Pitching story ideas to bloggers

Some questions for the public relations and media relations folks out there:

  • How do you pitch your story ideas or press releases to bloggers? What tips, techniques, etc., do you recommend for successful story placement?
  • How do you decide which blogs and bloggers to pitch? Are you going for the big guns only, like TechCrunch and Boing Boing? Or are you targeting niche blogs?
  • More importantly, are you even pitching to bloggers at all? If not, why not? What things are keeping you from doing so?

I asked these questions last week on a communications listserv as part of my research for PR School 2.0, which happens in just a few weeks. I only received two responses about pitching to bloggers — one from a media relations guy who has had some success targeting niche and newspaper bloggers, and another from a media relations guy who doesn’t pitch to bloggers but had advice on how he would do it, if he did. The lack of response tells me that very few of us in higher ed are trying to pitch to bloggers.

Uploads to YouTube increase to 1GB

Yesterday I posted about micro-casting website 12seconds.tv. And thanks to Kyle and Ron, I now have my very own 12seconds channel with nothing on it (paging Bruce Springsteen ).

Today, I’m heading in the opposite direction, sharing the latest news from the biggest name in online video.

YouTube announced this week that it users can now upload videos as large as 1 gigabyte. Up till now, users were limited to a measly 100 megabytes for their uploads. The new video uploader is now available to anyone who wants to opt in. It also lets you edit your clip’s metadata during upload.

This is good news to anyone who desires to post longer or higher-quality video to the service.

Thanks to TechCrunch and LifeHacker for the info. As TechCrunch points out, YouTube is actually playing catch-up with some of the other services.

Much of these features were already available from other services, but it indicates that YouTube really does have a view of what’s going on in the market and wants to stay competitive in that space even though it’s still the de facto leader.