What do you cover?

I was chatting with a PR via email the other day when they asked what I cover. A fair question, especially given that I had requested they remove me from a distro list as the subjects of the press releases I was receiving weren’t quite in my wheelhouse. And sure, you can Google your way into a broad overview of the sort of thing that any journalist tends to work on — you’ll find pieces they’ve written in the past or whatever they’re choosing to brag the most about on Instagram. But it’s also true that there’s things people could be interested in for which they’ve got zero digital footprint.

To talk about myself specifically, I cover mind, health and wellbeing. But there’s sub topics within that that might not be obvious. (You can get me excited talking about mitochondria, which you might be able to guess, and about how supplementing people with Omega-3 can reduce rates of violence, which you might not. There’s no evidence of either on the Internet).

So how to strike a balance between not wasting your time sending over stuff that’s majorly off-piste and still taking an informed punt on something that is adjacent to what a journalist is demonstrably interested in? I think the best way to think about it is probably broad interest buckets. Take optimisation. Last year’s January feature on which supplements boost brain function indicates that something on fine-tuning a weights routine for maximum impact in minimal time could well spark intrigue. Or weird wellness. If a writer has a track record of exploring psychedelic medicine, then stuff around Internal Family Systems might well interest them.

When it comes to what a journalist covers, there’s always room to expand things out. Even if not to a wildly unpredictable extent.