[CurtMonash]

This is appalling pabulum. It has no more to do with pitching a journalist successfully than wearing nice clothing to the interview has to do with getting a job.

Every pitch should have dual goals:

1. Ideally, you'd like to get covered. 2. Absent that, you'd like to increase the likelihood of getting covered in the future.

So you should think of your pitch as being more about making your company look worth writing about. In particular, don't breathlessly oversell a minor piece of news.

If you're a native English speaker, you should strongly consider going without a PR firm altogether. They're the sort of outfit who follow the cookie-cutter advice in the post linked here and think they're adding value. They also are very bad, with few exceptions, at finding credible ways to make you sound unique.

[CurtMonash]

Here's a link with some of the reasons for my opinion:

http://www.strategicmessaging.com/five-kinds-of-public-relat...

(First time I've posted a link to Hacker News. I'm curious to see what happens ...)

[Mz]

You can do an after action report tomorrow. I would like to see it, especially if it doesn't involve 10k hits. I think only the crazy stuff gets reported and it skews public perception of what it means to post a link here. My links never get anywhere near the traffic that gets reported around here until people seem to think that kind of hype is the norm.