This week the team from Today FM’s The Last Word are back to tell us about the importance of calling rather than emailing to pitch, being succinct in your press releases and how studio interviews work better than phone ones. If you haven’t already checked out our previous post from the team in which they talk about dealing with radio interviews and deciding topics, you can find it here.

If you hear something on radio that concerns your company or organisation, what’s the best way to approach the show for inclusion?

It depends on how that piece has made you feel, I suppose. The worst way is to call immediately after and shout down the line. I suppose a phone call is best – emails can be patchy especially if you are sending it during pressure points in our day. It is easy to miss. If it is a friendly call to note that you might be relevant to such a discussion then you might not get on straight away but you might get on next time. Treat the call as a pre-interview and pitch yourself well for inclusion.

If sending in a news release is there a format you prefer?

Try to keep attachments to a minimum – most releases are read for the headline and first line with attachments opened less regularly. As long as they are readable they should do ok – be succinct and to the point though.

Would your preference be for a phone interview or a studio interview and why?

For radio, studio is everything, the connection that gets made between guest and presenter is the first step to a really successful item. The guest is more able to engage in a conversation than over the phone and it sounds better. Most of our guests who make the effort to come in once, come in all the time – it is an enormous difference to doing a phone interview.

From our perspective phone interviews have to be done from time to time – but they don’t sound as good so might get less time.

What are Matt Cooper’s favourite/ least favourite topics to talk about?

Matt treats stories on their merits. Our listeners have diverse interests and we try to reflect that by doing unusual and new stuff. Matt is happy to go with his own feelings on certain stories but if a number of the team feel something is worth doing it makes the cut – we operate very much as a team in that regard trying to get as broad a base of stories as possible.