On Season 2, Episode 104 of Coffee with a Journalist we had the opportunity to speak with Anita Ramaswamy, a reporter at TechCrunch covering crypto and fintech startups, trends, and news. 

Anita has been reporting for TechCrunch since November of 2021 and prior to joining the team was a Finance Fellow at Insider.

If you’re considering pitching Anita refer to these 4 tips you can implement within your media outreach. You can also watch Anita’s videos loaded with information surrounding her pitch tips, relationship-building advice, and more on the OnePitch YouTube channel.

Pitches = startups & founders

At the beginning of the episode, Anita shares a few points about TechCrunch’s audience and the types of stories they focus on as a publication. When you’re pitching any journalists for this matter it’s important to pay close attention to, or research, the audience of the publication and how stories are positioned.

Here’s what Anita shared:

“​​TechCrunch is a tech news outlet, and we focus a lot on speaking to people who are building things, so founders, sometimes investors. We focus a lot on, I would say, early stage founders is our core audience. But, in general, anyone who's curious about tech, wants to build, and has that fascination.”

Keep subject lines clear & direct

On the topic of subject lines, Anita had some great examples of ones that catch her attention and actually compel her to open the email and read further. She says subject lines that are, “direct and clear as possible,” are most preferred.

“Sometimes, it's just as simple as saying something like ‘exclusive fintech launch’ or ‘fintech funding announcement.’ Or if you're announcing like a fun launch, like ‘exclusive‘ like ‘X million dollar crypto fund.’ Those are just some examples that I've definitely clicked on in the past.”

Anita also shared the importance of notating an exclusive in your subject line as well as urgency/timeliness. Beware though as, with most reporters, Anita needs lead time in order to publish the story since she’s busy working on others AND finishing her degree at NYU.

Pitch the "Chain Reaction" podcast

At the time of the recording, Anita was in the process of launching a podcast through TechCrunch called Chain Reaction. The hosts, her and her colleague Lucas Matney, talk all about crypto news and feature a guest speaker that they joint interview. The goal is to uncover trends in the space.

They’re actively looking for, “crypto experts, people doing interesting things in the crypto space, so not necessarily the most traditional experts always. It could be anyone doing anything interesting and maybe really like involved in the community on Twitter or Discord…”

Learn more about Chain Reaction here.

Exclusives > Embargoes

Most seasoned PR professionals understand why exclusives are desired more by journalists over embargoes. If you’re not sure why the idea is that an exclusive should go to one journalist and one journalist only meaning they can break the news before someone else does.

Anita mentioned she doesn’t necessarily prefer one vs the other, however, she did say this about exclusives:

“​​I will say that it's nice to be offered an exclusive because it's not so much about the competitive aspect of it for me, but it's more about it just shows that that company really cares, and they know that TechCrunch specifically would be a good fit for their story.”

She also mentioned that if an exclusive is relevant to her and fits her beat, “that sort of becomes my priority for the week…”

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There are numerous ways you can pitch and build a relationship with a reporter. As we outlined above, for Anita it’s all about crypto, founders, startups, and investors. Remember this next time you’re considering pitching her.

If you didn’t have a chance to listen to Anita’s episode, click here to listen and view notes from the episode, and check out her Relationship Building Tips video on YouTube.

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