Harm Reduction Starts at Home with Reliable Info

The Upgrade ⬆️ Before: You open a spreadsheet of 60 journalists and start Googling each one to see what they've written lately. Three hours in, you've checked 15, and half your notes are already stale. After: You open Preston. Every journalist shows recent coverage, current beat, and where you left off with them — already up to date. You spend the three hours on the pitch, not the prep. Same list. Same reporters. The difference is where your hours go. Research that took days should take minutes. That's the whole point.

Journalists: How do NGOs actually land in your inbox? This month, I'll be running a series of posts on how NGOs pitch, follow up, and (often) miss the mark with reporters, and what actually builds a relationship worth keeping. I'm collecting input as I go. Comment if you're ok going public, DM if you'd rather stay off the record. Either way, it shapes the series and I'll share (with discretion) what I find.

So your company has insights to share.. how do you turn that into value for a reporter? 🤔 A generic pitch to “discuss industry trends” gives journalists very little reason to respond. Instead, identify exactly what your expert brings to the conversation. For example, do they have local or industry-specific context? Do they have data to support a broader trend? ✅ The easier it is for a journalist to understand how your source fits into the story, the stronger the opportunity becomes. Read our full blog on how to turn insights into a real story: https://loom.ly/WNI9VJQ

One of the things I enjoy most about being at this stage of Wonder Journalist is how quickly a conversation can turn into something real. Recently, we added the ability for journalists to bring written documents directly into their workflow. The idea came from conversations with reporters who told us they wanted to work with more than just audio and video. They wanted to bring reports, existing articles, documents, and other written material into the same place so they could have more context and better attribution, So we built it! There is something really satisfying about speaking to someone, understanding what isn't working for them, and a few weeks later they're using something that didn't exist before. The best thing about being early is that you can still listen closely and move quickly.

You’re an expert. That doesn’t make you featured news. You pitch yourself to the media. then...Crickets. Why? Because journalists care about the story their readers and viewers need to hear right now. That’s where a lot of expert pitches fall apart. Sarah Graham Schlotfeldt and I are sharing six of the biggest reasons expert pitches get ignored, plus what the strongest pitches do differently. Join us for a FREE LinkedIn Live where we’ll show you how to turn your expertise into something journalists can use. https://lnkd.in/g2hpHUhj

"I don't need your client to be interesting. I need them to make my article better." That's the entire brief, delivered in one sentence over a terrible espresso in Lisbon. It reframes the whole exercise. A pitch isn't a request for coverage. It's an offer of raw material for something the journalist is already trying to build. So the question before sending anything isn't "is our news important." It's "what is this reporter currently struggling to explain, and do we make that easier." Almost nobody asks the second one, because it requires reading what they published in the last two weeks. That takes fifteen minutes and eliminates most of the reasons pitches fail. Fifteen minutes.

The 3 questions every funder should answer before going to press: 1. What's the story, not the product? — If you can't say it in one sentence, neither can a journalist. 2. Who's the audience that matters? — Investors, customers, or talent? Coverage that reaches the wrong people is just noise. 3. What's the proof? — A data point, a customer result, a contrarian take. Something that makes the story credible. Answer these three and you've got a pitch worth sending. Skip them and you're gambling on a reporter's patience. This is the framework I walk funders through before we ever send a single email to a journalist.

A reporter passed on your last pitch. A colleague already emailed them this week. One journalist moved outlets in July, and your list still has the old address. None of it is written down, so all of it gets repeated. Preston keeps the record so your team doesn't have to. Every journalist carries a live status — queued, pitched, opened, warm, covered — and it updates as you go. When a reporter changes beats, the profile changes with them. The point isn't the database. It's that your team stops pitching blind and starts pitching from memory. The system remembers; you decide what to do with it.

This series is a great example of a core part of Evident's mission: Getting complex and crucial stories in front of wide audiences on the platforms where they spend their time — social video platforms. As more people tune out "the news," we're looking for new ways to get important information in front of people. Partnerships and creative visualization, like what this series offers, help us do that.

A new social video series from independent journalist Bianca Graulau and Evident examines the "Debt Trap" that drains the public services of vulnerable economies to line the pockets of wealthy firms. Check out our first episode and stay tuned for new videos in this series over the coming weeks! Correspondent: Bianca Graulau Producer: Claudia Ayuso Editor/animator: Josephine Choy DP: John Garcia Executive producer: Zach Toombs