Last week, we talked to Yessi Bello-Perez from The Next Web for our first webinar of the Journalist’s Insights series, in which we talk to journalists about what they do and the interaction they have with PR people, startups and other businesses.
Stuck at home due to Covid, we are not able to hold our usual talks and participate in workshops, so we decided to take action.
But this is not a one-off. We hope to keep going with these sessions and create bridges between PR professionals, startups and journalists, especially those working in tech or with startups, and share knowledge and better ways to communicate with each other. The goal is to help startups be better equipped to get noticed in the media, and facilitate relevant dialogue between PRs and journalists.
It was a special privilege to be able to interview Yessi in our first edition. In a way, Yessi embodies the spirit of the series – her own role at The Next Web leading Growth Quarters sees her focus on finding and dissecting insights to help startups and scaleups grow. Yessi is well-acquainted with the tech startup world, with years of experience in journalism, including a past role as editor of UKTN.
Of course, with Covid-19 affecting the world of business so much, Growth Quarters has become the place to go for resources on how to be more resilient. In a true Growth Quarters spirit, we wanted to zoom into PR and understand better how startups could more effectively communicate with the media during these times.
What follows is the conversation Yessi had with our founder JJ. There are some real gems and takeaways here for anyone in PR, as well as anyone wanting to better understand how to get in touch with journalists, so make sure you don’t miss reading any of her answers.
Questions we asked Yessi
- About Yessi’s experience and current role
- Yessi’s top tips for working remotely during Covid-19
- On how Covid-19 is affecting European tech startups
- On communicating with journalists even if it’s not good times for your company
- Yessi explains what stories are interesting and whether it’s all just about Coronavirus
- On the current situation and lack of positive news
- Yessi shares how many emails she gets every day
- The naughty and nice filter in journalists’ inboxes
- On whether press pages and press kits are useful
- How to get yourself noticed if you feel journalists ignore you
- The importance of Twitter
- Pitching via Twitter: is it OK to do it?
- MarTech tools for PR from the side of journalists
- How Covid-19 has affected PRs and journalists at work
- Topics of importance for tech startups in journalism during Covid-19
- How startups from smaller countries can get noticed in the international media
- Answers to questions from the audience
- Reaching out to Yessi
Tell us about your experience as a journalist and what you are doing currently.
Right now I write for a section of The Next Web called Growth Quarters, a space for European tech startups and scaleups. The premise of Growth Quarters is to give people candid insight and advice to help them grow their businesses.
We launched in early February, at a time nobody assumed or knew we could end up in the situation Covid-19 has put us in. Our content has changed dramatically, and we’re more focused on helping people get through this uncertainty, ranging from business pivots or how to onboard people online all the way to how people can work more effectively from home, be it by breaking up your workweek from your weekend to mental health, which is a really important conversation we’re trying to focus on. It’s varied.
Businesses are changing and adapting, and we as journalists are doing so too in order to provide as much relevant content as we can.
Considering you’ve heard so many stories and advice from those adapting to the Covid-19 situation, what would your top tips be for startups for working at home?
I’ve been working from home for a bit over a year myself. The biggest thing I’ve learned in the past 6 weeks is to have a routine. I know it sounds cheesy or like common sense, but it makes a huge difference. Having a morning routine that sets the tone for the day, for example.
One of the pieces I recently worked on is about the whiteboard. When I saw we were gonna go into this situation of lockdown, I invested in a whiteboard, I bought it off Amazon and it’s really helping me be productive and stay on top of my deadlines and priorities. I keep it immediately in eye-view.
“There’s less friction. The whiteboard makes me feel at ease and organized”
If you can have a space in your home that you can use just for work, that’s great, but if not and you are unfortunately needing to use your kitchen table, or the laptop on the sofa, then you need to find ways to adapt. I know a lot of people struggling to switch off for the day. Their days and evenings are blending into one single blur of work.Some people are also telling me their employers are asking them to be available on weekends, which is madness. The weekend is yours and that should always be the case.
From where you are, could you give us a helicopter view of the changes in the world of tech startups arising out of the Covid-19 situation? Is this something that startups are more resilient to because of how they master technology and the fact they are smaller, agile businesses, or are they affected in the same way all businesses are?
