Among other points that I emphasized:

For many publicists, sending an e-mail often marks the extent of their outreach.

But based on my years as a reporter as well as in the PR realm, e-mails take on a markedly different life when they are accompanied by a verbal heads-up and some professional rapport. What guides my approach is how I always preferred to be treated as a journalist.

If someone was pitching a story to me for the first time, I was happy to get a call first so that the e-mail didn’t arrive out of the blue. (Later, once a publicist and I had built some trust and mutual respect, I welcomed e-mails any time, and calls in advance weren’t so necessary.)

Even though I was open to introductory phone calls, my patience had its limit. I had neither the time nor the interest to have my ear talked off when my real interest was in seeing, by e-mail, how much groundwork the publicist had done for me.

In my years on a newspaper staff, I had my beat or beats to tend to. As a freelance journalist, I was paid for completed articles, not the passage of time. So the swifter, more complete and more concrete a pitch, the more likely I would hop on a story.

When we give the media what they need, they will give us what we want. And who knows? They might even return more of our e-mails.

And with Super Bowl 46 only a few days away, it’s a natural, timely hook, if you can think of one with a logical tie-in to your organization, product or service.

For one popular club in Burr Ridge, that principle translated into a news release riding the big game’s coattails. The Inside Edge PR release carried the headline, “Five Seasons Family Sports Club Issues Five-Point Plan for Super Bowl Fan Fitness.”

There is no limit to the number of story ideas you can link to the calendar, but some other potential timely tie-ins coming up this month: Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, Presidents Day and, for the first time since 2008, Leap Day.

That was in the 1980s, when a story I wrote in the Marshfield Mariner took days to appear locally and wouldn’t show up globally unless someone boarded a flight at Logan International Airport and hauled a copy of the paper to another country.

Now, an inaccurate (or at least premature) report of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s death goes from a student website (Onward State) to CBSSports.com in the blink of an eye. And from CBSSports, of course, it goes viral….then backfires, due to the national site’s lack of independent corroboration.

It’s about 11 p.m. on Jan. 21 and Onward State has issued an apology by Devon Edwards, who announced his resignation as managing editor at the same time.

CBSSports.com, by contrast, hasn’t issued an apology–though it should, especially if all it did was re-hash Onward State’s erroneous report without any independent verification.

While Onward State’s mistake might be something you would  expect from young reporters and editors, how can a major outlet get so lax that it is drawn into such a sophomoric slip-up?

The gaffe will surely be dissected in the days to come, but I’ll bet that near the heart of the problem is one or more individuals’ desire to put being first ahead of being sure.

For example, a feature profile on a Realtor should help that professional and his or her firm sell homes. A recent case in point: this Inside Edge PR piece on Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Gloor Realty’s Nancy Leavy.

And the development of quality content—often in the form of writing—is a great gateway for one of my favorite PR phenomena: the re-purposed piece.

A month ago, I identified one such opportunity with the Kenosha Area Business Alliance, an IEPR client. KABA President Todd Battle had written an excellent piece for the organization’s newsletter.

It focused on a group of business leaders who comprise KABA’s CEO Roundtable—and how, collectively, they possessed admirable qualities unlike the “fat cat CEO” depiction that so often dominates public perception.

Todd wrote the piece nearly two years ago, shortly after the Roundtable was formed. The timing didn’t deter me.

If anything, amid the Occupy Wall Street movement and related labor/class unrest across the country, Todd’s message is more relevant than ever.

And on Thursday, a significantly larger audience than those who follow KABA got that message: the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published the column as an op-ed piece, “Not every CEO fits fat cat portrayal.”

The success of this re-purposing approach, of course, rises and falls with the quality of the original content. Take the time and expend the effort to get it done well the first time, and you’ll be setting the stage for an excellent return on that investment days, weeks, months or even years later.

My 90-minute workshop, which demystifies how to communicate with the media and empowers organizations to secure coverage for their causes, returns with three sessions over the next three months.

