Public Relations Firms Editing and Proofreading Services

Journalists covering enterprise software receive several hundred approaches in a week and open perhaps a dozen. What arrives is rarely a pitch. It is a press release attached to a paragraph saying the sender thought this might be of interest, addressed to a reporter who does not cover the beat, about a funding round that is not a story. The response rate on that approach sits near zero, and the usual remedy is to send more next week.

The documents we edit for Public Relations Firms

Media pitches and journalist approaches make up the bulk of this work. Press releases and announcements come with them, along with exclusive and embargo offers, spokesperson and commentary offers, and reactive pitches written against a running news story. We also edit feature proposals, press kits and media resources, briefing documents for spokespeople, media lists and the reasoning behind them, campaign proposals, coverage reporting and evaluation, award and speaker submissions, and forward planning documents for clients. Our editors work on the email a journalist opens or does not.

What the editing involves

The opening lines decide whether a pitch is a service to a journalist or an interruption. A pitch that opens with the agency, the client, and the announcement spends the reader's attention before making a case. We move the story into the first line, in the shape a headline would take: not "Acme has published its annual survey" but "Two-thirds of hospital technology teams have delayed a security upgrade for budget reasons". The second line is where the pitch shows it was aimed, by naming what this reporter has actually written, when it ran, and where.

What is on offer belongs in plain words: an exclusive, an interview, data under embargo, or access to somebody who does not usually speak. A journalist is deciding whether there is something here that cannot be had elsewhere, and a pitch that never says what is being offered leaves the journalist to guess. The release works better as a link than as an attachment. A pitch gets a few seconds on a phone, and we cut it until it fits them. Agencies working this way send 30 approaches where they once sent 300, and get more coverage.

We do not decide what is newsworthy or which reporter should receive which story. The agency and its client know the beat, and the targeting arrives with the brief. Our work is on the order of the sentences, on whether the figure in the first line matches the figure in the release, and on whether a claim called "new" in the pitch is called new in the quote.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including embargoed material, client information, and campaigns before launch. We are editors, not publicists or legal advisors, and we offer no view on media strategy, defamation, privacy, or regulatory questions. What we can do is make the pitch worth opening.