Tech startups should be best placed to deal with this type of scenario. Generally people are more used to working remotely and tend to have more tech literacy – it’s easier to use tools such as Zoom. In terms of business impact, however, it has to do with what you do as a company. I wrote a piece recently about how travel tech startups and scaleups are being affected, who are feeling a bigger impact than say startups focusing on the gig economy of food delivery.
“For now, coronavirus is holding the world of travel to ransom”
I think there will be a longer-term impact in terms of the amount of capital available for startups All my conversation with VCs, and this is probably echoed with what you can see in the press at the moment, they are generally speaking trying to focus more on their existing portfolio companies as opposed to looking for new opportunities. If you can’t meet people in person, that will have an impact on whether you will invest in a founder or not. I think a trend we’re likely to see is more follow-on funding as VCs reinvest in companies that they already have a stake in.
I think the European tech ecosystem is much more mature than it was 10 or even 5 years ago. I’d like to think we’re not as reliant on US capital as we once were, which is a good thing. The impact of all this in the US is being felt quite drastically and that will in its turn have an impact on US investors.
There’s a lot of talk of winners and losers coming out of this situation. How can those that are most severely impacted by Covid-19 communicate with the media in a positive way?
I think having the communications channels open is really powerful. Even if your story at the moment is not the one you want to shout about because it’s not necessarily about success, I think being open about the challenges that you come across as a business and sharing knowledge about how you’re solving them, and how others can do the same can go a long way. That is really powerful and something that would work well with Growth Quarters, as it’s ultimately the kind of insight we’ve always wanted.
Anyone watching this webinar knows that it’s not just fun and games, growing a business is blood, sweat and tears. People often think speaking to the media is only about relaying a positive message and that’s not necessarily the truth.Ultimately, we’re not there to promote businesses’ stories. So being candid, honest and transparent will get you very far now, but also in the future.
We’ve been in this Covid situation for a couple months now, more or less. Are all stories getting through to you Covid-related?
We’ve seen a mix of both. The issue with people jumping on the Covid bandwagon is they tend to shoehorn something on a press release or a story. That’s something I would encourage everyone to stay away from. If someone had to completely pivot because of coronavirus, and states the reason why, what was done about it and what they are looking to do – that’s interesting. You telling me you sent your workforce home because of coronavirus – everyone’s doing that, that is not interesting.It’s probably quite hard for people at the moment, we are trying to pay equal attention to coronavirus and non-coronavirus stories, perhaps a lot of the positive stories are getting lost in all the noise. I wouldn’t say that now is the time to shout about every single business milestone.
Thought leadership pieces are really interesting to us, a lot of that content does well with our audience, particularly people who talk about challenges and give advice. We’ve had content from how to sleep better and how to deal with that as a founder all the way through to looking after your work force and making sure you are a transparent leader and a good communicator. But we’ve also had people that have opened up and told us how they are dealing with coronavirus from a marketing perspective. There is a real hunger for that kind of content. Unfortunately, coronavirus is the situation that we’re in.
Also, a lot of people are sitting on positive news and not wanting to shout out about them. They feel now is not the time to share those, they don’t want to seem tone-deaf. I had written an article a few weeks ago and shared the link with the company so they could share it on social media, but they chose not to. It was too positive.
Are we lacking some positive news?
I think so. On a personal level, I was fine at the beginning. But hearing about people being furloughed or losing their jobs, businesses running out of money, it is hard to keep a positive mind. Some are comparing this to 2007, 2008 and pointing out how a lot of amazing Fintechs came out of the back of the crisis, but I think this might be more severe than what happened 12 years ago.
Moving over to your day-to-day. On average, how many emails do you get every day?
On a bad day, 100 emails. I used to be disciplined in terms of getting back to everybody. Now I just can’t. The other day I was trying to make an effort to go through everything in my inbox but it’s just impossible. I apologise to anyone here if I haven’t gotten back to your email, but, it’s just crazy.
People don’t realise we have to deal with inboxes while at the same time dealing with internal communications. You get the full picture if you look at the amount of time that I spend on Slack pitching stories to my editor and discussing angles, and on top of that having to go through emails where perhaps 80% are irrelevant to me, or which have been sent as part of a mail-merge.
Is it true that journalists have naughty and nice lists, and that repeat offenders are blocked? If that’s the case, how can people get on your nice list?
I can’t speak for everybody else but I do recognise certain names. I don’t necessarily block them, but I’m less likely to read them. I associate those names with stuff that’s irrelevant. Similarly, I also recognise the names of people that will send me useful stuff. I don’t have any kind of filters set up for that, I do the filtering in my head.In terms of avoiding getting ignored, it comes down to the basics. Researching the publication, the individual writer, having a look at the content and seeing what and how we’re covering.
Then, the first thing journalists see is the subject line, so that’s what’s going to need to be the most relevant as it will make me want to click, or not. And then it’s about the way the email is set up. Try to avoid attachments as much as you can. If there’s a press release, I’d rather it be copied and pasted into the email, as opposed to as an attachment. And if you do send an attachment, please don’t send PDFs as they are hard to copy and paste from.
Make sure any asset a journalist would need, like images, is there. Besides that, it’s important that your website is clear and concise, and states what you do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a story I think is interesting, but I go to the company’s website and it’s impossible to understand what the company is trying to do. Broken hyperlinks, Twitter accounts that have not been used in years, those kinds of things also make me question what’s going on with the company.
Are press pages and press kits useful?
Yes, definitely. It’s useful to have an information hub for the media with the right layout. But also clear contact details. Often it’s very hard for us, when we are the ones getting in touch, to do so with the right person as quickly as we need that to happen. Timing is key for us.
A problem is sometimes when companies use the press page just to highlight other coverage, which is not really helpful.
There are a lot of PRs and founders with good stories that sometimes get ignored. What can they do to get your attention?
That’s true. There are good stories out there that don’t always get covered. It might be that on a certain day we are focusing on something. There are so many factors that can impact this. I think it’s OK to chase a journalist. But if you’ve followed up twice or more times and get no response, then probably it’s a no.There’s different ways of getting people’s attention. If you really think your story is right for me, and you want my attention, DM me on Twitter and tell me “hey there’s something in your inbox about X and I think it would be interesting for you because of X, and I think it would fit in really well with founder series X, and this is why”.
It’s getting more difficult now. Back in the day when I started, people used to actually ring up. I hated that so much, I’d try to be nice on the phone, and then I’d hung up and be like “aargh”. But it’s very distracting.My biggest piece of advice for both founders and PRs is to try and build up a personal relationship with the journalist. You can do that in so many different ways. That could be by engaging in our conversations. We journalists tweet our stream of consciousness all the time. You don’t have to agree with what we say or what we think but engaging with what we’re saying in the right way can be really powerful.
Twitter is really important to journalists. But what if a company doesn’t have a Twitter or social media presence?
In those scenarios you need to do reverse fact-checking and looking at the people that are behind the company. Looking into the founder, what kind of track record they have, where they worked previously. There’s nothing wrong with having to do that, and it’s something that we journalists should be doing all the time. Is it more leg work? For sure. Is it worth it? Half the time it is. Don’t forget that journalists can find something bad as well, and may end up writing about that.
That’s the thing, it’s quite ad-hoc. That’s the thing about PR. There’s no specific magic formula for this. And it takes time to know what to do to maximise chances.I do think that if people have the budget to hire PR professionals they should. Usually PR professionals know what to pitch and what to avoid. The worst pitches I’ve had in my career have been from people trying to do it themselves and just firing off emails. When you do your own PR there’s also the danger of being too close to the product. You might assume a lot of things and also struggle with getting turned down because the pitch is more emotional, it’s their babies.
Would you accept a pitch initiated via Twitter?
I prefer email. But I think it’s absolutely fine to start that conversation on Twitter as long as the pitch is relevant and you can see a fit for it, I think that’s absolutely fine.I think the danger that we’re seeing is people sending general stuff that might be relevant for The Next Web as a publication, but not for Growth Quarters.
When we turn it down, they might come back asking which one of our colleagues could be interested. Unfortunately that’s something us journalists don’t have time to look into, and in fact shows us you haven’t really done the right research into why it would be relevant or not. It might sound really harsh, but it’s the reality and at that point in the conversation I would have probably moved on to something else.
What is your take on PR MarTech tools and the likes of Muck Rack, Agility PR?
I can’t really say I use them a lot. Sometimes using the hashtag #journorequests you also get a lot of inbound messages from various solution providers to spread the request. It can be useful, but I’d much rather speak to the individual directly. I know others have found it useful. I think it also depends on the publication as well.
