Pitching Me

This is a note to my colleagues on the public relations, publicity or management side of the industry. The amount of pitches I receive is already untenable, but recently the majority of them have shown a lack of basic understanding for the work I do. So I am going to set the record straight here and hopefully help all of us foster a world in which we see to it that the best stories get told, by the best people for telling them.

First, a few things about me.

I am the planning editor at The New York Times. That is a full-time, intense job. I do not write for the NYT nor do I work in the Arts department, which covers popular music.

In my free time, I write books about music, and I write in-depth, feature stories on a freelance basis for Rolling Stone, No Depression, and other publications. I am not on the payroll for any of those outlets, and if I never write another story for them, neither me nor the outlet will be impacted. (I have started writing for The Back Lounge, but that’s a startup, personal project that is very much a work in progress.)

This is a long way of saying, I have the good fortune to be extremely selective in the stories I write. I have no interest in album reviews, quick-hit phone calls with the next big thing while a rep listens in, talking to an artist because their publicist happened to see my name on a festival media list, or anything besides in-depth, personal profiles that involve me spending weeks, months or occasionally years with artists whose stories are worth that attention to detail. If you are looking for one of those other things, you’re going to need to pitch a writer who does those things.

The other factor at play is, if I only were to write the stories on my wish-to-write list and never took a pitch, and lived and wrote until I was 100, I still would not get through the stories on my wish-to-write list. So I really am only in the market for top-tier pitches that are for top-tier stories.

So, second, here some characteristics of pitches that I find effective and ones I do not find even slightly so.

Pitches likely to work on me:

• Invitations to spend time with an artist, get to know the artist, experience their live show, and talk to an artist on their turf. 

• Album or music pitches that take me behind the music, behind the songs, or into the studio while art is being created.

• Artist profiles that involve a compelling, unique or personal story that resonate with fans.

• The most effective PR pitches to me will come from someone who has read my work before and invited me to forge a long-term rapport with an artist. 

Pitches unlikely to work on me:

• Anything from someone who did not bother to so much as Google my name or learn one thing about me and the artist you are asking me to cover. If your email starts with, “I would like to introduce you to The Turnpike Troubadours, a country band out of Oklahoma,” I am marking it as spam.

• Rushed, time-sensitive pitches. If your single or album is out next week, then you need to contact a writer who does quick hits. That’s not me.

• Anything that implies your artist is more important than whatever I am working on at the time and that I should drop everything for your pitch if I know what is good for me, or is otherwise dismissive of the work I have done or am doing. That is definitely not true.

• Cookie-cutter phoner or Zoom interviews with a rep listening in to protect the artist from my scary questions. Again, that’s not me, and you should be pitching writers who do those sort of things.

If I could boil this unfortunately-necessary post down to a single sentence, it would be: Please take time to learn just a little bit about me before reaching out to ask me to write something about someone. Thank you.

You can reach me by email with pitches.