Thursday, August 29, 2013
Make Your Expert Relevant: Expert Pitch ProTip from News
Looking to get your expert interviewed by the media, but don’t have a lot of time to compose a pitch?
Easy, take your existing content - a previous pitch, op-ed, or feature profile of your expert, and make it fresh. With a little cut here, copy there, and a revision or two, you can make your existing content relevant to today’s news.
Take for example this op-ed from Smart Grid expert, Dr. Ray Klump, Professor and Chair of Computer Science and Mathematics at Lewis University.
The original pitch:
This original op-ed, titled “Why Does Hot Weather Cause Power Outages?” was mostly penned from the professor’s perspective; informative, densely packed with detail, and full of good bites to be mined later. But it wasn’t written with a particular news event in mind.
In talking to our client at Lewis University, she mentioned that their region was currently under a heat wave (as happens in late August in Chicago), and this professor might be worth pitching again to the media. I offered to help revise the original pitch, and with just a few tweaks, make it relevant to the current news event going on in the region.
The idea was to lead with this professor’s expertise in relation to the topic of heat waves and air conditioning. Only a few words and phrases were composed originally for this pitch, with the bulk of the content coming from the previously written op-ed. Read the full revised pitch here.
Check back for any updates on the resulting media coverage from this pitch.
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