Using AI in media pitches

How to use ChatGPT & co to your advantage - and what to avoid

Should you be using AI to help you write media pitches? Could it help streamline your idea and write in the style of a publication? Or will it make your email so generic an editor will ignore it?

I was previously firmly in the anti-AI camp, because it makes stuff up - a massive no-no for journalists - and it plagiarises the hard work and investment of real news organisations.

But I’ve now realised that: a) we can’t escape it so we’re going to have to learn to live with it, and b) it can be pretty useful for some pitching tasks.

So this week’s Get Featured is a guide on how to adjust your approach to pitching to incorporate AI - in all its positive and negative forms.

I asked the Substack AI image generator to create: “An AI robot taking over a newspaper office” - what a vision of the future…

One thing that has become clear is that the rise of AI has rapidly eroded trust: the public’s trust in whether what they read and watch is actually true, and journalists’ ability to trust the information provided to us, even from seemingly reputable sources.

As a journalist, I’m receiving more AI-generated quotes when I put out a #journorequest for comments - and some of these are from AI-generated people.

As a result, things are shifting in terms of what journalists and editors are looking for from media pitches.

Here are my thoughts on how you can adapt to - and capitalise on - these changes to maximise your press coverage: