Brass tack answers from an experienced professional, who still pitches every week, to common questions about pitching the media
Many of the media pitching “tips” you see today are 101-level advice. If you sort through the guest posts on media relations published over the last 20 years, in any of the trade publications, you’ll find they all say the same basic things over and over again.
Usually, the “tips” come down to some formulation that your pitch should be:
- Relevant – related to a reporter’s focus;
- Timely – topical to current news;
- Clear – get to the point; plain language usually wins;
- Pithy – data shows pithy pitches generally perform best; and
- Newsworthy – “news” by definition defies expectations.
That last one is hard. It’s hard to defy expectations more than once in a while.
It’s also subjective. Two reporters can have vastly different value judgments on the same pitch. I’ve also seen the same reporter reject a pitch today, and then six months later come back to it.
News evolves, perspectives change, and reporters, like people, can and do have experiences that change their views.
So, while such basic pitching tips are table stakes, they also shouldn’t be overlooked.
I’ve done a lot of media relations over my career – and still do it today. One of my criticisms of the PR industry is that as professionals gain tenure, they tend to do less and less pitching.
In large PR firms, they usually push this work down to junior staff. In professional services, including legal, accounting and consulting, pushing work down to junior staff is called leverage. Leverage is supposed to save the client money and grow the margin.
I don’t think it works. Why? Like any skill, generally, the more experience you have in pitching, the better you are at it.
Michael Smart’s FAQs on pitching the media
Michael Smart is a rare breed. I’ve always found he brings perspective to media relations that’s usually quite sound. That was the case for a recent post, based on a webinar he did with Muck Rack: A Q&A deep dive on media pitching with PR coach Michael Smart.
While I agree with much of his commentary, I also have a take of my own. So, I’m going to run through some of the same (or similar) questions – cite bits and bytes from his answers – and add my own color commentary.
Keep in mind, I tend to come at things from a B2B technology perspective.
Question: How do you break through the volume of pitches reporters receive daily?
The essence of Smart’s answer boils down to “a pitch that’s one-to-one focused on them, storytelling audience-first, and not just talking about the client, that’s enough to make you stand out from the deluge of often lazy pitches.”
Indeed, reporters strive to tell informative stories, whereas many pitches are product promotions. Businesses want their product or brand to be the hero, where in a good story, the customer is the hero and the product plays a supporting role.
Most businesses don’t want to admit mistakes or struggles. The pitch is “we’ve always been awesome and now, with version 4.0, we are even more awesome.” That’s not a story. A movie along those lines would bomb at the box office – and so do those PR pitches.
A good story has tension, strife and adversity. Failures are an essential part of storytelling.
The story isn’t rich to richer – it’s rags to riches. It’s in a dog’s nature to bite the hand of a man, so that’s not “newsworthy,” but a man who bites a dog defies expectations.
Storytelling follows a pattern. There’s a comedian who jokes that Harry Potter is the same story as Star Wars with less impressive lightsabers. People laugh because there’s some truth to it.
This is not an accident – it’s a formula. There is a definitive structure to storytelling that has been academically analyzed and literally been passed down for thousands of years.
Question: Should you follow up on pitches with reporters?
Smart’s answer is yes – you have to follow up:
“Even these best pitchers at the top of their game, with all these relationships, still need to follow up to get the results that make them come to mind as the best pitching pros we know. These folks know that no response isn’t a ‘no,’ it’s just a ‘not yet.’ They follow up, try new angles and they keep going until they hear either ‘yes’ or an unmistakable ‘no.’
This isn’t about stubbornness; it’s diplomatic tenacity. That’s the ability to keep showing up with fresh value while staying likable and respectful. Persistence is [a] process, not personality. You don’t have to be pushy. You just have to keep showing up.”
Historically, my approach to a “follow-up” is to write a new pitch. I strive to come up with a different angle, which sometimes means I’m reaching out to a different reporter.
This is because I don’t want to be a pest. Further, I’ve always found that if a reporter likes a pitch, they respond right away, even if that’s to say, “Pass, but good pitch.”
A Muck Rack survey of 1,000 reporters in 2024 started to change my mind a bit. It found that a majority of reporters are okay with a follow-up pitch:
- 51% say one follow-up is ideal and 48% say it should come within 3–7 days.
What I’ve started doing with follow-ups is take the Axios approach in a follow-up in a bulletized format:
- A one-sentence summary;
- A line about “why we care”;
- Call out an interesting statistic or factoid.
