When Making Your Pitch, Here’s What Journalists Value Most
By Matt Petteruto for PRNews
For PR and comms professionals, there’s nothing more frustrating than having your media pitch rejected or, in some cases, outright ignored. Did your email end up in the journalist’s spam folder? Were they just buried with other assignments?
There are a host of reasons why journalists reject pitches, but the most common cause is that far too often, the content being pitched is irrelevant to the specific topic or area that the journalist covers. We know this by simply listening to what journalists have to say when it comes to receiving pitches from PR and comms pros.
Why Relevance is Key to Your Pitch
Two of the most popular media surveys produced each year are the Cision State of the Media Report and the Muck Rack State of Journalism Report. Cision and Muck Rack are well-established names in the PR world, providing various products and services geared towards PR and comms professionals. In addition, both companies produce several valuable reports containing insights into the modern media landscape. This includes digging into what journalists value most when working with PR and comms pros.
As shared in Cision’s most recent State of the Media Report, “A consistent theme throughout the survey results was the need for relevant content from the public relations professionals who reach out to them. When asked to describe the “perfect” PR pitch, relevance was by far the most cited factor…”.
More than half of the journalists surveyed by Cision said they receive over 50 pitches a week on average. However, only 7% said that the majority of pitches they get were relevant to their audience. As one journalist bluntly stated, “Stop wasting my time with pitches that are completely out of my coverage area.”
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