The PR Pitch Is Not Dead. The Bad PR Pitch Should Be.
More pitches don’t mean better PR. The right story, sent to the right person, still wins.
When I started in PR, the press release was a big thing.
Early in my career, working for other agencies and companies, I learned a very traditional version of media relations. A client had news, so one of the first things we did was send out a release. It would typically go through a distribution platform and be sent to hundreds of outlets categorized by industry. From there, it was regurgitated and spit out into the mysterious world of press release distribution.
At one company I worked for, pitching wasn’t necessarily much more personal.
We were taught to create several different angles, build targeted media lists and aim to send 3,000 non-personalized emails in one day through a PR database.
Yes. Three thousand.
And yes, journalists sometimes responded exactly as you might expect.
TAKE ME OFF THIS LIST!
There were some good hits that came out of it too. Mass pitching did work, particularly back then. But certainly not at the volume you might expect after emailing 3,000 people.
I found the whole thing frustrating and, frankly, a little invasive. What exactly were we expecting from those 3,000 contacts?
From conversations I had with people at other agencies, I knew volume was very much part of the PR culture at the time, although 3,000 was certainly at the extreme end.
Clients asked about volume too.
How many pitches will you send every month?
And, of course:
How many placements can I expect?
Needless to say, I eventually moved on from that company. The approach felt spammy and non-strategic to me.
And today? I think it would be an even worse idea.
Spray and pray had its moment
Even five or six years ago, mass emailing was still very much a thing. It even has a name: spray and pray.
To me, that isn’t really PR.
The media landscape has become far more fragmented. There are still many staff journalists, but there are also freelancers. Publications have closed or consolidated. Smaller local media have disappeared. Audiences themselves are spread across more places.
At the same time, PR databases have made it incredibly easy to get journalists’ email addresses.
That’s both good and bad.
It’s good for people like me because I can find the right person.
It’s bad because so can thousands of other people.
Journalists can receive more than 100 pitches a day. So if you’re sending the same generic email to hundreds or thousands of them, how exactly are you going to stand out?
You’re probably not.
Mass mailing is not the way to stand out and get known.
Today, I believe much more strongly in carefully curated outreach, relationship building and pitches created for the journalist, their beat and their audience.
It takes more time.
The list is smaller.
And in my experience, the results are much stronger.
Please don’t tell a journalist how wonderful you are
This is probably one of my biggest pitching bugaboos.
The self-promotional pitch.
PR is earned media. You’re trying to offer something valuable, educational, useful, interesting or genuinely newsworthy enough that it earns its way into the media.
That means your pitch shouldn’t essentially say:
I’m wonderful. I’ve done this and this and this. I’ve made a million dollars. I’m very successful. I’m sure you’d love to interview me.
Why?
Why would the journalist’s audience care?
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pitch a product for review. Of course you should, if there’s a legitimate reason for that publication to review it. You have a product you believe matters or solves a problem for their readers. The journalist decides whether it’s worth covering.
That’s earned media.
But the pitch has to provide value to the publication and its audience, not just value to you because you want publicity.
There’s a big difference.
And perhaps don’t pitch dog food to the weatherman
Research matters.
I’ve seen pitches sent to people who have absolutely nothing to do with the subject.
If you’re pitching a story about the best dog food, why are you sending it to the Weather Channel or the local weatherman?
You’ve got to know who you’re pitching.
Does this journalist actually cover the beat?
Have they covered this type of story?
Does this particular angle make sense for them?
This doesn’t mean spending six hours researching every journalist before sending one email. But it does mean taking enough care to know that you’re pitching the right person.
And while we’re here, nothing says I’ve carefully selected you for this story quite like:
Hi First Name.
It happens.
Someone sets up a mail merge, doesn’t have the contact’s name or doesn’t check the system properly, and off it goes.
Hi First Name.
Not ideal.
A pitch doesn’t have to be three sentences long
I don’t subscribe to the idea that every media pitch must be incredibly short.
Sometimes you need enough information to explain the story properly.
But there’s a difference between enough information and crazily long.
Journalists are busy. They’re getting a lot of pitches. They shouldn’t have to work their way through your life story before figuring out why you’ve contacted them.
I feel similarly about subject lines.
I’m not against something corny. I like a good play on words or a pun when it fits. Around the holidays or for the right story, why not?
But clever shouldn’t come at the expense of clarity.
A journalist should be able to look at the subject line and have a pretty good idea whether the email is relevant to them — and whether it’s a story rather than a sales pitch.
And I don’t send attachments.
Ever.
I provide a link to supporting information, images or other materials. I don’t want a large attachment contributing to the email ending up in spam or giving someone another reason not to open it.
About those guaranteed placements...
This one gets me.
There are companies that will tell potential clients:
We can get you into Forbes for $1,000.
We can get you into another major publication for $1,500.
And the client gets excited.
Of course they do. Who wouldn’t want to say they’ve appeared in a major publication?
But if you’ve purchased a guaranteed placement, that’s not the same thing as earning editorial coverage.
It is paid placement.
There may be legitimate reasons someone chooses to buy sponsored or paid media. That’s fine. But it should be called what it is.
The problem comes when paid placement is sold or understood as though a journalist or editor independently decided the person or company was worth covering.
Those are two very different things.
AI can make PR stronger — or more mediocre than ever
I love AI.
There. I said it.
I use it as a strategic partner, particularly for research and brainstorming.
What topics are becoming important in a client’s industry? What’s relevant right now? What might the best PR mix be for this particular client? What angles haven’t we considered?
And definitely — definitely — learning more about the journalist.
I have access to tools like Muck Rack, but sometimes AI gives me much greater insight or helps me make connections I might have missed. And it saves an enormous amount of time.
For me, that’s where AI gets really interesting.
It’s like having another partner at the table.
Where I become much less enthusiastic is:
Hey AI, write me five pitches.
Copy.
Paste.
Send them to 500 people.
We’ve basically reinvented spray and pray, only now we can do it faster.
I prefer to write pitches myself or have our team write them. AI can help us research, brainstorm angles, check something, polish it and even think about how an angle could be personalized for a particular contact.
But the thinking and the voice still need to be human.
Otherwise, it’s just laziness at scale.
AI can strengthen PR.
Or it can make mediocre PR more mediocre than ever.
Sometimes the journalist who clicks doesn’t bite
We’ve become very good at watching what happens after a pitch goes out.
Opens. Clicks. Repeat opens.
And I admit it: I still get excited when I see that a journalist has opened a pitch and clicked through to the supporting information.
They clicked!
And then...
Nothing.
Meanwhile, another journalist opens the email once, doesn’t click anything and ends up covering the story.
That still surprises me.
It is also a good reminder that we can read far too much into our own data.
An open is an open. A click is a click.
Neither is a media placement.
Ultimately, journalists respond because they see a story.
Maybe it’s a human-interest story that’s genuinely right for their local beat. Maybe it’s a new technology that could change an industry. Maybe it’s an unusual angle backed by strong data.
A good subject line helps.
Timing helps.
Relationships help.
But there still needs to be something worth covering.
Before you hit Send
If someone new joined Mackasey tomorrow and was about to send their first pitch, I wouldn’t tell them to worry about how many emails they were going to get out that day.
I’d want them to ask three things:
Does this journalist actually cover this beat and this angle?
What value could this story provide to the journalist’s audience?
And is it actually newsworthy?
If you can’t answer those questions, don’t hit Send yet.
Three thousand pitches won’t fix the wrong story.
And AI won’t either.