I’m finding success with this approach. I believe it’s because reporters are inundated with pitches. They might see my pitch and want to come back to it later, but there are a lot of different things (not just pitches) competing for their attention. So, while a follow-up might add to the email deluge, the value of a reminder about a good pitch is acceptable.
Resilience is mandatory for pitching the media
Smart talks about persistence. I’d add to that resilience. In some sense, media pitching is like working in sales – and you’ve got to be resilient in the face of rejection. You will have pitches rejected a lot. But there’s something even more common in pitching that requires resilience: silence.
As human beings, we don’t handle uncertainty well. Learning to manage uncertainty comes with experience. Most of your pitches will go without response, which is a form of uncertainty. It’s easy to get frustrated.
Why? If reporters responded to every PR pitch, they’d spend their whole day doing it, so they don’t. Further, many of them, reporters will tell you, aren’t relevant and don’t merit a response. As a benchmark, reporters respond to less than 3% of the pitches they receive. If they get 100 PR pitches a day, which is not uncommon, just three will get a response.
Pitch analytics inform your follow-up
I use pitch analytics. There are a number of email plugins that you can purchase (one-off and fairly inexpensive), designed for salespeople, to get email metrics like open rates and click-throughs. Such metrics can help inform your decision to follow up. Yet these tools aren’t perfect. Apple has privacy settings by default that block these metrics if, for example, an email is opened on an iPhone.
Many PR software vendors, including Muck Rack, offer such pitch analytics in their platforms. To use these, many of them require you to cut and paste pitch copy into their system. Often, the workspace is a tiny little box in their software, which is a poor UX.
I prefer to work in Outlook, so I opt for an email client plugin. The only PR software vendor I’m aware of that offers these plugins is Propel. As an alternative, some PR software vendors offer a system email you can put in your bcc line.
Another option, if you have access to your employer’s or client’s Google Analytics instance, is to use Google URL builder to track click-throughs. However, that approach starts to get clunky and messy to track very quickly.
In any case, resilience is part of the PR job. It’s on you – and it’s on me – to find a way to break through. When you do break through, be sure to take stock of what’s landing and why – and use that analysis to improve your efforts. For me, that’s contingent on actually believing in what you are advocating for because authenticity is persuasive.
Either way, keep Smart’s response in mind and don’t be “pushy” because it will backfire.
Question: What’s the best email subject line for a PR pitch?
Smart says the best subject lines are “clear” summaries of the story you’re pitching.
My take is similar also. The subject line should give the recipient a good feel for the contents of that email. It’s setting expectations, which, if the contents don’t match, will fall flat.
I occasionally experiment with putting the first name of the reporter in the subject line – especially if it’s someone I’m having trouble reaching. The idea being it’s indicative of the fact that the message is meant for them personally.
Don’t overuse it. If you do it every time, it becomes obnoxious. And if you use it all the time, and your pitches are falling flat, chances are that technique may have become a signal that your message should be deleted without being read.
Question: Are press releases still worth doing?
Smart has a good answer for this one, too:
“For sure. Just don’t expect them to result in media coverage from journalists who are really important to you. It’s a good way for us to explore the story in advance and get practice in how a story might look. It can distract clients and bosses so that we can pitch the story the way that we know will work and still deliver the messaging that’s in the release.”
I think press releases are still worthy as well. More than exploring the story, they often become the basis of messaging and talking points – especially around things like new product launches.
I always draft a pitch and paste the press release copy below my signature when sending. Do not send unsolicited attachments — not a Word file or a PDF. If I have photos or images, I’ll put those on a shared drive with clear descriptions.
If an employer or client waters down a beautiful announcement in the review and approval process – and this happens a lot when there is a group of people reviewing it – then, as Smart says, I’m absolutely going to do the client a favor, barring an important sensitivity, and pitch it like I originally wrote it.
Now, press release distribution is another thing. I have a one-sided love-hate relationship with the distribution vendors. Yes, I do think distribution is worth the effort. Smart is right, the distribution isn’t going to drive coverage from journalists you are hoping to reach – but it might help you reach people you hadn’t found yet.
I refuse to spend $2,500-$3,000 on a press release distributed through PR Newswire or Business Wire. The cost-benefit at that price point just isn’t there. In my opinion, PRWeb has been mismanaged — good features removed, even as the price point has grown — so I don’t use it anymore and I’ve been experimenting with other lower-cost providers. There are dozens of them.
One more thing on distribution: if a vendor claims backlinks gained through press release distribution services will improve your SEO, they are wrong. Click on any link on a wire service today and you will see that those links are no-follow.
