This Week in PR Takes - Week 15

Happy Friday!

I hope that you’ve been enjoying TWiPRT and please don’t forget to engage with the takes in this newsletter. The goal here is to highlight a few takes each week and encourage conversation among the Public Relations/Communications community.

Take of the Week:
Please indulge me, I’m going to give you my own take as the Take of the Week.

How many of us have worked tirelessly for weeks, if not months, creating the perfect PR campaign only to have it fizzle out when it comes reporters’ reception to the pitch and the results just aren’t there? We have all been there, whether at an agency or in-house.

There are countless reasons why this happens, but here’s one way to avoid this: tell reporters what you’re working on before it’s wrapped up in a bow.

Ultimately, most of us work on reporters’ time-tables and not the other way around. With so much oxygen being taken up from must-cover, major macro events like tariffs or large companies issuing news; most of us do not have the luxury of giving reporters a week or two for what is most often a nice-to-cover story. The more notice we can give about the general topic, timeframe and other related information to reporters about upcoming campaigns, the better the chance we have of avoiding a campaign like the Looney Tunes “Bang” gun and really make an impact.

And with that, here’s the rest of the takes.

A word from Dazzle:
I just used Dazzle this week to help find relevant reporters for an upcoming campaign. This AI search agent found some excellent journalists that seem like great matches for the pitch, and that along with their chatbot are two of the great features of their platform.

Don’t forget that you can get a free month if you sign up for a month of their Professional Plan (valued at $250) and use the promo code PRTAKES2025. In case it helps, here is a link to Dazzle’s promo code manual to help with any questions.
_{*Disclosure, I receive compensation if you decide to sign on beyond the trial}

The Rest of the Takes:

• I couldn’t agree more with Jasmin’s take on PR metrics and measuring impact over reach

• Carly posted about her “Bathtub Test” when considering a media pitch

• Is four hits per month considered a success? Sarah penned a few thoughts on the question

• Noah Dye wrote about the jargon that is often used in press releases

• This is less of a PR take per se, and more of a take on the emotional state of PR people today. Thank you Sarah for writing this thoughtful post, and here’s hoping we all take our vacation time.

• Even though most of the takes in each newsletter have focused on PR and external comms, a lot of us also work on internal comms as well. Courtesy of Jennifer, here is a day in the life snapshot of an internal comms professional.

• Have you ever wanted to pitch a sensitive topic? Lydia and Nic dove into how to pitch them to show authenticity and not opportunism.
  

  Don’t forget to check out Dazzle and the promo code again is: PRTAKES2025
  

  That’s it for this week’s takes, thanks for reading.

  -Brian

  https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkramer/