Curtis Black (from left), Natalie Moore, and Mark Brown shared thoughts on the best way to reach them with story ideas at CMW today.

Today we finished up the fifth and final session of this year’s Professional Media Relations workshop by having the participants… meet with journalists to pitch their stories!

I’m really leaving out all the best stories — partly to protect the guilty — but thought others might care to hear pitching tips from the perspective of the great panel that came to work with our group: Curtis Black of CMW Newstips, Mark Brown of Chicago SunTimes, James Janega of Chicago Tribune, Natalie Moore of Chicago Public Radio, and Dawn Reiss, freelancer:
James Janega
He’ll take a tip from any method (twitter, facebook, phone, email, “a passing comment”) on any topic, but pretty quick move to the phone to determine if there’s something cover-able there. He also noted the Tribune has a new Chicagoland extra—it’s a preprinted section that appears Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday-and this is a great opportunity to pitch issue and trend stories at a time when the newshole, the space available for stories, is getting smaller.

Mark Brown
With Roland Burris, Rod Blagojevich and more crazy shenanigans than you can shake a stick at in Illinois, writing his Chicago Sun-Times column is “a fish in a barrel situation right now: It’s too easy!” But he said that given the running around he has to do to chase the big story, there’s an opportunity to provide some more offbeat stuff for when he gets back to a less insane situation. In general, he says, “I am always looking for neighborhood stories. Get me out of the office, find a story about people.” Two more things. First, keep it tight: “I’m a done in a day kind of guy. Because of my demands for output I can’t do a long-range story very often.” Second, keep in mind that the Sun-Times has a shrinking newshole, which makes it that much harder to get in the paper—don’t be discouraged, but be realistic.

Natalie Moore, Chicago Public Radio
Her geographic beat is the South Side (her studio is at 69th and Halsted). On that beat, she has wide latitude over what she covers. Natalie’s interested in changing demographics, housing, economic development changing neighborhood type stories. In general, she really enjoys getting community voices in the news. “I’ve found that people don’t know when they are doing something that’s newsy,” she said. She cited a story about Global Girls, which advocates for sex education in the schools; she was able to do a story about them pegged to Sarah Palin announcing her daughter’s pregnancy.

Dawn Reiss
Before going freelance, Dawn worked at Dallas Morning News and St. Petersburg Times. “I consider myself a mobile journalist,” she said; she writes for 25 outlets locally and nationally. “Anything you pitch me, I’ll consider. I get 50-150 pitches a day.” One of her specialties is boiling complicated stuff down to conversational and clear language. She noted the advantages of freelancers over staff writers: for example, they can pitch more markets than staffers. Also, she said she’s a “mobile journalist: “I use a flip camera, I use audio, even though I come from a print background everyone wants that now.”

Curtis Black
The Workshop grew out of Newstips, Curtis said. “When I started 10 years ago we would have 2 or 3 sheets with story ideas that we mailed out monthly; now it goes on the Web site as a blog and pushes by email. We put [your release] through a journalistic filter but leaving some gaps so we leave room for someone to make the idea their own.” As he noted, the Workshop does not necessarily track who uses this or how stuff gets picked up; but we do know folks are looking at, and to an extent it’s become a news source in its own right.