The first one is Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 1111 South Blvd. in Oak Park (directly south of the CTA’s Harlem/Lake stop, on the far western edge of the Green Line).

As with prior PR Secrets workshops, the program will be tailored to address the specific needs of those in attendance. Capacity is capped at 12 people, and each participant receives an 11-page workbook that provides a blueprint for putting the secrets into action.

PR Secrets is back, with monthly sessions between February and April.

Among PR Secrets’ alumni: small-business owners,entrepreneurs, attorneys, finance professionals, insurance agents, and creative professionals.

Attached is a flier that you can click on for more detail, including the $39 fee.

You can also see a brief excerpt from my first PR Secrets session, held just up the street at The Carleton Hotel in Oak Park. Got questions? Email Matt@InsideEdgePR.com or call 708-860-1380.

It takes quite a bit to coax out the cranky side of me.

Some sample scenarios: seemingly bright souls who fail to see the humorous relevance of “irregardless” in certain contexts; running across mention of the Red Sox collapse in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series; and getting yet another LinkedIn invitation from someone I’ve never met.

Of that irksome threesome, the last happens with alarming frequency. So from time to time I feel it my social-media duty to rail against it in the spirit of promoting common sense, basic 21st century etiqutte and sound interpersonal practices.

If you are guilty of inviting people to link-in with you–and you have never met (either in person or in cyberspace), then stop!

With every impersonal, mud-on-the-wall LinkedIn invitation, you are communicating laziness, sloppiness and presumptuousness. Those are the hardly the traits to get you off on the best footing.

If you’ve not met someone and you think you’d be a good LinkedIn candidate, then go ahead, tell them so–but be sure to provide context or indication of how such a connection would be mutually beneficial.

I have written at length about LinkedIn, mostly via posts here on Tips From the Inside Edge, and the theme I keep returning to: treat people like individuals, not some additional notch in your Cyber-Rolodex belt.

Another tip I’d offer: make the effort to provide meaningful recommendations of people with whom you are LinkedIn—add value, so that it’s not about a quantity of connections, but a high quality of any given connection.

I’ve made more than 60 recommendations and it not only benefits those I recommend, but also showcases my ability to string a few cogent thoughts together (on good days)–a rather relevant “show, don’t tell” element when one is in the public relations and communications industry.

Maybe you were dashing to catch a plane or were trying to outrun a pursuer—on a playing field or, God forbid, in a more sinister context.

Whatever the scenario, it’s fairly safe to say that it was an exception to the rule of a more casual pace in your day-to-day life. Rarely does life require such bursts of urgent, frenetic energy.

So should it be in delivering news releases to the media: only in exceedingly extreme cases should you lead with such a tone—when you absolutely cannot spare a few moments before getting the most vital facts across.

Almost always, the publicist is better off leaving the breathlessness to reporters. Otherwise, you risk undermining your credibility with a jaded reporter who will dismiss your information as overblown hype.

Because I am still on many lists for media members, a recent example is from a news release that arrived in my in-box.

The first paragraph reads:

Dr. Terry Beardsley, founder and principal clinical researcher behind LTCI, the first USDA-approved treatment for Feline Leukemia Virus (FeLV) and Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) announced the launch of a new website and a simplified process for veterinarians to order Lymphocyte T-Cell Immunomodulator
(LTCI) to treat their patients.

While there is ample material here that can be crafted into something at least debatably newsworthy—and that Dr. Beardsley is a leader in his field—cramming nearly 50 words,  sprinkled with multi-syllabic doozies and alphabet soup terms, from the get-go is a great way to invite insta-deletes.

Instead, a much more effective approach would be to illustrate this development through the impact on a single cat. Give it a name (“Fluffy” works fine) and give it a few paragraphs to play out the implications of this news, both for Fluffy and the family with whom he’s graciously agreed to share his home.