When I was doing lifestyle journalism, you would completely rely on those kinds of products to ask for inbound information that would be difficult to get. In the case of tech startups and scaleups I don’t see a lot of use for it.
How have PRs been behaving recently given the situation of Covid-19? And how is it looking for the media sector? Print has been in decline for a while, and now this is more noticeable than ever.
We’re definitely getting more emails. People are showing to be creative in terms of the angles they are pitching and the stories that are coming across. I don’t think they are misbehaving, I do understand PRs are hired by companies to do a job, I think if anything it’s a very challenging job to have at the moment.In terms of the media – there’s a real danger of fatigue. I’m in online journalism, and while Covid-19 is part of the wider business conversation I’m lucky to be able to dip in and out. I’m also in a WhatsApp group with 70 or 80 other journalists, many of them work with big media corporations and a lot of them are really struggling. People forget that before something is broadcasted, journalists might need to see a lot of distressing images themselves and that takes a toll already. But when you go home and then everyone else wants to speak about coronavirus as well, that takes an even bigger toll and can really affect mental health.
A lot of people I know are struggling with anxiety, job uncertainty. Journalists in the UK are also classified as key workers so there’s also the anxiety of having to potentially expose yourself over a job you wouldn’t have even battered an eyelid for a few months ago. Not everybody is lucky enough to be able to work remotely. I think we’re still in the early days and that this will have a bigger effect as time progresses.
What’s next in this situation? A lot of emphasis was placed on mental health, communication, with Zoom as a clear focus. What are the next topics we’ll be having conversations about?
I think a lot of things will change in terms of the way that we work. I have a personal interest in HealthTech and Fintech, and how AI is changing the way we do things, and I think that is going to remain. But I’m very interested in how people are dealing with the current challenges. For example, a report came out based on PitchBook data that said a lot of VCs are going to shift their focus to online collaboration tools. What’s going to be interesting is that those sectors already have a number of established players, so I’m not entirely sure how much room there is for new players to break into that industry at the moment. If you do so I imagine you will need a different proposition to what those key players already have.
“there are also opportunities for startups that can facilitate remote collaboration and centralize essential business functions online”
From a Growth Quarters perspective, my interest in stories isn’t going to change, we’re still passionate about giving people actual actionable advice in terms of growing their company. I think there’s a lot of advice-driven content out there but I don’t think people are being honest and transparent enough about the actual challenges they are facing.
Also failure! I know it was very trendy to speak about failure in the US a few years ago, and I think there’s something really powerful about that. In an industry such as tech where we talk about serial entrepreneurs a lot, sometimes people are doing well with their business but don’t realise that it’s their sixth business perhaps, and that before they got to where they are today they had to fail and pick themselves up four or five different times.For us it’s, firstly, actionable advice, secondly, also the human element. I think that the people behind the business always tend to be far more interesting than the business themselves. How you interact with others in the industry and the community is also very, very important.
We’ve got attendees today from all over Europe, including smaller countries. If you’re not in a place like the UK, Germany or France where unicorns are more likely to emerge, or if you are a smaller startup, what does it take to make it big in the foreign media? Does that harm their chances of obtaining coverage?
If the company is doing something that is really interesting and if there is a real case for coverage, being able to come to a journalist and giving them that scoop is incredibly powerful. There’s a lot of untold stories in European tech, and that’s something that we want to cover in Growth Quarters more and more.I’m originally Spanish and, bias aside, I do know there’s a lot of really cool startups in Spain. But they don’t necessarily get written about much. The European press has historically focused on the UK, Germany, France. I know the Baltics are getting a lot more attention at the moment, deservedly so. I think it’s up to the individual journalists and publication to look further afield. Personally, I think that is happening more and more.
Also, the conversation has traditionally been dominated by fundraising. When I first started covering tech a lot of the companies that would get coverage would be those that got funding. In the eyes of a journalist, a VC investing, or an angel, was a way to legitimise the business in itself. I think that needs to change. There are a lot of businesses that don’t need to fundraise, they’re bootstrapped or profitable from day one, but they might still be interesting and something the media should focus on a lot more.
Q&A from the audience
How long until journalists reach Covid-fatigue? When is the right time to focus on stories focusing on the future rather than the current situation, such as best tactics to combat the impending recession, supporting businesses and boosting employment?
