How Not to Pitch Your Stories to the Media

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When it comes to media pitching, many PR pros have their own strategies and secrets for achieving success. Most of them, however, agree that media pitches should be concise and have a specific news or feature angle that would correspond to the topics covered by a particular journalist or publication.

With this said, here are 3 things you don’t want to do when pitching your story to the media:

1.    Carpet-bomb all available media outlets.
Spamming journalists with irrelevant emails has never produced good media coverage for anyone. Your pitch should be targeted selectively only at those contacts that cover the news topic or industry of your client.

2.    Sending pitches without actual news.
Don’t send pitches without actual news or feature angles. Emailing journalists general information about a company, service or product will achieve absolutely nothing. When pitching a story, think about the readers of a particular publication. Would your news be interesting to them? What value does it offer the readers?

3.    Not being able to answer questions about the news.
Very often, young PR pros neglect to familiarize themselves with the details of the story they are trying to place. As a result, when interested reporters contact them with additional questions, they are not able to immediately provide any answers. Journalists often work on tight deadlines, and if they can’t get what they need for a story when they need it, they will go elsewhere.


Try to avoid these common mistakes, and you’ll see a significant increase in the amount of media coverage you’ll be able to secure for your clients.

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