The pitch landscape has changed
Journalist inboxes have always been busy. In 2024, they are busier than they have ever been, and for a specific reason. The rise of accessible AI writing tools over the past eighteen months has dramatically lowered the barrier to producing a press release or a pitch email. PR teams that previously could send fifty pitches a week can now send five hundred. Many do.
The problem is that volume without quality is not a strategy, it is noise. Journalists who receive hundreds of pitches per day have become extremely efficient at deleting them. Subject lines go unread. Generic pitches, however well-formatted, do not get opened. The reporters who do respond to pitches are responding to a small fraction of what they receive, and that fraction is almost exclusively characterised by genuine relevance to their beat, a clearly articulated story, and evidence that the person sending it understands what they cover.
If your pitch open rate is low, and for most PR teams, it is, the problem is almost certainly not your formatting or your timing. It is whether your pitch has something genuinely worth reading.
Start with the story, not the announcement
The most common pitch failure is writing from the inside out. The company has news. The news gets written up as a press release. The press release gets turned into a pitch email. The journalist receives something that is, essentially, a company's self-description of why its own announcement matters.
Journalists do not write stories about companies. They write stories about what is happening in the world, trends, shifts, conflicts, consequences, human experiences, and occasionally a company's news is a useful piece of evidence within one of those stories. The pitch should start from the story, not from the announcement.
Before you write a word, ask: what is the story here from a reader's perspective? Not from a company's perspective, from a reader's. What does this announcement tell us about something happening in the world that a reader would care about? That is your pitch opening. The company and the announcement come second, as evidence or example.
Journalists don't cover companies. They cover stories. Your pitch works when the company is an example of a story, not when the story is an example of the company.
Research the journalist before you write
Generic pitches fail because they do not address what a specific journalist covers, how they cover it, or what they have written about recently. Personalisation that takes two minutes of research is not enough. You need to understand the beat well enough to have a genuine opinion about how your story fits into it.
Read their last ten articles (a tool like Muck Rack makes this straightforward). What topics come up repeatedly? What angles do they tend to take? Do they prefer data-heavy pieces or narrative-driven ones? Do they interview executives or focus on trends and analysis? A pitch that references specific work they have done, draws a genuine connection to it, and explains why this story extends or enriches what they are already covering will outperform a personalised-but-generic pitch every time.
This means pitching fewer journalists more carefully rather than pitching many journalists with a standard template. For most stories, a list of ten well-researched journalists outperforms a list of a hundred people who share a vague category overlap with your announcement.
The anatomy of a pitch that works
The subject line is the first filter. It should read like a story, not like a press release. "New research finds mid-market CFOs are cutting martech budgets faster than any other category" is a subject line. "XYZ Company Releases 2024 Marketing Technology Report" is a press release. The former describes something happening. The latter describes a document that exists.
The opening line should make the journalist's reader the centre of the story. Not the company, not the product, the situation that the journalist's readers are in or care about. One or two sentences establishing why this matters now.
The pitch body should answer three questions: what is the story, why now, and why this source? Keep it short. Two or three paragraphs maximum. Journalists are busy and decide within seconds whether to continue reading. Everything that is not essential to answering those three questions should be cut.
End with a clear offer: an interview, an embargo, exclusive data, access to a spokesperson. Make it easy for the journalist to say yes to something specific, not just to "let me know if you're interested."
Follow up once, then stop
One follow-up, three to five days after the original pitch, is appropriate. Two is borderline. More than two is damage to a relationship you have not yet built. Journalists remember persistent pitchers, and not fondly. The follow-up should add something new (a piece of supporting data, a fresh angle) rather than just asking if they saw the original email.
If there is no response after a single follow-up, the story is not right for that journalist at this time. Move on, file the contact for future pitches, and resist the urge to follow up again.
Build before you need it
The PR teams that consistently get coverage are the ones that invest in journalist relationships outside of active pitching campaigns. Reading their work. Sharing it when it is good. Providing useful data or context when asked. Being a reliable, non-pushy source of expertise. When you pitch someone who already knows you as a useful contact rather than a stranger with an announcement, the open rate changes dramatically.
That relationship does not happen in the week before a product launch. It happens in the months before you need anything.