Bloomberg tax journalist Erb on finding stories

Kelly Phillips Erb is a team lead for Insights & Commentary at Bloomberg Tax, spoke with “On Record PR” host Gina Rubel about her job.

Here is an excerpt:

Where else do you source stories besides Twitter?

A lot of times it’s word of mouth. I’ll have a conversation on my podcast, and somebody will mention a name, and I’ll say, “Oh my gosh…” There is a guy who is going to be on my podcast that someone mentioned to me, “Oh, you’ve got to talk to this guy because he does tax on TikTok.” I am on TikTok, but I don’t follow it that closely, and so it was intriguing because it was a referral, it was, “Let me tell you a story …” and I ended up getting an e-mail from him.  He and I talked — he’s fantastic — and it was such a great fun episode.

I use LinkedIn. I don’t always love LinkedIn as much for sources because of those things we mentioned before about subject lines. Messages gets lost sometimes in inbox messaging, which is what a lot of professionals like to do on LinkedIn. It’s difficult for me to sort through all the requests I get on LinkedIn, so I prefer e-mail in that regard because I do like a good subject line. If I get five private messages in a morning, that just adds to the list. I don’t think some people on LinkedIn are as targeted as they could be.

One of the cool things about Twitter — even though it’s wider– is there’s hashtag #taxtwitter. When people are using that tag, I know that they’re talking about tax. That’s easy to follow.

I do greatly appreciate Facebook for the same reason that I like Twitter. It helps me get good sources. People will tag a friend and say they’re proficient in something and that helps.

A lot of times I will also check sources on LinkedIn. If somebody says, “Oh, you should use Gina,” I’ll go and I’ll look just to make sure it’s who I’m looking for. I want a tax attorney, maybe this is a story for where a CPA doesn’t work or vice versa. I do my homework.

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