Andrew Couts is a Senior Editor of Security and investigations at WIRED.
In this episode, Andrew dishes on the importance of timely, well-sourced expert quotes, the perils of poorly targeted pitches, and why direct, short emails are the secret to grabbing his attention.
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[00:10:00] BB: Yep, yep. Okay, so let's talk about those pitches that you do want to respond to. What is standing out to you in the subject line that gets your attention?
[00:10:09] AC: That is a good question. For the security desk, we are looking for stories that are new, something that is unique in some way something we've not seen before. And when we have a team that's as experienced as our security desk is, that's a pretty high bar. There's very few things that are really new, relevant to our readers. Does it have impact on the people who are going to be reading this in a good way or a bad way? Most of the time, because of the subject matter that my desk deals with. It's pretty heavy. It's pretty serious. It's not usually good, light, fun things.
[00:11:13] BB: No, no, no.
[00:11:14] AC: But we do like. We like the fun stuff anytime we can find it, anytime there's something that's really cool or unique. This especially applies to research. And sometimes if there are people out there representing, you know, universities, a lot of times, if somebody's done something really cool, built a cool new technology that's related to cybersecurity or surveillance or anything of that nature, you know, we're all ears to hear that. We want to have the fun stuff in the mix as much as possible. So, you know, if it's. If it's really unique, if it does seem like it's impactful, we're going to be more responsive to those stories or to those pitches. That's about it, though.
And I don't know that there's one word in the subject line that's going to really catch my attention just because I get so many of them. I don't even know. And it's got to have. It's got to be related maybe to something that's already on my mind. So it's really luck of the draw.
[00:12:15] BB: Ooh, okay. Yeah. That is. So much of pitching that we try to emphasize is, like, timing is a lot of the grace of getting that response. Oh, my gosh. You just happen to be on Tuesday filing a story about that. You need one last source. Like the next week, I pitch you... No, that's, you know, it doesn't matter. It's not there.
Okay. Andrew, for editors, this is a little bit of an extra fold in because you have people who could write the pieces that you're kind of traffic-controlling towards. So, how much of you is forwarding what you believe is a good source or anything? Or are you just hitting that nuke button all the time? I don't know.
[00:12:51] AC: Yeah, I'd say I usually do it pretty regularly, a couple of times a week. It's not always for the security section. Most of the time, those get passed on to our business desk or our gear desk and are pitches that are just not applicable to my coverage area or my desk's coverage area. Generally, there are things that maybe I just don't know whether somebody on a different desk would want to cover this, or I don't have the subject matter expertise to know if this is interesting to someone. Other times there are things where it will just, I'll happen to open the email or happen to catch my attention because of a well written subject line maybe and will think, okay, this is actually interesting and I'll forward along to my team and very often we'll follow up on those and. But that's, you know, that's pretty rare. Maybe a couple times a month.
[00:13:55] BB: Okay, so rare. Okay, good. Is there anything that helps your life be better, Andrew, via a publicist, like, what can we do to help you?
[00:14:08] AC: Great question.
[00:14:10] BB: That's what we're here for.
[00:14:12] AC: You know, I am more of an investigative editor than I am anything else. And so I will say that not always, but very often that puts me in a position of contention with the publicist who I'm working with. We're generally not reaching out with good news, whether it's a company has been breached or something bad has happened. And so, you know, I would say one thing I just want to emphasize is that we really do want to get the company's side of the story. We want to understand it. We want to get everything right that is paramount for every story we're doing, no matter the severity or no matter the nature of the story. You know, and getting that insider perspective is really essential. You know, 100% of the time we don't know the reality on the ground better than somebody who is on the ground.
Where it gets, you know, touchy is that very often you don't want to. People don't want to give journalists that information or there's. They want to control how it's being, you know, presented and which I totally understand, but really, like, we're not ever doing a gotcha. We're never trying to, you know, twist things to make it a better story. We want to know what the reality is and we'll decide to publish based on what the reality is that based on our reporting. And so, you know, we're, we're really there to tell you, let you guys know what we know. Can you give us more perspective? Can you give us some insights here? Tell us what we got wrong. That's what we want to know.
And so the more we can have a relationship where we're interacting that way on the basis like our job is to report the news and to tell the truth. The more you can get us closer to the truth, the better. That said, I've worked in this business long enough and have had enough bad faith interactions with publicists that, you know, my guard is up as well. And so we're not gonna just take something as the truth because someone has said it. We're gonna do additional reporting and we're gonna make sure that we're getting there for our readers. That's who we're there to serve. It's not there to serve anybody else. So.
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