Today, I’m excited to welcome Lily Canter, a money, health and lifestyle journalist and co-director of Freelancing for Journalists to Failing Publicly. She is discussing a series of consecutive fails that I think many a journalist, freelance or otherwise, has fallen prey to: paying too much attention to PR emails.
As someone who also loves Inbox Zero, I love Lily’s take on how she took back control of her inbox - read on to find out how.
Back when I started freelancing in 2015, I was thrilled whenever I received an email from a PR. Each one felt like validation that I was a ‘real journalist’.
For the uninitiated, PR stands for public relations and is a generic term for anyone who works in communications for public bodies, private organisations or the third sector. There are also PR agencies that represent individual and corporate clients.
Essentially a PR’s job is to protect the reputation of the person or organisation they represent. This means working alongside journalists to provide them with (selective) information to promote a particular agenda.
It is very much a love-hate relationship because these days it can be very difficult to get information without going through a PR but as a journalist you really wish you could just speak directly to the source.
As a freelance journalist, PRs are a necessary evil and in the beginning I did my upmost to respond to every single PR email I received. If an obscure and/or irrelevant press release landed in my inbox I would politely respond and say ‘thanks but this isn’t one for me’, or ‘just to let you know these are the types of things that I cover’. I felt proud of myself for being so efficient and friendly and I filed away 90% of the emails in case I needed to refer to them in the future.
I often received surprised responses from PRs saying thank you for taking the time to respond because they were so used to being ignored.
But after a while, I realised that my good intentions were a fool’s errand. The friendly feedback did not improve quality control and I simply received more and more guff.
I am one of those people that likes to have a tidy inbox and no unread emails. So there soon came a point where I had to make a change. It was no longer time-efficient to respond to every single email or choose which folder to file them away into. Being polite was costing me money and taking me away from researching and writing.
Over time my email strategy has evolved but to be quite frank these days it is pretty brutal. On average I get 50 unsolicited emails a day from PRs. This does not include random junk mail, emails from the public and genuine responses to PR requests or messages from sources and editors. These are 50 emails that appear simply because someone, somewhere has added me to a PR list.
Up until recently, I used to open each one and glance through it before filing or deleting. Then I switched to reading the subject heading and opening it up if I thought it could be relevant.
But these days I tend to look at the first few words of the subject heading and then press delete. I can honestly say that most days I delete 100% of these emails without even reading the full subject heading. One or two a week will catch my eye and I will open them before instantly regretting it and pressing delete. About once or twice a month there will be something useful that I will file or respond to.
Every now and then I respond and ask to be taken off the mailing list and I really should do this more often - this would be a far better use of my time.
I do get the occasional story idea, quote or case study from these PR emails but they are few and far between. Put simply, if I had more quality emails I would open more of them. But most of them are commentary on a breaking news story (I mainly write features), an inane press release (for example: 8 garden ‘weeds’ that are good for your health or This city has more FIVE-STAR hotels than any other city in the world), or someone asking me to interview an MD for no apparent reason other than they want publicity.
And I know hundreds of journalists will have received the exact same information so I have no exclusivity which as a freelancer is my lifeblood.
These days, I actually pride myself on cutting through the crap with a virtual machete. I have even stopped answering my phone if I don’t know the number because it is always a PR ringing to tell me they have sent me an email, which I already know I have deleted.
For many, my approach may seem rude, harsh, or ungrateful but for me, it works. I spend my time and energy seeking sources directly and only use PRs when there is specific information or case study I need. I think my journalism is better for it and my daily inbox cleansing is extremely satisfying.
That’s not to say that journalists shouldn’t have relationships with PRs. In fact, tomorrow I am taking part in a free event to discuss how to build better relationships between journalists and PRs. And guess what my first piece of advice will be?