My 2 cents worth of advice to startups when they approach media through email or Contact Form:

  1. Try not to send a mass mail. ‘Hi’, ‘Hey there’, ‘Hello’ look so dumb. Try and find out name of the journalist you are trying to approach. Personal emails might get extra attention as they look to be addressed directly at individuals rather than a mass.
  2. If you do decide to do a mass mail, learn to use the BCC. By CC-ing, one, you are not doing any good by exposing emails and leave them open for farming; two, it robs the journalist of the exclusive factor.
  3. Please, please provide the location where you, or your startup is based and what your target market is. It helps me assign the story to the specific journalist.
  4. Give complete information in the email itself, rather than giving a link to your website and asking us to find more details there. It just takes me away from my job in hand, which is about clearing emails. I don’t want to open another window right now. Links are good to come back to when you want to explore deeper.
  5. This last one is not just for startups, but PR too. Please, for God’s sake add pictures of products, and spokesperson with your Press Releases and announcements. If you do not want to clutter my email box, please feel free to give a Drive, Dropbox, Box, Yousendit, Wetransfer or any other service link to the pictures. Journalists will appreciate that they can focus on writing the article than worry about fishing for the right picture on Google and leave themselves open to copyright issues.
  6. … and please don’t send a stamp size picture. Please send a hi-res picture. The article will look bad with a pixelated picture.