Good Morning Gloucester

Hey I just created and edit a blog that reaches an average of 38,000 people a day and won CBS Boston’s Most Valuable Blogger Award.   What do I know, right?

I’m no professional but I’d like to offer up tips to the PR professional who may be responsible for getting out their client’s messages or their community organization’s message.

From an editor’s perspective who gets to decide what makes it on our pages I’ll offer up some tips on how to get the stuff you are interested in promoting, promoted.

Tip #1

Make it easy for the editor.

I’m running a business and get to tend to the blog in the sparse down time that I have from running the business that pays my bills.  Make shit easy for me.

The best press releases are interesting stories that provide some type of payback for my readership.

In the email that you send me pitching your idea, type it out the way you would like it written and in the subject line type the title of the post the way you would like to see it on the blog.

I’m not too proud, I’m a goddamn professional copy and paster, believe me.  If I can easily copy and paste your copy without it being in some crazy font or weird formatted margins that makes me happy.  The worst is when I  have to backspace 40 lines of copy to make it look like a normal paragraph and I tend to get irritated when I get something preformatted in some weird 7 words of copy per line.  The absolute worst.  I have better stuff to do than to realign your message.  I can create much more interesting stuff for my readership in the limited time I have to work on my publication than what I will be editing for you, believe me.

In the email you send, include the hyperlinks to the corresponding organization or where you want the reader to go for more info.

Provide a nice pdf and think about where it will be displayed.  For example: if your organization is making flyers to post on standard sized 8.5 x 11 inch paper for around town and you send that to me with standard sized font, when it gets shrunk down for display on the blog, the column which we display it will be about half that.  So the standard sized font you used for a coffee shop flyer will be half that size when posted the blog and barely legible if legible at all.

If you continually send me stuff that I need to edit the shit out of to make work I will ignore you (unless I really like you and you bring me food).

This will be a weekly feature.

Pass it on.