• What racial/ethnic/identity groups do your cast or production team belong to? We have, among other things, Hmong and Somali newspapers, which like to cover members of their communities being in shows.
• LGBTQ+? There’s not only the monthly Lavender Magazine (a real gem of local coverage), but also KFAI’s cutely named Fresh Fruit radio show that’s interested in publicizing work by and about members of that community.
• What schools did your cast or production team attend (or are attending)? Alumni newsletters and magazines are a great way to get some coverage.
• What area(s) are your cast or production team from? It’s pretty easy (relatively speaking) to get a small town or community newspaper to run coverage about a resident who’s doing something exciting in a big city or foreign country.
• Are there any special content things that make your show of special interest to specific groups?

I am by no means saying to never reach high with a new organization, or that you have to wait until your career is well-advanced to send out a press release. Instead, consider this: What are some of the most interesting and exciting things about what you do, and what will make help convey that interest and excitement to the readers of your target publication?

Don’t Lie

But don’t lie. I’ve read some pitches over the years that had fabricated information, including attributing words to a fellow critic who said that they were made-up. It helps no one and wastes people’s time.

Not convinced? Let’s try this another way: Once you have some coverage, it will be easier (relatively speaking) to attract coverage by a music critic or journalist in a larger publication because the prior body of coverage will help them conceive how they might write about you.

Keep in mind that most critics are underpaid or not paid at all, and get a much larger volume of requests than they can handle. (I get more than a hundred press releases on a slow day.) A lot of small-town journalists are severely underpaid and do not have expertise in your specialty area. With this in mind, let’s reframe the question as “What can I give a writer that will both excite their interest and empower them to easily write about me?”

Don’t know where to start with that? Put together a list, and then ask someone else to tell you what they think might be helpful to add. Sometimes, that might mean you need to produce a variety of photos that represent you well and convey something of what you want.

These days, strong photos are essential – an online piece without photos gets less than 20% of the clickthroughs, so most editors won’t even waste their time approving a piece that doesn’t have a compelling headline photo to go with it. Blurry, clearly lit, and capturing something of your personality and/or work is a good place to start.

No bathroom selfies, please – and yes, people do submit those in press kits. Just because you see them on online dating profiles… doesn’t mean you should use them for, ahem, non-dating publicity.

Help Those Who Help You

Finally: If you went to a conservatory or university music program, you may recall music history textbooks quoting some of the great music critics and journalists of the 19th century – Schumann, Berlioz, Fétis, and so forth. Each of them wrote in no small part because they thought that their colleagues’ work deserved more attention, and wrote the kind of coverage that they wanted to be reading more of. They also founded their own journals or took editing positions so that their writing would have a platform – and depended on readers to make the activity sustainable.

Readers are still important. In fact, since most reading is now online, pageviews are a stand-in for advertising sales and impressions, and somewhere behind every publication is a need to have readers at the points being measured.

So: If someone writes about you, publicize the work, in a way that drives readership to them. Please don’t screenshot a review’s text and post it on social media without a link to the original publication – if those views don’t go to the publication, they don’t get counted. At the end of the day, a lack of readers/views will kill a publication, and it’s certainly not going to make the writer or editor inclined to cover you in the future.

Don’t do these other things, too: https://twincitiesarts.com/category/curmudgeon/