SCHWARTZ HEALTHCARE-IT BLOG

Wall Street Journal Reporter Interview

Here is an interview with Amy Dockser Marcus of The Wall Street Journal, drawn from the Schwartz Communications Healthcare Newsletter. Useful advice for PR practitioners.

Schwartz: What makes a good pitch? What do you look for when evaluating a medical therapy or diagnostic to feature in Personal Journal section?

Marcus: To make a good pitch, you have to read Personal Journal. It is clear to me from a pitch when someone has never bothered to read the newspaper or the section and so has no understanding of what kind of stories we run.

Personal Journal is heavily oriented toward consumer service information. We want to break news, but it also has to be news that someone can use right then or in the immediate future. Diagnostics or new medical therapies that won't be available in the doctor's office for the next five years may be fascinating and work for some other section of our paper, but we won't write a story about them in Personal Journal.

I am interested in learning about diagnostic tests and new therapies that will transform in some way how diseases are treated. The pitch should explain why this is a significant change from what is traditionally done or what kind of major difference its use will make in the health of a consumer.

Schwartz: What is your view of disease awareness months? What are the requirements for making that kind of pitch newsworthy?

Marcus: Personal Journal in the past has rarely written about disease awareness months. We are interested in breaking news about diseases no matter when they happen during the year. We do not run general stories about disease awareness months. The only way we would consider this is if there is a genuine news story, emerging trend, new treatment, new diagnostic test, or some other news-related development related to the disease. Even then, we'd probably just run a straight news story about the development rather than focusing on the tie to a particular disease awareness month.

Schwartz: What do you think of the use of celebrity spokespeople?

Marcus: It doesn't matter what any of us think, they are here to stay. It won't make a pitch more appealing if a celebrity is backing the use of a particular product. But if there is an unusual or newsworthy reason why the celebrity got involved, that might be interesting to know.

For more PR strategy and tactical advice, please click on the "PR Strategy and Tactics" category to the right.

Posted by Shawn Whalen on January 29, 2007 at 3:30 PM
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