I think people are starting to get Covid fatigue, but I’m not sure we are all there yet, and that’s due to a lot of us not knowing the full implication of the pandemic, especially in the short to mid-term.I would hold off on those for a bit. If things improve in the summer, that could be a real turning point. To understand exactly the mood, it’s one of those things we need to wait for and feel the mood in the room when the time comes.What topics and headlines do you see being picked up as we move into the recovery stage?
Different types of working, not only working from home, but in general the future of working and the future of the office. I know there’s a lot of content already, but that will continue to be an interesting conversation.Also the automation of jobs, that’s going to pick up as well. That doesn’t necessarily mean people will lose their jobs to machines. I think we’re going to be working alongside them a lot more though.
Also of interest is the change in how businesses are run, higher transparency and interaction with employees and how that shifts online. People will realise your employees don’t need to be in the same city or country to do their job.And finally, life and work balance, the lifestyle content. I can see that being huge in the coming months, especially while we’re all stuck at home.
How long should the pitch be?
You should be able to convey what the business is doing in a few sentences. It should focus on the who, what, when, where and why. You need to give enough information to let the journalist bite and contact you later and get that conversation going.
I’ve seen horrendous emails where the body of the text looks longer than an A4 page and is badly formatted. I wouldn’t care even if it’s about Microsoft, I won’t be reading that. That’s the way it is with journalists. I would say short, sweet and really concise.I would also avoid using ‘the Uber of’ or ‘the Netflix of’. You shouldn’t use that language at all. Ultimately the business case should speak for itself. It seems lazy to use those names as adjectives in my opinion. People might want to stand out in their email subject lines with it. But, as a journalist if you see that all the time in your inbox, it’s not original and doesn’t tell me anything about your business really.Uber is Uber, and we don’t need more Ubers in the world. It’s best if you are able to explain what you’re doing in your own words.
Should links to press kits and further information be added to email pitches, or is that something to think about if the journalist wants to continue the conversation?
I think that’s fine as long as the most important information is at the top. In journalism we always use the inverted pyramid model, meaning everything that what’s most important should be at the top.Anything that can avoid making the journalist’s life harder is something that I’m interested in.
What I’m not interested in is people sending me the links of coverage they got in other publications. Sometimes people will wonder why a story is turned down if they were previously covered by another publication. That’s good for them that they were, but that won’t affect my decision on whether I’m going to cover it or not.
If we have a great story to share with the world, should we shout out about it, or should we first fix our website?
I would say that everything that represents you online should be sorted before you talk to a journalist. It really does set you apart from others pitching stories. It doesn’t need to be super-fancy or perfect, but you should at least have the information that says what you do and who’s behind the business.That’s something that I’m going to immediately want to know. Who’s the CEO, who’s the co-founder, who are the founders? Management should be on there. I want to be able to know who they are.
If you could fix one thing about PR, what would it be?
I actually don’t agree with journalists giving PRs slack. I think it’s important to realise it should be a mutually beneficial relationship. Aside from the fact that I get irrelevant pitches I don’t think there is anything.
Definitely I would ask to get my name right and my gender right. I have received emails addressed to me as “Mr Yussi”, “Mr Yassi” and all sorts of weird things.It’s a tough job on either side of the email. You’re looking to pitch a story, we’re looking for stuff to cover. I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s something that needs to be fixed. I think that if everyone was able to send relevant stuff that would make everything a whole load easier and take all the aggro away from journalists that is sometimes felt
Do journalists only cover new things created, or also a new approach or way of doing things?
There definitely needs to be something new. Something that is also really helpful is explaining that new thing or approach in the context of your competitors, because it helps me set you apart in the industry, so that’s really useful.
What’s the best way to reach you and stay in touch with you?
Best way to follow my work is by going to Growth Quarters. You can also find me on @yessibelloperez on Twitter. You can also reach me via email on yessi@thenextweb.com. But before you do, make sure that you read the interview!
Have you seen the rest of our blog yet? Here is more from our Journalist’s Insights series:
Breaking the Journalism Mould with Dan Taylor from tech.eu
Busting Journalism Myths with Lindsay Dodgson from Business Insider
Diving into fintech journalism with Doug Mackenzie from Fintech Finance
Journalist’s Insights: From PR to Media With Remco Janssen of Silicon Canals