Then we can roll out Dr. B, his credentials and how he’s helping Fluffy and so many of his fellow felines. No matter how cute Fluffy may be, he can wait.

It’s an excellent commentary by someone with extensive experience connected to the now-controversial Second Mile charity founded by alleged pedophile Jerry Sandusky. The piece came to my attention today after Day, a fellow Medill alum, sent a pitch for another op-ed (focusing on fired Penn State football coach Joe Paterno) over the alumni list-serv.

Day’s inquiry prompted me to refer back to a most helpful resource for anyone seeking to pitch an opinion piece: The OpEd Project.

While The OpEd Project’s goal is to encourage more diverse voices, particularly women, to have their works published, the insights, resources and links on the site are a treasure trove for anyone seeking to disseminate their viewpoint on any variety of subjects.

In a blog post just over two weeks ago, I noted Inside Edge PR’s efforts on George’s behalf, as he was about to make his bid to break the record (50 minutes, 11 seconds) for an abdominal plank.

Two days shy of his 54th birthday, George didn’t just do that—he tore it to shreds. Nearly a half-hour beyond the mind-blowing mark, at the 1 hour, 20-minute, 5-second mark, George had stretched his body and mind to the max.

Within a few minutes  sweat raining from his still-quivering body, George did a couple of push-ups.

“Now he’s rubbing it in,” I chuckled to another observer.

Since then, media coverage has swelled from the mostly local variety (before and immediately after the event, such as this piece in the Daily Herald) to national and beyond, aided in no small part by my decision Monday morning to send word of George’s achievement to fellow Medill alumni.

I have rarely sent a PR pitch via that medium, but felt it was more than justified amid the list-serv’s regular stream of requests for web designers, apartment listings and other random miscellany.

The closest I’ve gotten to “holding” a Guinness World Record–standing next to the amazing George Hood, I cradle his plaque with the plank record certificate.

More coverage is coming, too, including a piece on a national site by another colleague who noticed my first blog post two weeks ago after I linked to it on Facebook.

Now that’s social-media in action.

Sure, “hyper-local,”  as a way of describing the trend in journalism toward coverage centered on ever-smaller geographic areas, has been overused in recent years. But I can’t help but think that the Chicago Tribune, some four years after launching TribLocal to up the media market’s ante in the suburbs, has designs to go hyper-hyper-local.

That’s a simple conclusion to reach on the heels of learning that the company has secured 334 domain names that consist of as many community, neighborhood or otherwise-geographically specific sites–all with “tribune” at the tail end of the name.

From “addisontribune.com” to “ziontribune.com,” you can learn more about it here at Fusible.com.

When I began covering Hinsdale in 1999, at the start of a six-year run as a freelance reporter for the Tribune–I quickly recognized that geography was sometimes a decisive factor in whether I would be able to secure an assignment.

So over time, to broaden my ability to feed extra mouths that came along in the Baron brood, I expanded my reporting domain to cover three communities. (Well, two communities–Oak Brook and Elmhurst–and one larger-than-life journalist’s shooting-fish-in-a-barrel dream for unearthing corruption and incompetence–that would be Cicero, even post-Betty Loren-Maltese.)

With its domain-name shopping spree, the Tribune is likely taking the same course, only on a macro level by leveraging its resources to provide for its hoped-for larger kingdom. Among other rivals, the company is facing a strong push by AOL-backed Patch.com throughout the Chicago area (a.k.a. “Chicagoland,” a term first coined by the Tribune in 1926).

Regardless of how this plays out, the simple act of securing those URLs reinforces one of my principal pieces of counsel to clients: don’t rely solely on swinging for the fences (major media market coverage).

Hitting home runs is great–and it only makes sense to go for them when you have the chance. But the bulk of your success will flow from getting very good at identifying multiple, smaller markets where you can tell your story over and over again in a way that is relevant to each sub-market.