We’re in an industry that doesn’t stop moving. Particularly when it comes to jobs.
It feels like journalists are switching positions all the time and it must be extremely hard for those working in PR to keep up with who is doing what at which publication.
Particularly the junior employees who are new to the industry and to whom journalists must seem like an index of faceless bylines.
I do sympathise. And yet… to save your emails from being deleted immediately because of irrelevance, to be good at your job rather than middling, I’d recommend a bit of research before you target a journalist.
Ok, maybe your boss wants you to do a mail out and has given you a list of names. Do you have half an hour to spare before you send that out to check that they’re the right names on the list? Could you consult your colleagues to check that the correct people are being targeted and weren’t actually made redundant last year? Could you even email a journalist directly and personally ask them what kind of stories will work for them?
Time-consuming, maybe, but I think that it’s work that is going to benefit you in the long run.
We’re in the business of relationships. Much better to have a few good relationships than a score of bad ones.