Thursday, December 11, 2014

The Art of the Pitch or "You Had Me At Hello"

I've kind of been on a podcasting binge for a few weeks, learning about them and about radio.

I love radio, I think it's an outstanding medium for telling stories. I can't even begin to list what I love about it.

Have you been listening to "Serial"? A friend got me hooked on it-only one more episode to go. From the official Serial web site, I got to the main site for This American Life and was looking around.

From the main site, I got onto this absolutely fascinating audio recording about The Art of the Pitch ("You Had Me At Hello"). 

A lot of this stuff is common sense, and a lot of it reminds me of how I advise people to write their cover letters and tailor their CVs and their interview skills.

This has a lot of really good information about pitching story ideas, about clarity, and how to get your story out there and how stories for radio (and also for other media) peculate up to to story meetings.

It's very important to anticipate the question "why should I care".

If you have time, put it on in the background and have a really good listen, it has stuff in it for everyone-journalists, media personalities, regular people trying to pitch and idea, business people and just about storytelling in general.

I love it.

Lots of gems in here. Seriously-have a listen.