#Magazining - The Most Enjoyable Homework When Doing Your Own PR

Favorite homework one can do when doing their own PR: #magazining or as we also call it,  “media monitoring.” It’s the time when you can absorb how these magazines are spinning ideas 💡, and inspiring readers. It’s the time a DIY PR (translate: artist, maker, busniness owner, innovator doing their own PR) thinks 🤔 up ways to get their businesses mentioned.

Media monitoring is how you make your own luck, and make your own PR happen. Tin Shingle has the tools to help you do that. Join us. Already a subscriber to our free newsletter? Upgrade to a pro level and dig into our classes, databases, and community.

Allure Magazine Makes A Point To Feature Asian Women On Their Covers

We're going to start sharing with you our #MediaMonitoring research. It's really fun homework - you just read magazines. But it makes pitching the big magazines so much easier because you already know how they think. Continue the conversation with us in our Private Community Groups to bounce ideas off each other, but here's what we got from Allure:

Allure Magazine is stepping it up with Asian women appearing on their covers. Only 2 Asian women have held the spot: Lucy Liu in 2000, and Olivia Munn in 2014. Editor in Chief Michelle Lee  is changing that with this year’s "The Hair Guide" which dropped this May/June 2018 by featuring 3 “game-changing Asian models,” which has special meaning to her. “My preteen self couldn’t even fathom seeing an Asian face on the cover of a mainstream magazine or landing a TV show or headlining a movie,” she said in her letter from the editor. As for future coverage for Asian women, Michelle says: “Let’s not wait for Lucy Lui’s next movie.” Bravo! 👏

What else was featured?

A Local Hair Parlor - In Chicago! 

Usually when brick and mortars are featured in print magazines, they are in New York, since that’s where most of the magazines are based. Here, Chicago’s North Side is featured when the salon Logan Parlor took the spotlight. Founded by LGBTQ activists Jamie DiGrazia and Tricia Serpe, this parlor is unusual in that it was designed to look like your grandma’s house to promote familiarity, be snug, offer coffee and free beer while you’re getting cut, and “act as a safe community space first,” according to the article. Published during LGBTQ month, this gave the parlor even more relevancy against competing salons may have also been pitching into the magazine.

Products of Course

The Tangle Teaser, an invention of a brush by a London based hairdresser, Shaun Pulfrey. It got only two paragraphs of content, but it's a spot in a regular page of the magazine that features entrepreneurs. An entire page was dedicated to it. Shaun recounted how he mortgaged his flat, spent $130,000 to develop the brush, got on to Dragon’s Den (London’s equivalent of Shark Tank), and was sent home, rejected. They called it a hair-brained idea. That night, however, 1,300 orders came in and Shaun considered it a score. A global commercial for his brand. This type of story could have easily been pitched in to the magazine just by knowing the magazine’s theme alone. Which is what’s Tin Shingle’s Editorial Calendars are for.

PS: Want to pitch Shark Tank? Listen to this Tin Shingle's Training TuneUp where we interviewed two contestants on the show who went home with a win.

The Experts Weigh In

There are the roundups of course. Maybe you would have seen this come across a HARO lead, maybe you would have missed it or maybe it never ended up in that slush pile at all. An expert or product owner could have certainly cold-pitched this in with an idea of when best to use this product. The editor may have forwarded it to the writer for consideration. If you’re an expert or service provider, you could off-the-cuff recommend your preferred products. If you’re a business who created the products, well...you know what to do.

A Singer-Songwriter

Kelissa McDonald is a 29 year old singer-songwriter who was included in Allure’s feature story on how hair is represented in culture and religion. Kelissa was featured for her hair worn in Rastafarian tradition. Three women in total were featured in the article: a Sikh woman named Jessie Kaur Lehail who co-founded the Kaur Project, a storytelling site about the varied experiences of modern Sikh women like her, and Melissa Oaks, a Native American Mohawk who grew up on the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory and is an activist and organizer, as well as a teacher of Native American art and design.

Are Your Wheels Turning?

This is what happens when you subscribe to magazines and study them for their style, vibe and content choices. The more you read them, the more you'll know how your brand might fit into a story. Thumbing through the magazine is a great way to think outside of the box, and think of clever angles or reasons to feature you or your business, that you normally wouldn't have thought of.

This is what we love about looking through Tin Shingle's Editorial Calendars. It forces us to think outside of the box, and form an idea around a theme. It means you are "cold-pitching" an idea, and not waiting around to hear something more specific that already has a line of pitches in for it. Tin Shingle helps you do this each month during our "PR Planning for This Month" Training TuneUp webinar. Subscribe to our newsletter to get alerts of when these are, and turn on a Level 3 Online Classes Membership to stream any of the webinars you missed or want to hear again.

What's Next At Allure?

Here's a sneak peek of Allure's Editorial Calendar in Tin Shingle's Members-Only Database. When you're a Level 4 Member of Tin Shingle, you can see our entire collection. Knowing the general theme of a magazine will help your wheels turn about the type of pitch you could send in to the right editor.

Speaking of such contacts, Tin Shingle keeps an exclusive list of editors, writers and producers in our members-only Media Contact database. We also knew they were working on this Hair Guide because we have their Editorial Calendar in our members-only database as well. We focused on it during our webinar TuneUp, “PR Planning: January” where we highlight ideas 💡 that the print media is working on, since their editorial cycle is 3-6 months in advance.

Media Contacts & Editorial Calendars Through Membership With Tin Shingle

Become an All Access Level 4 Member today for access! And improve your chances for getting featured in magazines! Tin Shingle is your DIY PR BFF.

Weekend Reading: Curled Up With Architectural Digest

Weekend 📖 reading known as Media Monitoring or PR Homework in these parts at Tin Shingle.

Flipping through the gorgeous pages of Architectual Digest and settling in on a feature of a Hudson Valley home in Croton on the Hudson, the Neumann House by Marcel Breuer.

The best way to pitch a magazine is to know its writing and editorial style as well as you would know your closest friend and how they like things. The easiest way to do that is by subscribing to the magazine in print. If you want a magazine to even exist in print to feature your business and inspire you, then support it with a paid subscription. Read it on paper and experience it in the way it was designed.

For all you advertisers out there - if you have paid for branded content or a roundup or a group full page ad - bravo to you. Advertisers keep the magazines in business to keep the editorial cycle spinning. Somethings got to pay those photographers, writers and editors!