged. No editor is going to read this. I wouldn’t read this. What am I doing?” So I think if it’s short and sweet and then yeah, images really do help.

Alessia Horwich (14:14):

Is there a time of day or a time of the week when you’re more likely to be looking in your inbox for pitches?

Niki Blasina (14:20):

There is really no science to it. I think you just kind of have to catch people at the right time, which is a terrible thing to say. Mornings are probably always good. If you sort of have something sent off like 8:00 AM, then once people start scrolling emails on their way into the office, they’re like, “Okay, yeah.” We get a lot on Friday at five o’clock and I will admit I am mentally checked out at that time. So if you’re going to send an email on a Friday evening, do that at 8:00 AM on Monday.

Alessia Horwich (14:46):

Do you think there’s any merit in a PR trying to connect with a correspondent that’s in a destination relevant to them to bring you a story through them or is it …

Niki Blasina (14:55):

Yeah, definitely. Because if you can excite them, that’s always good.

Alessia Horwich (15:00):

Yeah.

Niki Blasina (15:01):

If there’s a sort of writer already lined up to do it and they can say, “Look, this looks really interesting. Someone has brought this to me. ” That’s great.

Alessia Horwich (15:08):

Are there any other regular features that you would want PRs to think about pitching to you for?

Niki Blasina (15:14):

We have a regular series called Tips From the Top, which I think PRs might quite like because it’s a really nice way to get your clients to share. It’s essentially cultural figures share their insider guide to a city. So I think it’s a really nice way to get chefs or artists or designers or it tends to be more sort of like creative people or people working in those industries that do it and they share the Dishoom guide to Mumbai as a sort of see how that piece did to kind of tee up our Mumbai guide. But yeah, that’s a really good one. It’s like nice. We shoot people like we shoot people. We photograph people and they have a nice portrait snapped and they get to write about their favourite restaurants or something about their city that they find really interesting. So that’s a good one and that’s a Globetrotter OG.

(16:01):

We’ve been doing that for years and years.

Alessia Horwich (16:03):

How does that work? Who commissions it and how does it work with the interviewee?

Niki Blasina (16:07):

Yeah. So me and Rebecca both commission it and it’s actually up to the contributor to write the piece for them.

Alessia Horwich (16:13):

Right. Okay.

Niki Blasina (16:14):

Yeah. We know that their PRs are helping. Yes. Obviously. Yeah, no, it’s up to the contributor to write it. And then we just help kind of hone in on an angle basically. And then we obviously work with them. There’s like an editing process. No one has to be kind of afraid that they’re writing for us by any means. Obviously it’s like very kind of needs to get through until it’s ready and there’s not a lot of time pressure on it because it’s a regular slot. We tend to have a sort of long pipeline of those pieces. So it’s kind of we get to work, we’ll work with people. We know like a three Michelin star chef is going to be extremely busy, for example. So we don’t have to say, “Yeah, can we have your piece next week?” We’re like, “You have a month to do it, but let me know if you need more time and we can work with that type thing.”

Alessia Horwich (16:55):

When PRs are pitching that, what’s the best way to do it? Should they sort of say, “This is my client, this is why they’re interesting.” And do they have to then say what the places they would pick would be or …

Niki Blasina (17:07):

Yeah, it’s good to come with an angle, I think. Yeah, we had someone, I think I commissioned one today actually, and it was someone who’s written a sort of half history book, half cookbook, all about Rome. I think I’ve commissioned her to write about the kind of history of wine bars and Enoteca and Rome and how they’re all disappearing and what the modern scene is like, and then she selects her favourite. And that was the suggestion from her PR. So I said, she said she could write a guide to Rome for you. And I went back and said, “How can we kind of narrow that scope a little bit?” And that was her suggestion. And I was like, “I love that. That’s a great idea. Let’s do that. ” We have another regular one called Obsessed With. It’s essentially people highlight their kind of food and drink obsessions or a seasonal ingredient that chefs are really obsessed with or something like that.

(17:51):

And we know a lot of restaurant PRs will kind of get in touch and say, “It’s asparagus season and my clients are doing … One of my clients is doing an asparagus ice cream and one of my clients is doing this and my clients is doing that. ” And that’s really helpful because we can narrow in on the dishes that way. And another idea that came from a PR recently was on a specific dish that is kind of popping up all over London at the moment. She said, “Look, I have my clients doing it. My three clients are doing this, but I’ve also seen it at X, Y, and Z. I feel like this could work really well with your slot.” And she pitched it to the writer that tends to contribute quite frequently for that slot. And she said to me, “Is that too niche?

(18:27):

Is it too weird?” And I was like, “No, that is niche and weird, but let’s do it because I think our readers will really love that. “

Alessia Horwich (18:31):

Yeah, that’s for the obsessed with sport.

Niki Blasina (18:33):

Yeah. Stuff like that’s really helpful. If you’re noticing trends, I think if you can pitch trends or like pitch stories rather than businesses, I think is also really good because that’s what we’re after ultimately.

Alessia Horwich (18:44):

Yeah. I mean, you don’t exist to give them exposure for their business, do you?

Niki Blasina (18:47):

Yeah. And we’re not just going to profile every business. No.

Alessia Horwich (18:51):

But putting together trends piece products where you can be shrewd.

Niki Blasina (18:54):

Yeah, exactly. And then I think another slot to mention would be greener getaways, which is more, it’s our sustainability slot essentially where it could be a pub with rooms or destination restaurant or it could be a hotel. It’s just sort of a kind of … And that doesn’t necessarily have to be within one of our cities. We try and say like, oh, this is within … You can take a train to it. It takes an hour. It can be outside a city as well. And that’s just more about just who’s doing something really interesting in terms of sustainability.

Alessia Horwich (19:21):

Yeah. I was going to say, how interesting does it have to be pretty interesting? Do your audience really care that much about sustainability?

Niki Blasina (19:27):

I think so. Yeah. I think the luxury travellers, I think still actually really care about it more. I think for a while you kind of would see hotel … A lot of hoteliers will say people still want the toiletries to take away and they want this and that. But I do think that’s changed.

Alessia Horwich (19:44):

That’s good

Niki Blasina (19:44):

News. People care. Yeah. Yeah. Really good news. And we care. So we’ll keep covering it.

Alessia Horwich (19:49):

For those regular slots, how often do you run them?

Niki Blasina (19:52):

The tips from the top slot, so that’s pretty frequent. We probably would do one every, maybe one a month. Sometimes because we do tend to have a long pipeline of them, if something falls through, we’ll bring one up, so we’ll do them more frequently. And then the rest are more kind of as in one.

Alessia Horwich (20:09):

If you were speaking to a PR who’s pitching to you for the first time, what are the three main pieces of advice you would give them about pitching to FT Globetrotter?

Niki Blasina (20:17):

I think first of all, visit our section page on FT.com, so just ft.com/globetrotter. There’s a list at the top of the page that says all of the destinations that we’re covering. So make sure that you’re pitching a client that’s in one of those cities. Familiarise yourself with our content as well. Check to see if we’ve covered something before. And if we have covered a certain topic before, something quite similar before, have a think about what angle is different. How is the story that you’re pitching or the client that you’re pitching? How is that offering more value or offering something different? Or how is that idea essentially differentiated from what we’ve already done and already covered? I suppose the third thing would be keeping it short and snappy with a pitch would be think about a lead and a nut par essentially. Come in with the news and then in a short paragraph, give the kind of five W’s and the why now and the why should we care, basically.

Alessia Horwich (21:16):

Great. Niki, thank you so much for your time. We’ve learned so much about it and I hope you’ll be inundated with brilliant pitches.

Niki Blasina (21:22):

Oh, I hope so. Yeah, please. I love that.