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Prospect FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions when deciding to engage Newstips.
We already have an agency, or a big in-house department, and they tell us we have these bases covered. Why should we bother with you? Won't you just get in their way?
It's good to see you pay that much attention to journalists, and very good to see how much of your trust and confidence your existing operations have earned. Still, Newstips never enters a relationship we don't believe we can enhance, and the way we work never competes or collides with anything else you have happening.
To be specific, unless you're employing a PR army, it's unlikely that you can pitch as many of the press as we can pitch as frequently as we can pitch them; that's also true of specific sectors of the press, including the A List. It's unlikely that your team efforts can cover as many angles as we can cover with our regimen of creating a fresh coverage pitch each week.
It doesn't matter to us and shouldn't matter to you whose first contact resulted in any specific coverage; if that's important to your agency or your internal staff, then any time there's a question about it, credit them for it - we'll still balance out as a very productive contributor to the effort. 
For direct corroboration of that, see the Agencies page and review the comments here.
We're a service, not an agency. We're not here to compete with what's happening at your agency or on your staff; we're here to amplify it.
How do we judge results?
How do we know if this is working?
We believe that "PR" should stand for "Produces Revenues" and work with our clients to help make that so. Our Briefings Library has a document that specifically explains how to evaluate PR operations as a revenue center.
But most people who ask about judging results seem to be looking for something else they can count - column inches or review requests or some number of placements, for example. Experience teaches us two lessons here: that there really is no one measurable thing that turns out to be important, and that measurable-factor quotas are ultimately irrelevant to decisions about canceling or renewing outside services.
In real life, trust your intuition. If you feel like continuing a relationship you will and if you don't you won't. It's that simple - well, almost that simple.
The beginning of a relationship always has a period that seems to be a slump (it really isn't; it's just a phase between activities going into the pipeline and activities going out seems quiet for anybody not inside the pipeline). That's the reason we mandate a minimum three-month relationship. After that, we keep things going, 'till forbid, until you say not to (we believe in no-fault termination, and only require one full calendar month advance notice of termination).
My budget is completely spent-out; what can I do?
 In short, you can justify an addition to your budget, or you may be able to tap into budgets from other internal departments or operations. Unlike other elements, and perhaps unlike other providers, we have ways to help that happen, including techniques to demonstrate our operation as a positive revenue center for your company. So we can (usually) take you beyond cost-justification and all the way to demonstrating positive ROI.
We've also had experience working with enough big companies to know that there are often discretionary budget line items available to product managers (especially during a launch era), to trade show or event managers and to others. We'll be happy to help you with the work of making a case to include us.
But only if you want us to. If "no budget" is just a phrase you use to blow people off, please consider switching something like "no interest" or "not going to happen" or even "no. thanks". We really don't mind hearing a straight "no" because it saves a lot of time and energy on both sides. We are always interested in knowing why, and would appreciate hearing that, but you are, of course, under no obligation to tell us.
We already reach everybody we need to reach; what can you add to that?
Sometimes (but not often) we encounter companies who really do reach everybody they could ever hope to reach, so there really isn't anything we can add, and we say so and wish them well. These are usually companies whose products are bought by such a small universe of customers that a press presence is incidental.
 If you think you're reaching everybody you need to reach, that's a great start. It means you have a really good idea of your highest-priority media goals. But reaching everybody you need to reach or have to reach may not mean reaching everybody you want to reach. The press, alas, presents moving targets.
There are valuable opportunities lurking in surprising places, simply because individual journalists and media as a whole are constantly redefining what it is they want to cover and who it is they want to reach.
When it comes to reaching the press, we discovered (between the first and second issues of the Bulletin, more than a thousand issues ago) that the less we target, the better our results for clients. Journalists we never expected to cover certain stories were interested enough to shift their coverage focus to include them - including some very significant and prestigious press people.
Odds are that we reach a significant number of press people today that you don't reach, meaning significant new opportunities to compel more interest in you.
Give us a chance to talk to you (on the house) about what you're doing now, and to tell you who else we reach who we see covering it. If we can't add significantly, it would make no sense for us to have you as a client (for now) and we will be up front about saying so.
Why should we take all the risk?
You take a lot of risks. We take a lot of risks.
Your risk in a PR relationship is the money you spend now. Our risk in any client relationship is much larger; it amounts to all the money we will never collect over the months and years ahead if our performance results in you terminating our services.
Risk, by the way, is an inescapable part of being in business. You take risks with every professional you engage, but for some reason, professionals in marketing services get this kind of question a lot more than bankers, lawyers or investment counselors, with whom in each case there's generally a lot more money at stake.
After a few decades of doing what we do, we know why. Outside PR services often leave their clients feeling shortchanged or stung (and there are war stories on both sides with plenty of blame to go around). So we get a lot of questions about sharing risks, offering guarantees (a taboo under the Public Relations Society of America Code of Ethics) or working on a commission basis.
We don't
Read my lips: We have it covered. What can you possibly add?
Maybe nothing. Or maybe we can add depth and frequency you're not getting now. We reach more broadly than most PR operations because of our role as journalists to journalists. We also reach more frequently and pitch new coverage angles each time. We've been doing it long enough to be part of the assignment infrastructure of many larger editorial operations. We get read where most PR vehicles get ignored. And we get called into major media planning stages, long before PR operations ever get wind that an opportunity awaits.
We're delighted that you think you have everything covered - it demonstrates that you care about having everything covered. We help make sure you get everything covered better.
Why do we need you if things we already do are already effective?
Thanks for the opportunity to address that! We are truly delighted to hear about any organization that cares enough about reaching journalists - and understands the enormous potential power of the press - to put energy and resources into doing that effectively.
The question is whether adding us will make your efforts even more effective - or better, even more productive. Ours is a more persistent, more consistent presence than most PR programs produce, to a broader swath of journalists than most programs are able to reach.
There's also a question of the efficiency of your own resources. When you're being proactive - using an outreach to the press to try to score placements - your conversion percentages can't be high and you produce only a modest amount of coverage per effort. When it's the press initiating contact and you can instead be responsive, your conversion to coverage is much higher.
Our tools and techniques trigger media interest and get them to call you. Your life gets easier. Your coverage productivity improves.
What if we try you and don't like you?
If you try us and don't like us, terminate us. You can make the termination effective any time after the initial (required) 3-calendar-month minimum term with minimal (one full calendar month) notice.
We use the wires; why do we need you?
The wires distribute news releases that you create whenever you get around to creating them and make these releases available to one or more of the collections of "media end points" they reach. We distribute paragraph-long press coverage pitches that we write and distribute them to journalists who have asked to get our Bulletin.
In most circumstances, we are sending to more journalists than they are. As a rule, we have a much higher number of those we reach actually reading what we send than will ever read what's on the wires (we keep surveying people in the press to reconfirm that these statements are accurate). Also, the sales operations at the wires have a history of convincing their clients to buy coverage "packages" that reach broad swaths of inappropriate press people (like product stories going out to city room editors at daily newspapers).
As a rule, we send out coverage pitches more frequently and more consistently than most companies send out releases. And as a rule, the journalists who follow up on the pitches we present are not left feeling that they are doomed to spend their careers as rewriters of press releases. 
Be aware as well that most press releases are terrible - badly written, poorly targeted, informationally incomplete, linguistically inept and (more often than not) about something that no one in the press will ever choose to cover. Our surveys of journalists tell us that as a whole, significantly fewer than 5% of all press releases are ever worth reading as far down as the middle of the first paragraph. many of these journalists admit to "delete on receipt" handling of press releases they get by e-mail.
That is not to say that you shouldn't use the wires. If you are in a publicly traded company (especially since Regulation FD) or plan an IPO, the wires help make your announcements available to people in the investment community who may wish to research you; the wires are not, in that context, about getting press coverage. For Advisories (an underused format we like and sometimes recommend) or some releases, there are smart ways to choose "circuits" on the wires at a fraction of the cost of the packages they prefer to sell, and with no significant compromise in productive reach.
That is also not to say that you shouldn't use press releases, or something like them. These days, the smartest way to distribute PR materials, product information, photos and so on is via the Web. With appropriate attention to the "press room" area of a Web site, short and simple messages that communicate new content and provide a link can get much better coverage results than most press-wire-based initiatives.
How come we never heard of you before?
Luck? Marty Winston (the guy behind Newstips) has been involved in product PR since early 1974. When there was still a personal computer industry (it has since melted into larger landscapes), he held the dubious distinction of being the PR guy with the longest continuous involvement in it. Marty says it's because he was stupid enough to choose a career without an exit path. He was, at least, smart enough to recognize the sea changes and make an early effort to expand the Newstips press presence into many more kinds of media outlets.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Newstips focus on companies and media that played in the computer industry kept it less than visible to those outside. During that era, we invented new database applications and e-mail innovations that empowered unprecedented coverage effectiveness for Newstips clients.
In the 1990s, Newstips avoided the intoxicated hubbub of the dot-com circus to focus on the current and coming shifts in editorial environs, and on spreading its client base to companies whose products had benefits to offer people who were using many technologies, at home or at work. (This also marked a major transition into significantly more enterprise journalism and a more focused commitment to our role as journalists to journalists). By the end of the dot-com boom, during the demise of so many of the media outlets that had helped shape the 1990s, it was again Marty Winston's research that led to its current era of focus: PR that could reasonably cost-justify itself on a revenue-production basis.
The key is in the little-known field of Behavioral Marketing, which is about the triggers behind purchase decisions and especially (from the Newstips perspective) how media coverage can play a deliberate and instrumental role in triggering those decisions. One more tweak of the tools and techniques at Newstips aligned our performance with (at last) a science for PR operations. Marty is working on a book (his third) to explain Behavioral Marketing, but it isn't out yet.
Maybe that explains why you may never heard of us. Or maybe it is just luck.
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