How to talk to journalists on email and Twitter

Don Macintyre, who was political editor of The Independent when I joined as a political reporter, once exclaimed in frustration that the news desk had “no idea where stories come from”.

What he meant was the deals that are done between senior journalists, agreeing to share stories, or between journalists and politicians. But in fact the prosaic truth is that most news stories come from email and, these days, from Twitter.

Most journalists receive hundreds of emails a day. Most of them are press releases (or “news releases” if you don’t want to discriminate against broadcasters and the online media). Different journalists work differently: I have a zero inbox policy, filing, deleting or marking as junk all emails. Others save time by not bothering; I have seen someone’s screen showing more than 300,000 unread emails.

Some of these are part of the infrastructure of news – government announcements and the like – and are guaranteed the relevant journalists’ attention. Others are more speculative and have to fight to be read.

So if you find yourself writing a news release, make sure the subject line says what it is about in as few words as possible. If you are writing to individual journalists because you have done your research and know what they are interested in, then do not start by hoping they are well or that they had a good weekend. This is hard, because it goes against the instinct for normal polite conversation.

Instead, get straight to the point: explain why they might be interested in what you are telling them. There is plenty of time for pleasantries later, if they want to follow up.

The other big source of news stories is Twitter. Again, it is harder for individuals and small organisations to attract journalists’ attention, but it is possible if you know a lot about a subject and can convey this knowledge in 280-character bites.

The important thing to remember is that journalists are busy, and might well have 300,000 unread emails or tweets on their computer, but if you can keep it simple and offer them something that will make their life easier, they will be grateful.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator