What you need to know about pitching at the weekend
It’s generally agreed (and something I’ve recommended myself) that pitching on a Friday isn’t the best idea. Whilst this holds true if you’re pitching things such as announcements, which are best left to the start of the following week, if you have a more evergreen (always relevant) story to pitch, it can actually be brilliant.
Here are some thoughts on why and how to go about it.
There are less people pitching
This is the first and most obvious reason. There are far less people pitching stories at the weekend than there are on, say, a Monday morning. People forget that there are actually editors and journalists working weekend shifts so they don’t think to send them ideas.
Weekend editors actually need stories
The media never sleeps - even at the weekend, which means there are journalists and editors yawning their way through a Saturday morning shift, looking for ideas to populate the website or fill their pages. Between the facts that less people are pitching and that there is an appetite for stories, your chances of getting that all important ‘YES!’ on your idea are much higher. Particularly because the team on staff is much smaller at the weekend, meaning there is much more pressure on them to put out more stories. Which brings me to…
You could get featured much more quickly
If you pitch and get a yes at the weekend, chances are, that story is going up that weekend, which means you could go from 0 to featured in less than 48 hours. Now wouldn’t that be nice?! Of course, the caveat to this is that, if you’re pitching at the weekend, you need to be prepared to turn that idea around and get it back to that editor usually within a few hours, so you’ll have to work quickly. But with the prospect of a gorgeous new feature in a world-famous newspaper brand in the offing, I’d say it’s definitely worth the downtime sacrifice once in a while.
It’s mostly newspapers
Newspapers are the media that typically have staff working weekend shifts, as most magazines will make weekend content ahead of time and schedule it to publish on their websites in advance. The same usually applies for lifestyle desks at newspapers, but there will always be staff working on the news and opinion desks at the weekend, so if you have an opinion piece you’d love to write on a topic related to your business, this is the perfect time to send it.
How to find people to pitch to
There are a couple of places to check for the right contacts. Firstly, the general section email address is typically a good shout - this will usually be something like, ‘[email protected]’ and can typically be found on any news paper website in the contact section. This, for example, is The Times UK one: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/static/contact-us/.
Another place to check is on Twitter, where editors will typically share that they’re working a weekend shift and looking for stories. Just follow our usual research techniques to find these people.