If a distribution service is not using no-follow links, it’s only a matter of time before they are caught. And you run a genuine risk of a manual Google penalty – and that would be an unforced error leading to a major crisis.
Why don’t the links count? Because it’s effectively paying for links, which contradicts the thesis on which Google was originally built. So, Google fiercely enforces this on its properties, and they have a monopoly on organic search traffic.
Question: What are your thoughts on pitch length?
Smart’s answer:
“The best length for an email pitch, and the median length of the pitches in a study we conducted, was something like 170 words. But there were still pitches that were 400 words long or 650 words that landed.”
That reflects my experience too – and there’s some data behind it too. Propel, which is a startup competitor to Muck Rack, quantified this by analyzing 500,000 pitches sent through their system:
- Short pitches – 150 words or less – had a better response rate (5.89%) than long pitches (1.46%) – 500 words or more.
The counterfactual is that I’ve had success with long pitches too – close to 1,000 words. However, I use these sparingly, and they tend to be aimed at reporters who I know are writing long-form or investigative pieces. These won’t land with a reporter who writes five stories a day on deadline.
One more thing: leave room in long pitches for a reporter to connect the dots. If you spell it all out, you risk pre-empting your story. Human psychology demands you leave something to the imagination.
Question: Should you use generative AI to draft pitches?
Smart points out that generative AI produces average copy. Average doesn’t stand out in the inbox. I agree. Copy generated by AI is apparent to a journalist who gets 100 pitches a day.
I do use generative AI for supporting tasks:
- Brainstorming ideas;
- Researching a reporter’s work around a subject; and
- Generating ideas for alternate titles, subtitles and subject lines.
I prefer Perplexity and Grok for this. I like Perplexity because it was the first one that I observed that provides links to cited sources, which I double-check and you should too. As for Grok, I pay for it, and several tests have suggested it’s a better-trained AI for STEM-related subjects.
Either way, you must check the veracity of what generative AI suggests before acting on those suggestions. It’s a tool, not The Gospel.
Question: Are embargos still useful?
This question wasn’t listed explicitly, and I thought the context was unclear, so I want to address embargoes directly.
Embargoes are only useful if you have an announcement that is truly newsworthy – something you know a reporter is going to want. And you probably do not have that. Or if you do, it’s once in a great while.
Too often, PR folks use the word embargo to sex up their announcements – but reporters see right through this because they see it 10 times a day. Don’t do it.
The other aspect of embargoes is that they require the reporter or journalist to agree to them. If you slap the word “embargo” on a release and send it, unsolicited, to a reporter, they have no ethical obligation to adhere to it.
As a rule of thumb, I generally shy away from embargoes unless it’s something truly remarkable.
Question: Are exclusives still useful?
There was no question about exclusives on the Q&A, but it is a topic worth addressing in this blog post. If the announcement is truly newsworthy, yes, offering an exclusive does work. Reporters love an exclusive story because it sets them apart.
Here again, you should use them sparingly and only when truly warranted. If you try it too often, it becomes like the old fable about the ‘boy who cried wolf.’
There are also drawbacks. I once landed an exclusive that was front-page news on The Wall Street Journal. That afternoon, an executive editor from a trade publication reprimanded me for giving the story to the Journal and not his publication.
I just took the shot to the chin – that’s part of the job – knowing that if I could go back in time, I’d make the same choice. After all, it’s The Wall Street Journal.
If I hadn’t done that, the trade publication would have covered the story, but the Journal may not have without the exclusive. It certainly wouldn’t have been front-page news.
That trade publication, and many others, had to cover the story too, because The Wall Street Journal broke the story.
Final thoughts on media relations
There’s an element of subjectivity to what makes news. Therefore, there’s an element of subjectivity to effective media relations. While it’s important to adhere to the table stakes, it’s also important to be creative and try new things.
I can and do occasionally make a phone call or send a snail mail letter. I’m also a proponent of using paid media – particularly X, formerly Twitter – to drive earned media. Although I hate to admit it, on X, it’s just not as effective as it once was after the change in ownership.
However, using paid media for earned media purposes is a time-tested and strategic approach to media relations. X isn’t the only way to do it.
Finally, if I could only offer one tip to PR professionals who want to be more successful in pitching the media, it would be this: be obsessive and compulsive about your own professional development. It is essential that you have command of the history, problems, trends, solutions, and personalities in the topic you are pitching.
As Brian Solis, a self-described “recovering PR pro” once said, we are all forever students.
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