Call Me, Maybe: Tips on How Tech Startups Should Pitch Reporters

For startups trying to attract media attention, it’s never been more difficult. The sheer number of new tech hopefuls launching everyday means that it’s an impossible task for a single reporter to vet them all. Factor in faster news cycles, and the smaller amount of reporters covering wider beats, and you can begin to understand why reporters hate time wasting.

Nothing, these days, is a bigger time suck than the unsolicited, generic email pitch clogging up reporter mailboxes — unless it’s the dreaded cold call. And yet, companies still send them and still call. At a discussion on how startups should approach reporters at Mike Butcher’s Europas tech conference in London yesterday, Robin Wauters, the editor of Tech.eu, and Monty Munford, freelance writer for the Telegraph and the Economist, declared that this method of reaching out to reporters “is broken.” Well and truly. In fact, it’s not unheard of for some reporters to receive 500 generic email pitches as well as a couple of unsolicited calls a day. 

So, how then should a startup try to get a reporter's attention? According to Wauters and Munford speaking to a packed room, it’s actually quite basic: be polite, know your story and how to tell it, help them do their jobs better by hitting them up with news that’s not just about your company, and yes, offer to take them out for a drink (as long as it’s not coffee).

Specifically, here are some of their tips on approaching reporters:

Create a Relationship Before You Need Them: It used to be that reporters cultivated sources, but now more than ever reporters want you to cultivate them. Most reporters complain they simply don’t have the time, or as Wauters put it too many startups to chase and to little time to sift through and write about all of them. How do you cultivate reporters? Ask them out for a drink and talk about things other than your own company. Maybe you’re in a particularly interesting industry that’s being upended by tech, or you can add colour to an ongoing story in your sector. As Wauters said, “Help journalists become better at their jobs.” 

Call Me, Maybe? This is another age-old question that doesn’t have an answer, down to the fact that most journalists have different tolerance levels on how they like to be contacted. Wauters flat out hates phone calls. It’s the ultimate time-waster for him (all that blah blah blah small talk!) — so don’t even try. Munford, on the other hand, doesn’t mind them, but did say he’d prefer to be messaged first, as in “Are you free to take a call?” It’s also fine to contact the reporter to ask how they’d like to be contacted. 

Use Embargoes Sparingly: Reporters don’t like embargoes. They hate the orchestrated release of information and the feeling they are puppets of some large media machine. Typically, you have to be a pretty hot company that everyone has to write about to constantly get away with this. Why do PR’s use them if they are so hated? For PRs, embargoes aren’t so much about controlling the information, but trying to ensure the news gets covered by as many outlets as possible. PR’s know that if one site gets the news ahead of another, a competing site is much less likely to pick up the news, a fact that Wauters confirmed. Yet, reporters don’t want to do embargoes either. It’s a vicious circle. The only advice is to weigh up carefully the news you’re sharing and to consider whether it's newsworthy enough that it will get covered widely on a non-exclusive basis, or to ensure that who you give your exclusive has the widest targeted audience reach.

Should You Even Bother with a Press Release? The press release is another convention reporters hate. Munford’s particular objection was with the superlative language and phrasing — revolutionary this, groundbreaking that, and the much loathed, “excited to …and passionate about…” Strip out the buzzwords, advises Wauters, and your release should still be able to communicate what your company has achieved or is trying to do.

But should you forgo them altogether? I personally did not mind press releases when I was a reporter, especially if it saved me from hunting far and wide for fact checking - did I spell everyone’s name right? Did I get the numbers correct? Did I get certain dates right? Munford suggested they be written differently. A visual, interactive one could be posted to your company blog with further links to even more information. I still think they’re necessary as an “on the record,” document,  but it’s true that it’s a very rare story that gets written from a release picked up from "the wire".

