Joe Donatelli on Why Media Don't Open Your PR Pitch

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And most importantly, it's fun. And where can people subscribe? Look for the podcast on LinkedIn under the Making of a Marketer. Find the show at Marketing podcast.net or search for The Making of a Marketer wherever you get your podcasts. You heard her. Go subscribe. There are four billion podcasts. Then somehow, some way, you found the strategic communicator with Dan Farcus. We are part of the marketing podcast network. We are happy you are here. I saw something knowing that the average journalist slash blogger slash whatever we want to call them, receives up to 100 pitches per day, 100. And in many cases, maybe 10% of those actually even get read let alone considered. So it's a high volume business. And it's a business that is inherently based on failure in many cases because you are going to lose far more often than you win. How do you change those batting averages? Strategic communicators will talk with other strategic communicators. I thought, hey, let's talk to a journalist who actually has to read some of this crap. So with that in mind, I bring in Joe Donatelli. Joe Donatelli is currently the digital director for WBWS, the ABC affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent Joe were old more than two decades fighting the good fight for the quality of journalism and has traveled this amazing nation through part of that journey. And I had the fortune of knowing him a very, very, very long time ago at Ohio University. So Joe, first of all, what is bringing you joy? How are you doing? Oh, how am I doing? I'm doing very well. Thank you. What's bringing me joy is the fact that we hardly had any snow in February and so far in March in Cleveland. I'm so happy. It all is because I got a snowblower for Christmas. So I'm taking full responsibility for all of that happening. Congratulations. That's really well done. Yeah. People owe me a debt of gratitude. Thank you, Dan. Very noble. How many pitches do you get a day right now? I'm curious. So I bet if I went in through my inbox, I'm on a lot of different distribution lists in our newsroom, but easily over 100 pitches come in locally, regionally, nationally every single day from people who are pitching some product or some person or some way to get our attention. What is different about the pitches you get now to when you were working with Scripps Howard, Newd Service and a host of other organizations all across the country say over the last five or 10 years. What's different? Maybe not better or worse, but different. I'll think back to the last place I worked at Los Angeles magazine. That was five, six years ago. It wasn't as many pitches, but I think people knew our magazine well enough to know what to pitch and what not to. Being at a broadcast TV station, I feel like we're just on a bunch of de facto lists that people feel like are necessary to include us on that don't really make a lot of sense for us. So it feels like what's changed is at Channel 5, I'm on a lot of lists that I'm like, why are we been getting this? Whereas when I was at LA Mag, we looked at stuff and a lot of times we knew the PR people or what they did or who they represented. How does that volume of email impact you on a day-to-day basis when you're covering 20, 30 some odd different stories? Yeah, I can't even read it to be honest. So my thoughts on email as a pitch is that is a shot in the dark. The only things that perk up our interest is if somebody's done some bit of research that seems legitimate and has some new data or statistics or facts that we can put into a TV show or build a web story around. And usually that kind of thing has to be reflective in some way of Northeast Ohio. Hey, Northeast Ohio has the number one part of the state that's calling the gambling addiction hotline is a pitch that we got recently. And so that got our attention because it reflected kind of the state of play here in Northeast Ohio in an interesting way that we hadn't seen quantified before. But if it's things like books or a new restaurant opening or things like that, it's a tough sled, tough sledding. Is it harder for you to do your job well when you're dealing with so much clutter to get out of? Oh, and here's why I do triage on my emails now. So everything that is super important that I know I need to see, I've actually built email rules into my outlook so that it gets funneled straight to me. And if it's not something or someone that I know or have a relationship with, it goes into a whole other email folder that I'll look at like once a day and I'll just delete most of them because they're not relevant to me. So it hasn't really stopped me. It probably cost me a couple of minutes a day, but that's only because on the front end, I set up some rules in my email to say, I don't need to look at this other stuff. It's really not relevant to me. As you think of content, there is the famous national public radio creates one's publish everywhere model where I'm looking for good information and we'll figure out where to put it. Is that funneling its way through the local news market? Where do we place it and how do we place it? Yeah, so I'll tell you what, how to get our attention with an interesting story. There's a couple things that play. I think the one immediate way for to get our attention is for us to know who you are, have met you in person, have worked with you before, have seen you at a meeting, have seen you at a networking event. You've been in our building, we've had a copy together, cuts the clutter considerably. So when we get a pitch from legal aid or when we get a pitch from the food bank, like we know these guys, like we know them, we know when they pitch us, it's generally a pretty good story. Those are people we worked with for years. But sometimes there are new people in town, new activists, new organizations, new groups. We've got to meet them. Once we meet them and we've kind of vetted you personally and have a personal relationship with then that idea of a good story, it opens up because we know you, we can trust you and we know that if we call you or get email you, that that call or email is going to be returned and there's generally going to be some kind of fruitful outcome to cut through the clutter and get to good stories. I think the first most important thing is to establish a relationship with the journalists or journalists, a organization, you know, you're dealing with. As an outlet, are you thinking web first, social first, broadcast time, five o'clock first? So our, the thing we repeat here in our newsroom that I'm happy to share it and let our competitors know because we do it every day is the right news for the right platform. So we will get some story pitches where we're like, this is a great TV story. It is maybe not so great a web story. So we'll peer first on television and then we will clip the video and put a web story online. Maybe it will get some traffic. Maybe it won't, but it's reflective of what we do and it's good branding for the station. There are other times where we are breaking news and man, we are not waiting to put it on TV. We're going to put it on our website. We're going to push it out with a push alert. It is all those decisions are made on a case by case basis. And this is why as a newsroom, you want to be experienced and savvy and you want to know how to to evaluate news when it comes in and put it in the right place. There's some stuff that goes straight to social. I can think of a lot of examples of when something happens in the world of sports where literally you can tell the whole story with one associate of press photograph and a couple of words on, you know, on an image when you trade a player away or you sign a new player that goes straight to social, but that web story might not go up for an hour or two and it's not going to be on TV for three or four hours. It's case by case and you want to use the right platform to tell the story the right way. That way you're not wasting your own time or the audience's time. In terms of ownership groups and we've seen consolidation and purchases and certain outlets acquiring other markets and whatnot and script zones, dozens of TV stations across the country. How are you working with those sister outlets in terms of content concepts, content ideas? And is that something that a savvy PR person can think about in terms of developing an appropriate pitch? It's a good, it's a good question. We have, I think, 41 TV stations and how it generally works is if that if we've got a big story happening in one of those cities, they get shared out across all the stations so that we can all put it on our websites and put it in our newscast. I think it's a bit of a lottery. So if you happen to get a pitch out of feature, it lands at a script station and the traffic, the web traffic on it does really well 'cause we all look at each other's web traffic. Then the odds are good that other stations will request that story or our national news team may put it out, maybe request it from us and put it on every single website. It's super hit and miss. With the amount of features we do every week, how many of them end up being shared nationally. It's maybe like one or two. And generally those features tend to come from stories our journalists developed. They don't necessarily always come from a pitch, but if you can get one through, you can potentially have a good chunk of the American audience. From a talent perspective, our script stations looking at smaller script markets and saying that's our reporter, our digital director, our anchor of tomorrow. Are you seeing that more vertical integration in terms of talent? Yeah, how it generally works, you move up from market to market to market. And scripts does have, it has smaller to medium size to large markets. And there is an effort to keep really talented people within the company. So when we see somebody who's thriving in Montana or in Fort Myers or wherever that station is, and we're like, we gotta keep that person in the company. There is a big effort made to make sure that when they do a market jump, it's to somewhere where they wanna be increasingly what's happening then that I've seen. I can only say this anecdotally is people, especially over the last few years, wanna work closer to home. I think the pandemic changed a lot of people and changed the way we think about work and changed our relationship with our careers. And in our newsroom in Cleveland, we've had a lot of people who left, we're in some other market and they were like, I wanna be back in Cleveland. And so we've been the beneficiaries of that. So the effort is generally made to keep people in the company, that's for sure. - The marketer is Deborah Ecclelin here. - And I'm Keith Smith and we host the MPN Meta Marketing Show, which is not just another marketing podcast, but the marketing podcast about all the other marketing podcasts. - Podcasts are booming right? We love them and people actually listen. They don't support all they don't swipe. Well, except maybe during the efforts. - But here's the secret. With the marketing podcast network, your ads don't make people hit skip. 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They should be enjoyed. - Yes. - You may know you're listening to this show along the marketing podcast network, but did you know there are other great shows on MPN to help your business. - So let's take marketing through a late night talk show, cleanse, eliminate the X's and O's and bring in the personality of marketers, just brings it all together. - And most importantly, it's fun. - And where can people subscribe? - Look for the podcast on LinkedIn under The Making of a Marketer. Find the show at marketingpodcast.net or search for The Making of a Marketer wherever you get your podcasts. - You harder, go subscribe. - I don't know if this is congratulations, I guess it is. Regarding this horrible train derailment in East Ohio, you ended up on the Joe Rogan podcast as a discussion topic with local content and being able to understand this stuff. - How the hell did that happen? - I still am trying to figure it out. Oh no, I know how it happened. So when I, in a past life, I was an editor at Playboy Magazine, one of my writers at Playboy is somebody who's a really great writer and podcaster. So I was her editor at Playboy. It was her first kind of name publication. And since then she's gone on to thrive. Her name's Bridget Fettisie. And she was on, she's a frequent guest on Joe Rogan's podcast. They were talking about the East Palestine story. Joe Rogan was saying, "I feel like I'm not here "and anything about this. "Why aren't they telling us about this?" And Bridget said, "Stop for a second. They are reporting on this. It's locally, that's part of why you're not seeing it." And then Bridget happened to have on my phone a thread, I had done that day where I was responding to critics who were saying, "Nobody's covering this." And I had like 10 different links to stories, not only from News 5, but other news organizations of people who were covering it. And I responded in good faith and just said, "If you haven't seen our coverage, well, here it is." And then Bridget and Joe read that thread on their show, which was not something I expected to happen in my life. I just think if you happen to watch one cable channel or have one particular Facebook feed that you go to for news, it's possible. It never, you never saw this story. But if you knew enough to know that the story existed and you could Google it, there were, at that point, there already dozens, if not over 100 stories done on that train wreck. - I don't know what that says about news literacy because I would agree the idea that CNN or some other larger national outlet relate to the game. Yes, but the idea that people would just be oblivious to it is a smidge alarming. - I feel like by the time you've heard of it to complain that you were seeing no coverage of it, if that information makes it to you, then you should know the next step is just to Google it. That complaint to me, I think, some of it I think is made in good faith to say, I feel like this isn't being covered enough, but some of it I think is there's some amount of people with some kind of agenda, why to say the news isn't doing their job. And here's another example of the news, not doing their job, but instead of Googling to see if the news is doing their job, they're just saying the news isn't doing their job. - Everyone loves to talk about revenue and challenges of the industry and blah. I was intrigued by the notion that I believe you, and my trucker's still doing this, but the idea of having a dedicated newsletter on this situation that's going to people every day via email and those sorts of alternative forms of coverage that maybe don't end up on the six o'clock show, but are still reaching a whole heck of a lot of people. Do you think that's a trend in terms of being able to diversify those offerings and maybe give people information in a way that is sort of best suited to them? Even if that is not a traditional TV newscast for a TV station in air quotes, 100%. So I think broadly in media, we need to go around social media, 'cause social media is unreliable. So it used to be a very liable source of traffic to websites, especially news websites. That is no longer the case. You need to reach news consumers directly, more and more news organizations, including Channel 5 here in Cleveland, where I do have a newsletter called What Happened Now? But even new news organizations like Semaphore, which just launched, and you see this more and more with the New York Times in the Washington Post, there's a lot of dedicated newsletters because we can't rely on Twitter or Facebook that when I put something in a feed, so thousands of people that any significant percentage of people will see it. So I'd rather have a one-on-one relationship that I can control through a newsletter and with the explosive growth of something like Substack, there's an audience for it. People are saying, "Hey, I'm interested in these certain topics." And I know that these writers will cover these certain topics and I know I will always get that in my inbox. So I will subscribe to your newsletter so that I can stay informed. In my case, it's about what's happening in Cleveland, Ohio or in Northeast Ohio. In the case of other on Substack, you've got people who cover politics, who cover young adult nonfiction, who cover art, all kinds of different topics. And to me, that speaks more to what the future of media is, just because Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms are less and less reliable and less and less interested in sharing links from news organizations. And to be honest, do I want to own my data or do I want to rent it? - Yeah, for sure. And I know with my newsletter, I can see exactly how many subscribers there are, how many people open my newsletter every day, who opens my newsletter every day? And I can see where, where when a subject line that I put in an email was provocative or good enough to get people to open versus when I was too boring or when the topic was wrong and the numbers are down. So I get a lot more data from now, one-to-one relationship with perhaps, I don't wanna say fewer, but it's a concentrated group of people who subscribe to that newsletter. