STOP:
If you think this job mostly involves writing Press Releases and sending emails blindly in the hopes that someone will pick up what you’ve sent them, this is not the right job for you.
PR is hard. Cutting through the noise and getting journalists to pay attention to you and what you have to say is never easy.
Guess what? In personal finance and small business, it’s even harder.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build the PR machine around our flagship website in the small business to business and personal finance space. I can tell you already, this will not be easy.
You’ll be competing against well oiled PR Machines run by public companies and well funded private companies who have been doing this for years.
Your job will be to cut through the noise with newsworthy insights, content, and information that helps journalists do their job even better.
You will take the lead on:
- Brainstorming and developing newsworthy content like surveys, studies, tools, in conjunction with our content team.
- Contacting online publishers, bloggers, editors, journalists, government agencies directly and pitching them on #1
- Developing relationships with journalists so that we become their go to source for the topics we cover.
- Responding to and covering interview requests for local outlets as needed
- Managing the Editorial Calendar in relation to PR
Things we’re looking for in a candidate
- English needs to be your mother tongue. No exceptions.
- You need to be able to communicate well both in written and spoken mediums.
- You need to live somewhere in North America with a reliable internet and phone connection and be available during normal business hours.
- You cannot be phone shy. You’ll need to be able to cold call journalists as needed to pitch them.
- If you were a journalist in a past life, then you’ll love this job.
- You need to be able to work independently with little to no direct supervision.
- Excellent interpersonal skills
- 1+ years' relevant experience; agency experience or experience as a journalist is preferred.
- Attention to detail with excellent proofreading, fact checking, editing skills and grammar.
- Experience writing press releases and pitches
Tools for the job:
You won’t be starting from scratch - we have a successful track record of doing similar things in other verticals and now need someone to do it in a more nuanced, direct fashion. We use tools like Cision to make finding and contacting journalists a lot easier, and will help you with other tools for the job (not mentioned here for competitive reasons).
Ideally, you’ve worked in PR or as a journalist. You need to be curious, you need to be able to think outside of the box and come up with all sorts of weird ideas, and you need to be able to write and speak well. You need to be tenacious, you need to be somewhat aggressive and you need to do research. There's a lot of room to grow in this role over time, and a very clear track to growth for the right person.