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To pitch Vanity Fair, you must first build a relationship
How to begin a discussion with one of the magazine’s contributing editors, Michael Wolff
Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Wolff won’t take your calls or read your e-mails—if you’re pitching him. So don’t pitch him. Get to know him. Wolff is more likely to listen to people he knows.
“There’s a big difference between a blind pitch and someone I have a relationship with,” he told Ragan.com. The good news is Wolff has relationships with a number of people in the PR and communications field “who are talking to [him] all the time.”
“Some of them are among my close friends,” he said.
As contributing editor at Vanity Fair, Wolff writes a monthly column that usually covers broad topics such as media, politics, and business, and he maintains a regular blog for the magazine’s Web site. (The blog, “Off the Grid,” also appears on the Web site Newser.com, which Wolff founded.) He also passes story ideas on to other editors at Vanity Fair—a publication with a paid circulation of more than one million people each month. Not bad coverage.
But will he accept pitches from his friends in the PR business?
Though you may never become close friends with Wolff, you can increase your odds of engaging with him—and possibly seeing your idea in print—by getting to know him.
Here are some suggestions for getting your e-foot in the door.
Hungry like the Wolff? Back off, killer
If your client is hot for immediate coverage in Vanity Fair, don’t bother reaching out to Wolff. Sharing an idea with him takes time. “It’s a matter of someone saying to me, ‘What are you thinking about?’ Or saying, ‘You should think about this,’ and that may percolate with me over a number of months.”
So start slowly by sending him a note. His e-mail address is michael@newser.com.
“It’s possible that someone could e-mail me and say this is something interesting, but that would have to be more in the context of building a relationship,” Wolff explained.
Don’t simply fire off an e-mail or drop him in your contacts list. All pitches wind up in the trash bin, he said—unless they don’t.
“Some [e-mails] will catch my eye for their egregiousness,” he said. “People who have clearly never read what I’ve written, and if they had, they’d know that the last thing they’d want is for me to write about them. Occasionally, I tell them that.”
And that e-mail shouldn’t smack of salesmanship. Wolff has little patience for people who do little else but represent a client.
“It seems incredibly inefficient to me to have to talk to somebody and then think, ‘OK, why are they telling me this?’ Then I have to unravel it,” he explained.
Creating trust is essential. “Each of us builds his or her own social media network, as in, I will look at what this person tells me to look at because I know this person and this person knows what I need to see.”
What does Wolff want to see? Only one way to find out: Get to know him, and then ask. If it pays off, he might put your company or client in front of the millions of eyes that Vanity Fair reaches each month.
| More on Wolff: A startup business and one nasty reputation |
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By building a relationship with Michael Wolff, you’re reaching out to one of the more controversial members of the media. In addition to his Vanity Fair duties, Wolff also started the Web site, Newser.com, which aggregates news stories from around the Web and condenses them into 100- to 200-word briefs. With Newser, Wolff has said he’s trying to put newspapers out of business. Perhaps it’s this zeal for destroying newspapers—or Wolff’s penchant for criticizing fellow journalists—that has earned him scorn among his peers. “Gifted with a hyperactive and malicious mind, Wolff's forte is not reporting and analysis,” Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote May 5. “It’s the oh-aren’t-I-naughty clever slur, a talent worth admiring if not applauding, especially when you’re the target.” New York Times media columnist David Carr—the target of several Wolff blog posts—has taken a verbal swipe or two at him. And the New York Post’s Page Six and Manhattan blog Cityfile have spewed embarrassing details of his personal life across its pages. Of course, Wolff has also earned acclaim having won the National Magazine Award twice. Before joining Vanity Fair, Wolff was New York magazine’s media critic. He’s also the author of three books. His most recent, The Man Who Owns the News, is an exposé on Rupert Murdoch. |
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