Wolf Craft - How I track down editor emails

Using two examples from real businesses, this month’s edition covers finding email address and *the right* PR opportunities for you.  

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Q: Help! The main thing I struggle with is finding the actual email addresses for editors.

A:  What I recommend is becoming an expert Googler.

If it's an established publication that's part of a publishing house, like Conde Nast, for example, it should be something like- “first name . last name @ publishing house . com”

So, if you can find anyone at the publication, you can usually extrapolate from that to the contact that you want to contact. A publications masthead won't often have the editorial e-mail addresses, but they often have the publishing and sales e-mail addresses. The structure of the email addresses are almost always the same.

Another good place to look are in editors' social media bios. You can also look for their personal websites and reach out via a contact form and say “hi I'd like to send you a pitch what's the best email address?” Sometimes they'll respond to that. This is an especially good tactic for freelancers who often have personal websites for their work.

So getting comfortable with exploring all the Internet places they might live on, is a really good way to find that contact information.

As a professional PR firm, we happen to subscribe to one of those fancy editor contact databases, but we still have to use these tricks because sometimes those databases are still incorrect.

Useful tools to help you get started

1- Make sure your stuff is ready for editor eyes!

2- Find the right publication and pitch, this week!

3- Share your PR wins!

Q: What do you think is an interesting story?

If you were a writer at Architectural Digest, for example, what do you think would be a good story?

A: First, I want to remove myself and you from the conversation.

Kirsten and I built Wolf Craft around a design thinking methodology, and one of the most important pillars is research. Research is something that publicists have to do a lot of, and so do you if you are DIYing media strategy in-house.

If you're wondering — "what does Architectural Digest want to write about?" — you have to go to the source and actually read at their most recent pages, not just flip through. Read the articles, study the images, and get a good feel for the types of projects/products *and* the types of photography that they're featuring.

Generally, AD the print magazine, writes about celebrity homes and very expensive interior design. If you want to be considered, you have to be in those categories. Little me (or you!) isn’t going to make them change their established editorial point of view.

After some research, you may realize that your work and point of view may not fit that publication. This is good information to have because then you can go on to find out where you and your work *is* a good fit. Maybe you’re not a good fit for AD today, and you can build your on-ramp for a placement there sometime in the next two years.

Try and figure out what publications' point of view overlaps with what you create.

AD is like the New York Times of the interior design community. Everyone wants it, and thus they get bombarded with pitches. I have a fairly strong hunch that a lot of these pitches just aren't appropriate for their publication. This isn't something you should take personally, it's just good information to have..

To get good results, you should be pitching outlets that are appropriate for your work, so research research research.

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Cheers,

Nora