Director, Media Relations (Pitching)
University of California Los Angeles


Requisition Number: 35348
Salary: $6,125 - $16,042 monthly

Position Description:
UCLA Strategic Communications (StratComm) brings UCLA's mission and values to life by inspiring positive action as UCLA's lead storytellers, reflecting the multifaceted diversity of our university and surrounding communities. Demonstrating and reinforcing the university's commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in all creative work is central to StratComm's success. We believe a workplace culture that values EDI practices is essential to building strong teams, which translates to robust ideas, strategies and creative content that resonate with UCLA's diverse audiences.

The Office of Media Relations offers multiple services to enhance the efforts of the professional schools and other campus units to promote UCLA in the news media. One key priority for the office is developing strategies to identify, package and promote UCLA's research, programs, leadership, faculty and students in earned media, through successful and coordinated pitches to print, TV, radio and online media organizations.

Reporting to the Chief Media and Executive Communications Officer, the Director of Media Relations (Pitching) actively works with staff to pitch timely news and feature stories that support the University's objectives and in support of UCLA's key missions of research, teaching and public service. The Director keeps in regular communication and coordination with other units across Strategic Communications, particularly with media relations directors working on issues management, the social media team and executive communications. The Director supports pitch preparation and research; ensures staff develop content such as biographies, briefing documents, media alerts, soundbites, Q&As, backgrounders and boilerplates, briefing sheets; direct pitches to journalists and bloggers on an on-going basis; deploys rapid response to breaking news on behalf of the University, reacting quickly to emerging stories; and researches, identifies and approaches appropriate media contacts on an ongoing basis.

The Director closely tracks and monitors all pitches, quantifying all those that are made and which are successful to various media organizations, regularly providing that data to the Insights team in StratComm for tracking. The Director pays close attention to reports from the Insights team to evaluate and understand successes and iterate based on the data, also ensuring that members of the team to do the same. The Director also works closely with the Content Studio in StratComm to explore bold, new ways to tell stories beyond the written word, including but not limited to interactive graphics, videos, photo essays, etc. that could be compelling to journalists and all readers of UCLA Newsroom, where stories are published. Additionally the Director pays close attention to trends in the broader culture and issues dominating the news cycle as well as upcoming events that could drive media and public interest in a story that UCLA is uniquely positioned to tell. The director also tracks best practices of peer institutions.

The Director oversees the public information officers (PIOs) within the Office of Media Relations and supervises their work gathering information from faculty, administrators and others on campus, and decides how to effectively pitch compelling stories to press that benefit UCLA; works in close partnership with the Director of UCLA Newsroom to determine content that PIOs produce for the website and how that content, when posted, can effectively support the office's pitches to external press alongside needs of the UCLA Newsroom website; possess and further cultivates contacts at key media outlets and develops a comprehensive calendar for when to pitch specific media, basing it upon everything from key dates on the academic calendar to special sections that newspapers annually produce.


For full application instructions and position description, please visit: https://hr.mycareer.ucla.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=82813

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age or protected veteran status. For the complete University of California nondiscrimination and affirmative action policy, see: UC Nondiscrimination & Affirmative Action Policy, https://policy.ucop.edu/doc/4000376/DiscHarassAffirmAction






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