How to Pitch to the Media, with Ron Lieber | Ramit's Brain Trust

Hi, I'm Ron Lieber. I write the youe Money columnist for the New York Times. I'm currently on leave until the end of 2013 to write a book called the Opposite of Spoiled.

Thank you for being here.

Glad to be here.

So this is the mental mind shift that I had to go through in the last 10 years, which was I used to think of journalists or authors or people on TV or whoever it may be as. As they are at the top of the mountain, and there's no way I could reach them. And what I realized was they need ideas as much as anyone, in fact, more than most people. They just get overwhelmed with generally really bad pitches. And if you can actually build a relationship, you can send individual emails, you can add value for years and years before you ever pitch anything. That's the way to separate yourself.

Yeah. You know, because I do the same thing week in and week out, and the Times isn't the first time I did it. You know, I did it at the Wall Street Journal for a while, too. You know, I sort of settled into a system that works for me, and everybody has their own system, but, you know, eventually you do it enough, and the writing itself isn't really a problem. It's rare that I have anything approaching writer's block. And some of that is just, you know, the deadline governs everything. Right. You know, you can't leave a blank space in the newspaper. It's gotta be in on time. There's just, you know, there's no excuse. Right. I mean, it's just, you know, you've got to get it done one way or the other. So, you know, your mind gets trained to get it. Get it done, you know, one way or the other. I think, you know, maybe once we've had to kill something at the last minute because it. It completely blew up. You know, the best advice I still have today is, you know, the advice I've been giving out for years now, which is, you know, start a blog on the area that you are most intensely passionate about. And it ought to be something, you know, in a reasonably small niche, but in an area, hopefully, that a lot of people are interested in. And then it's much easier to promote that kind of stuff than it used to be, because instead of having to write to, you know, a thousand individual bloggers and email them a link to something that you think might be interesting, all these people are on Twitter. And, you know, if you follow them, if you retweet them, them, if you say something nice about something they wrote, that spoke to you. Eventually some of them are going to follow you, and eventually some of them are going to seize on the things that you wrote and then maybe you'll guest blog on their blog and then editors are going to read that eventually. And you kind of work your way up this ecosystem until you have a regular assignment from your target publication or a book deal or whatever. It's only a tiny percentage of people who get there. But this path is well established. It's been done many times now by people who were literally rank beginners to start with and have gone from kind of rank beginner to, you know, six figure book deal, you know, seven figure movies, movie rights. You know, the. The best example of this is still the woman who was working as a secretary who started a blog about cooking her way through Julia Child's the Art of French Cooking. And eventually this was noticed by kind of minor league people. And then it was noticed by Amanda Hesser at the New York Times who wrote a story about the blog which led to the book deal, which led to the Meryl Streep movie.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Wow.

And so, you know, when a Meryl Streep movie gets made out of the book that was made out of the blog, you now have, you know, probably well over a million dollars in the bank.

Yeah.

It happens. And all it takes is an original idea.

I like that. I like that. There's no kind of get rich quick or one shot thing. It's just the result of years and years of work.

Yeah.

A little bit of luck. And also making the right strategic decisions.

Right.

We've talked before about people who have become very, very famous or very, very wealthy or very. Just impactful. And oftentimes there are these, well, trodden paths. And if you study, you can find out how exactly they did it. In fact, a lot of people on TV have taken the exact same path to getting on tv. And in fact, you introduced me recently to somebody. I spoke to her. It was very nice of you to introduce us again because she had been on TV and I wanted to study her background and how she did it. She was super helpful because you made the introduction. I think a lot of us don't take the time to study the people who came before us. Right. It's like everything's different, but it's not that different, really.

Yeah. And you know, one other thing. You know, as long as we're deconstructing this kind of path to success for beginners, you know, the other thing that is important to note, you know, about the Julie Julia project. And it's happened with other, you know, blogs turned books turned TV shows. Like, shit, my dad says, right? There's real value in a well orchestrated site stunt. And I don't think the woman who did the whole Julie Julia thing was intending to be stunty, but there was something very stunt like about her approach, right? You know, you have to be completely gonzo and whacked out, right, to say, oh, okay, I'm gonna take, you know, I'm not that good of a cook, but I want to be a better cook and I love to eat. I'm gonna take, you know, the Art of French Cooking, you know, one of the biggest, baddest cookbooks that's ever been written. I'm gonna start from the first page. I'm gonna cook every fucking thing in that book, and I'm gonna write about every sing that I tried to make. It was just a great stunt, but it was also useful, right? You read that, you see what she does, you get ideas, you see how she fails, right?