Dear PR people

Editors and journalists are rarely shy about telling PR people what we do, and don’t want. And given that we’re bombarded with requests all day, it’s fair enough. But at the same time, it’s equally arrogant to presume to tell communications people how to do their job.

That said, each day I deal with the same small set of issues that waste my time, and in aggregate become really annoying. So I’ve finally got around to writing some humble tips for the punters:

1. No, I don’t have anything to do with Special Reports, or advertised features. Send email to the AFR’s Mark Lawson (use the AFR’s email convention). Please don’t email or call me about them.

2. Please don’t plead with me to write a story (The ‘but it’s really, really important!’ scenario happens more often than you’d like to think…).

3. News flash: We’re a business paper. No, really, it’s true. So that means we like numbers. If you’re pitching an IT story about a business deal, new product or whatever, make sure you include numbers. Big numbers. We don’t like small numbers.

4. Don’t email us a press release at

   6pm

   just “because that’s when we got sign off from the client.” If it does happen to be news worthy, we face the choice of working late or ignoring the story because we aspire to having a life each night. We also suspect that you’re doing it because you did a deal with a rival newspaper to give them story at 9am.

5. Along the same lines, the more notice we get, the more we like you. Each Tuesday’s big IT section is mostly planned in advance. If you know there’s something coming up that we might want to know, give us a heads up the week before, not the day before.

6. Ditto for each day’s IT section. Pitch us early in the day if you can.

7. Pitch via email. We do read it.

8. Please repeat your phone number on voice messages, or speak s-l-o-w-l-y. I know it seems obvious, but hey.

9. Sorry in advance if I/we don’t respond to messages or email. It’s not personal, we’ve probably just decided to write something else. And it’s a question of hours in the day.

10. If you want us to meet a local or overseas exec for a coffee etc., you’ve got a better chance of getting our ear if s/he can talk about big name Aussie companies or is prepared to divulge numbers (see point #3).