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, which has a potentially global audience, but you just get less and less returned from it. - It's reliable feedback versus random people, giving you a star review that doesn't mean anything. - Yeah, and it's just, and there's nobody, I have no stranger weirdos popping up in my feed like I do on Twitter, just to tell me I'm a bad person and they've never met me. With my newsletter, I've had one or two people say, I don't like the way you cover that. And I'll say, well, you know, I wrote about it this way for this reason and I still don't like it. And I'll always say, if you don't, if you really object to it, and I hope you don't, I always say, I hope you brought in your media diet to consider perspectives that aren't just the ones you agree with, but if you don't wanna do that, you're always welcome to unsubscribe. It's not nobody's forcing you to read it. Unlike Twitter or Facebook where sometimes stuff just pops up in your feed and you're like, you know, WTH. media diet, I am borrowing that and by borrowing that I'm using it and I'll quote you because I believe in good sourcing. There we go. That's awesome. So, there's where the puck is and it's evolving. What excites you about where you think broadcast and local news markets are going to go in the next couple of years? It's a really good question. So one thing that I'm excited that we're doing here at Channel 5 and I suspect the better TV stations across the country will do more of it is partnerships with other news organizations. This all sounds obvious. It's very hard to do. So we have a partnership with the Akram Beacon Journal and all of the smaller newspapers affiliated with the Beacon Journal in Northeast Ohio. We get stuff from them. They get stuff from us and it's a great collaborative relationship that really gives us a lot of power down in that part of our viewing area. We have a partnership with the Ohio Capitol Journal. This is the state house. This is where all the laws are made in Ohio. From the beginning of the pandemic, even through now, man, every story in Ohio has been out of Columbus. You had just all of the ways that our world is changing and that politics are affecting our lives. So great to have that relationship with them. And then we're also part of it up with the Marshall project. This is a digital news organization that covers criminal justice. And these guys do amazing investigations. In fact, I think they want to pull it through our last year for one of them. There is a Marshall project. Cleveland, it's the first of its kind. And we partnered with them. We have the biggest investigative unit in the city, one of the biggest in the country, actually. We had the luxury of being able to take an investigator every now and then and partner them up with a Marshall project reporter. And those two can go digging on a story for a couple of weeks and both go on air and on digital the same day and really give a story, the kind of megaphone. It would not have if it just appeared on the Marshall project site or it just appeared in our six o'clock newscast. And I think the shelf life of that longer form reporting merits the time investment because it's not just a four minute story that airs. Like that thing can last for weeks if not longer based on the importance of the stuff that you're covering. 100%. So when you do an investigation, especially when you're starting down the road on an investigation, it's like building the foundation of a house. You're going to keep building things on top of it. You're not just going to let it sit there. Once you've invested weeks or months into a story, no investigator is going to go, well, I'm done. They're going to just keep on it and see it through all the way to the bitter end, whatever that is. And a lot of times that bitter end is a good end. Sometimes a log it's changed. Sometimes someone gets fired. Sometimes the public opinion is changed in some way that is better for the community. There's a number of positive outcomes that can happen. And our investigators keep pressing until one of those outcomes has achieved in that story is no longer worth doing. Well, you think about that bowling green student. God bless the guy. He passed away in a hazing incident and the coverage of that, which has changed laws and created structure. That doesn't happen if journalists don't follow that for a couple of years. Yeah, absolutely right. That's why, you know, in a lot of cases, if you ever wonder why, oh, gee, why is that family talking to somebody on TV? That horrible thing just happened to them. They want change. Folks that we put on TV a lot of times, they feel like justice hasn't been done. The system hasn't worked in their favor. And the best way for them to get their message out is to talk, you know, to an investigator or to a television reporter or to a print reporter to somebody who will listen to their story and get it out there. That's why they do it. And often they're seeking some of the same goals as well. And you're helping tell their story in a long the way. Maybe some good does come of it. It is always my goal to go 20 minutes. I've never done it. The tradition continues. So let's transition to five questions with Joe Donatelli. Question number one, you actually are a voracious reader. Book you wish other people would read. I think, I think generally speaking, I wish more people would read for pleasure, particularly humor. I love humor books. So I'll throw some books out that I think everybody should read. Everyone should read the hitchhikers guy to the galaxy. If they haven't, it's a great funny book. Everyone should read Catch 22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. These are my favorite books to bring to a pool and just sit and read mindlessly for enjoyment. Favorite cocktail and/or mocktail if that is your jam? A bloody Mary and make it as spicy as possible and put as many appetizers as you can on a stick on top of it. Spice, spice, spice, spice. Yes. Make it hot and then also I love these places that are like, yeah, and we're also going to throw a slider and a hot wing and I'm going to ring out there. I'm like, great. Just put it all, make it a meal. Make it a meal. That's awesome. I'll keep the whole thing. One giant just bowl of yum. Yeah. Favorite restaurant in the town where you live. There's an Italian place near where I live called Scotty's. It's kind of a red and white, you know, chuckered tablecloth place. I go there with my family. They have good pizza. They have the best calzones in the city. It's not the fanciest. It's not on any triple advisor lists. It's just a great good old fashioned Italian place out there. And calzones are underrated as an Italian item. Absolutely. And this place makes the best calzones. Like it's Cleveland's preeminent food critic discovered what I did years ago and he wrote an article about it a couple of months ago saying these guys got the best calzones. I feel like a calzones. Go Scotty's. How many is person you know? I am going to go with my two brothers. So in our family, there's this reputation of Joe's the funny one. And I think my brothers are a lot funnier than I am. They're hilarious. They crack me up, not stop. When we're together, it just becomes like a roast with Don Rickles as the MC. We're horrible to each other and it's great fun. So I have also known him the longest and they have the most material on me and I and them. So it's it's good. So those are the two funniest people I know for sure. If you have never Googled Don Rickles and roasts or searched it on YouTube, A be prepared. Yeah. It's he was a force of nature. Yep. Jeff Ross is great. Don Rickles was like, wow, sharp is attack. Fing you wish you would have known when you graduated that now you know. That's a really good question. I'll tell you what the big the big thing that's occurred to me in the last few years that I didn't realize until I realized it was who you work with, the people you work with. This is going to sound corny, but the people you work with are it's the most important thing. Like it's not job title. It's not your role. Salary is important, but it's not the most important thing to drag your butt out of bad every day and go into a place with enthusiasm. It generally works best if you're enthusiastic about the people you're going to see every day. So if you're in a situation where you like the people you work with, you like your boss, you like your co-workers, you like your staff, you like your clients, treasure that. Don't grass is always greener yourself because that's a rare and beautiful thing. And I've been in all situations where I've liked the people I've worked with and I've been in situations where I'm like, what am I doing here? Why am I here and how can I get out of here? And so I mean, I feel like I'm in one of those good situations now. I like the people I work with. And that's something that I don't think I realized when I was younger, I think I was always going for titles and ascended responsibility and climbing a ladder. And there's there's a need for some of that, but the value of liking the people you work with, it will keep, it'll keep your, you know, your sale filled when you need it most. Joe Donatelli, where can people find you on the Google machine? Oh, man. You can follow my Twitter @JoeDonatelli. If you ever go to news five Cleveland dot com at the very top of the website, you can see the W A gen what happened now newsletter. There's a link there. You can click to subscribe and you will know more than you ever wanted to know about the goings on in Northeast Ohio on a daily basis. Lovely Joe Donatelli. This has been spectacular. I'm thankful for you. Thankful for those who have gotten through the entire podcast. A reminder, there are several other podcasts, part of the marketing podcast network. Give those an opportunity. Hopefully it is well worth your time. So this has been another episode of the strategic communicator with Dan Fargast, part of the marketing podcast network. Be smart, be safe. Be you. Far. Well. So let's take marketing through a late night talk show ends, eliminate the X's and O's and bring in the personality of marketers, just brings it all together. So if you're looking for that POV on what drives that marketing and sales alignment on someone how they became a marketing executive or what is that day to day when it comes to your personal brand, we talk about and tackle these subjects on the making of a marketer. You heard her. Go subscribe. This podcast is her. along the Marketing Podcast Network. For more great marketing podcasts, visit MarketingPodcasts.net.