How to Pitch Dan Cooper

1) What’s the best way to pitch you?

Email. On a good day, I’ll get upwards of 25-30 emails an hour, which means I’ve got a high noise-to-signal ratio to struggle through. When I started doing this job, I wanted to respond to every email I got but the sheer quantity of missives I get makes that impossible. What I do is try to at least read each message I get, although you get a knack for knowing if something’s worth persisting with after the first three lines. 

2) What’s the best time to pitch you?

Weeks, possibly even months before you launch.

If you’ve ever read Engadget, you’ll see that we publish between 40-50 stories a day, making the turnaround time for each story very small. A heads-up, even a “hey, we don’t have the press release, but this is what’s coming in the future” ahead of time is wonderful thing. Everyone at the site is drilled to respect embargoes, and certainly I’m very good at keeping my mouth shut.

Actually, just demanding embargoes sounds whiny and entitled, so lemme rephrase. Embargoes are great because they enable you to write about your new product/service/stuffed toy in a more considered way. Having that lead time is important as a writer because it enables you to dig in and place the story in the right context. Background research, interviews, even sometimes being able to try the product before it comes out are all privileges and responsibilities I take very seriously. It also dovetails nicely with my personal work philosophy, the 7 P’s, which stands for “Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.”

3) Other than your own, which is your favorite publication to read?

After Twitter, the first site that I check each morning is The Guardian, swiftly followed by The A.V. Club and Football 365. Much as I may pretend to be a cool, elite, urban hipster who is Above Such Things(TM), I also have a secret soft-spot for Buzzfeed.

4) Who’s your favorite journalist?

You know, the whole point of a journalist is to deliver the truth for people to make a decision about and, hopefully, in the process, make some sort of change. There aren’t many who have done it, but Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle, has to be top of that list. He’s the big daddy for whom everyone should either aspire to, or at least have read.

5) What kind of stories interest you?

If I’m answering this question for the company, then I’d say pitch me your tales on wearable and fitness technology and connected home stuff. It’s not an exclusive list, mind, and I’m as happy writing stories about home entertainment as I am the latest smartphone or tablet. Every now and again I’ll write about policy stuff, but you probably don’t want to pitch me on that, since I’m a big fan of mocking the pompous.

But really, the sort of stories that interest me are the ones that make me delighted to be living in the future. Magical inventions that make people’s lives easier, gadgets that are beautiful, powerful and economical. Social networks that aspire to do more than just steal a thousandth of Facebook’s ad share power. Big, bold, beautiful ideas, even ones that are doomed to fail, are much more appealing than yet another bloody Bluetooth speaker.

6) What tips would you give someone pitching you?

The problem with questions like this is that the people who care enough about pitching to read it are, almost always, the “good” PRs who already do the right things anyway. I also don’t want to just respond to this question with the stock response of “read the publication you’re going to pitch to, so you know that we’re not going to write about victorian plumbing or battery cases.” 

I love honesty in pitches. Some of my PR chums tell me (quietly) when I’m getting pitched because a client demanded it, rather than because I’m a good fit for a story. It’s something I appreciate because I know that the person in question isn’t messing me about. 

I would say that having a relationship is good, but honestly, how much I like you isn’t going to change my attitude towards a story. I’m accountable to both my readers and my colleagues, and as such, if a piece isn’t going to work for Engadget, I’m not going to write about it. That’s not to say that I don’t like building relationships with PRs, but I know that as important as it is, if we spent all day shooting the breeze with each other, nobody would get any work done -- and I’d hate to be the guy that’s responsible for you getting no work done. You can always tweet me when I’m bored, that’s where I let off steam and enviously look at your Instagram pictures of all the cocktail parties that PRs go to while we sit indoors... typing.

I love pitches that come with a single-line “Elevator Pitch” somewhere before the Dear Dan, purely because, again, it saves me time and helps me to understand what you’re selling. 

Fact-checking’s always a handy one, so I’ve often had messages saying “Hey Dave, great to see you at The Business Expo in Calgary last week!.” You can probably work out that if you couldn’t remember that I’m not called Dave, I wasn’t at the Business Expo in Calgary and we haven’t met, I’m not gonna read your email.

Now, after spending thousands of (insert own currency here) in order to learn the art of public relations, I bet you love having rank idiots like myself tell you how to do your job. If, however, you’ll permit me to provide some unsolicited, unqualified and unwanted advice about pitching, I’d like to say that it’s really important to get your message right. That means that you need to be able to explain what’s going on as if you’re talking to a child (because you are) and, more importantly, explain why. 

Why is often the question that inventors, creators and pitchers forget to ask, and it’s an easy way to trip. For instance, I was once pitched on a project were a person wanted to crowd fund a lot of cash for a video billboard. This billboard was meant to be strategically placed as to get the attention of Hollywood executives at a film festival. When I asked why they were doing this, the person on the other end of the phone was left spluttering about the community. Look, we both knew the “why” was because it was some guy’s vanity project and he wanted to use other people’s money to further his dreams of stardom. Being able to answer why is far more important than anything else you do... although that project wound up getting cancelled, probably for good reason.

7) What will you never write about?

• Engadget styles itself as “the definitive guide to this connected life,” which means that we talk about new technology, and how it relates to people. It’s a very broad church and there’s no site-wide or personal list of topics that we would never discuss under any circumstances, ever. That said, there are plenty of pitches that we get that are almost guaranteed never to be accepted:
• Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted: “Hey, I saw that you covered a Bluetooth Walrus polishing kit. My client released a similar Bluetooth sea mammal polishing kit five months ago. Would you like to cover us, too?”- Probably not, because the first one was a bit of a stretch, and unless you’ve got some really different features, you should have pitched us months ago.
• Nobody CEO has an opinion about something nobody cares about“Hey, I saw that you wrote up the IDC numbers about Walrus Polishing Gadgets. My client is the CEO of FinanceGlobaCorp that once read a Time article about Walrus Polishing Gadgets. Here’s his opinion that you can put into a story.”- Just... no. Same for if you want me to interview this unrelated person for no discernible reason.
• Startup funding rounds “Hi there, someone you don’t know and don’t care about managed to convince some rich old people to give them several million dollars!”- If it was Elon Musk, or Google or another tech personality that people may have an interest in, then send it over. Otherwise, don’t bother.
• Infographics.
• Pre-funding. Personally, I’m always leery of companies that need to pre-fund before they go to Kickstarter. That’s when they should be having a meeting with their bank manager. They don’t need the charity.
• Enterprise Stuff. Servers, security software, swanky office chairs, if you’re pitching it to a B2B office supplies mag, it’s probably not a fit for us.- I make an exception for standing desks, because I am a standing desk nerd
• Inanimate objects that aren’t gadgets.
• That exception for standing desks notwithstanding.

8) Star Wars or Star Trek?

Now that I’m married, and therefore have tricked someone into believing that I’m normal, I can be an out-and-proud fan of Star Trek. Star Wars is fine, sure, but if we’re all honest, it’s two very good movies and four that we’d much prefer hadn’t been made. Compare that with the sheer volume of wonderful Star Trek stuff (Balance of Terror, Wrath of Khan, Best of Both Worlds, The Inner Light, All Good Things, In the Pale Moonlight, The Undiscovered Country, Duet, Year of Hell Part One, The Die is Cast...) and there’s simply no choice.

Although Doctor Who is clearly miles better than both of ‘em.