Have a Good Product, Show Proof of Concept: “Have a good product” is obviously a hard one. Everyone, of course, thinks they have a good product. But reporters want to see that you have “proof of concept”. Proof of concept for a reporter usually means sharing numbers, which sometimes a company isn’t quite ready to do. But this leads to a question asked by TrustedHousesitters.com founder and CEO Andy Peck. In particular, why wasn’t anyone interested in them as a revenue-making startup and why were reporters seemingly obsessed and only interested in covering startups that had scored funding rounds? In the absence of proof of concept, journalists view funding rounds as vetting from people willing to put their money where their mouth is — never mind the number of startups that have failed despite being funded. (To be fair, it was unclear how and why Peck couldn't interest tech reporters, especially as he's got plenty of consumer press).

Know How to Tell Your Story: This is one that seems shockingly obvious: know how to tell your startup’s story. Who and what are you and your company? How and why did your company get started? It’s sometimes the case that if you can’t show proof of concept, but you can tell a good story, you’ll get some coverage. This happens more than you think in tech reporting, especially if reporters are writing on a very “cutting edge trend” (a few years back this was crowdfunding) and want to gather up examples of who’s venturing into this new territory. But if you can’t show proof of concept and can’t tell a good story, your pitches are doomed.

Some Basic Housekeeping: Learn how to spell and use grammar correctly. Munford’s pet peeve is the seemingly ongoing confusion between “your” and “you’re”. (Though, apparently, grammar mistakes are not necessarily your fault; it’s the way your brain is wired for language). He also asks you be polite and if he turns you down, don’t keep pestering him. How long should you follow up with them? Up to two weeks is the norm for them, then it’s on to the next story.

Tech.Eu: Can the Sharing Economy Fix Broken Cities?

I recently wrote an article for Tech.eu after attending the Financial Times' first Sharing Economy Summit. Here's a snippet of the article below: 

Around the world, as urbanization increases, inequality rises, and city logistics and services are strained to breaking point, the notion that companies and consumers can transform city living into something smarter, more efficient, and yes, kinder and gentler, is the tantalizing promise of the sharing economy.

The way in which cities operate today is broken.

In London alone, plenty of stats abound on the trials of urban life:

– Congestion costs the London economy around £4 billion every year.
– Londoners waste 170 million hours a year sitting in traffic.
– Over 3,300 deaths in London are partly attributable to air pollution; in some areas of the capital air pollution can account for as many as one in 12 deaths
– The average house price in London is £458,283; average pay is £35,000.
– Inequality in London is the widest in the UK and rising.The richest 10% by financial asset wealth have 60% of all assets. The poorest 80% of the population share 20% of all asset wealth.

It’s a situation that can only get worse; London’s population of 8.6 million people is expected to grow another 1.4 million by 2030. As Alex Stephany, CEO of JustPark, the app that connects drivers with parking spaces, said, “We’re pretty screwed if we can’t make [improving cities] work.”

On paper, cities and the sharing economy appear a natural partnership. With dense living, city dwellers have been the first to embrace collaborative services such as car and home sharing. Sharing companies are keen to tout their benefits: job creation, reduced congestion and pollution, reduced consumption, less waste, closer community ties, raising trust amongst strangers and so on.

But at the Financial Times’ Sharing Economy Summit in London last week — at which Stephany was speaking on a late afternoon panel, “The Future of the City” — it became abundantly clear that considerable hurdles remain to creating more shareable cities, especially if shareable also means moreequitable.

The discussion itself — which included Rohan Silva, ex-Downing Street special adviser and co-founder of shared office space Second Home; the affable stat-quoting Zipcar UK general manager Mark Walker; and the Institute of Directors’ Deputy Head of Policy Jimmy McLoughlin — centered mainly on the current examples of how individual companies were making a difference. Croydon Council, for example, manages to save £500,000 a year and cut employee driving by 42% after adopting Zipcar. With 32 councils across London, the cost savings — and reduction in pollution — could be considerable.

The bigger picture, however, of how and should sharing economy companies lead the way in reshaping the future of cities was a harder one to imagine.

Whilst their services and products may help toward a sustainable future, collaborative consumption starts ups — and especially those backed with VC bucks — are first and foremost building a business. There may be an expectation that sharing economy companies should somehow “behave better,” but they are no more likely to than a company creating customer service software.

Regulation and the Right to Innovate

Indeed, one of the consistent themes throughout the day was the need for startups to defend their “right to innovate,” a phrase coined by Martin Bailey, the head of the European Commission’s DG CONNECT unit, trying to assure the room that the EC were looking to create regulation that ensured level playing fields but didn’t stifle innovation.

But at a time when some sharing economy companies are rustling up VC investment in the billions, and all manner of startups are clamoring to be the “Uber” of a particular service or asset, there was a palpable impatience in the room when the discussion turned toward fair treatment of incumbents and startups, workers’ rights, and the implications for local housing markets.

On a panel looking at how the sharing economy should be regulated, Airbnb’s Head of Policy of Europe and Canada, Patrick Robinson, conceded that companies should all be regulated equally, but at the same time dismissed the numbers in a New York State Attorney General’s report that found 6 percent of hosts were generating 37 percent of Airbnb’s revenues from New York City rentals. The majority of Airbnb hosts, Robinson insisted, are not professional landlords.

And just who are the workers of the sharing economy? Are they micro-entrepreneurs as Love Home Swap CEO Debbie Wosskow likes to call them? Are they people looking to make a bit of “extra money”? Are they the traditionally low paid looking to cobble together a paycheck? If the sharing economy really is about job creation, rather than about some welcome “pin money”, do these workers deserve some employment benefits? Or, in the brave new world of the micro-entrepreneur should these workers whose labor collaborative companies are benefitting from be sensible enough to set aside something for pension plans, maternity leave, sick pay and holiday time?

Of course, it depends on the service itself. Lower-skilled platforms will attract lower-skilled workers, and will pay less. Still, there are certainly highly motivated workers who make the most of even these lower-paid jobs. Hassle.com CEO Alex Depledge told the story of one cleaner who works 50 hours a week. From the living wage, Depledge says Hassle pays (up to £8.50 / hour, according to the site), the cleaner has managed to build his father a house in Sierra Leone and is grateful to be able to afford Arsenal season tickets to boot. That cleaner, however, was an exception. Most, said Depledge, are on Hassle because they want the flexibility of working around their own schedules – usually mothers with family commitments or students juggling cleaning between courses.

But one person’s flexibility is another worker’s instability – again, the most in danger are low skilled, low-income workers using the sharing economy to patch together a living. On the regulation panel, Jackie Grech, the British Hospitality Association’s Legal and Policy Director & General Counsel, questioned whether women might be more excluded than men from the sharing economy because of a lack of benefits like maternity leave. Of course, with a flexible schedule a woman can always take the time off to care for her infant, she just won’t be paid for it.

Helen Goulden, NESTA’s Executive Director of its Innovation Lab, reminded the audience too, that in order to share and profit from assets such as cars and houses you had to have them in the first place – something the urban poor struggle to obtain.

Two-Tier Sharing

Could a two-tier sharing economy market emerge? The danger of one sharing economy for the middle and upper classes and one of the lower classes doesn’t seem such a far-fetched story when you consider the growing trend of the collaborative economy to move away from “sharing and caring” to the cool efficiency of the on-demand economy. On-demand services are still staffed by “everyday” people, often putting up their own assets to get the job done, but now the expectation is they can be summoned as quickly as a customer can access them on an app, or be bypassed for the next ready and willing worker.

Sharing and caring used to be a value-add, now it’s friction.

But then, the sharing economy has always been a bit of a misnomer, and a bit of a paradox. People act selfishly by seeking out the less expensive, easier option in order to behave more altruistically, or more sustainably.

Said JustPark CEO Stephany, “Environmentalism should be the biggest driver to action [to the service], but it’s actually the smallest. [Our customers] use JustPark because it’s cheaper and more convenient.”