PR strategy
5 Min read
How to win press coverage with better pitches
In the last 10 years I’ve represented a dozen or more companies. I’ve won Tier 1 coverage and landed stories on national broadcasts… and I’ve gotten crickets on entire campaigns, too.
To better understand why some stories won out, I analyzed as many of my media pitches as I could gather. Here’s what I can tell you about making the news.
The Hook
The first line is an invitation. Can you capture someone’s attention so fully that it pulls them out of the rhythm of their day? Makes them want more?
RSVP: Yes.
A good hook (or “lede,” in proper journalist lingo) gets a story started, and that’s as true when you send a pitch as it is when a writer publishes the final piece.
There are all sorts of strategies to writing good hooks, but I think they all boil down to presenting newsworthiness right up front.
Here are two of my favorite ledes I’ve sent in pitches:
2018 Scooter security:
“From ship cargo stowaways to subway turnstile-hoppers, fare evasion is as old as transit itself. This summer, the ‘dockless’ electric scooters dumped into a handful of US cities are being hacked to charge $0.00 — or stolen and stripped for parts.”
2025 Trust reveals and the rest of us:
“A recent WSJ story peeled back the velvet curtains of wealth to look at a growing trend among the well-to-do and recently bereaved: ‘Trust Reveals,’ where grieving families suddenly discover they’ll inherit millions in cash, assets and even businesses.”
Consider how each lede touches on the 7 elements of newsworthiness
The 7 elements of newsworthiness
• Timeliness — it’s happening now
• Proximity — it’s close to the reader geographically or personally
• Prominence — notable people or organizations are involved
• Impact — it affects a lot of people or affects them significantly
• Conflict — tension, opposition, struggle
• Human interest — emotional resonance, relatable characters
• Novelty — unusual, surprising, first of its kind
In Scooter Security, we jumped into the electric scooter zeitgeist to offer interviews about security choices.
It was Timely, following the launch of Lime, Bird, and other e-scooters. For urban readers the story had Proximity, plus some Conflict as people loved or hated the way scooters suddenly appeared and piled up on street corners. And the hook played on the Novelty of a new tech and the Human Interest in free rides and vivid imagery.
5/7 – pretty good!
In Trust reveals… we tread similar ground:
• Timeliness: referencing a WSJ story (tread carefully when sharing something already covered)
• Prominence: we’re talking about the rich and famous
• Human interest: wealth, death and surprises tug at the emotions
• Novelty: A secret will? How exciting!
4/7 – still more than halfway to a newsworthiness jackpot!
Here’s the key: in one or two sentences, set a hook that a journalist can pass on to their readers. The emotions at the heart of Human Interest and Novelty hooks are always a good place to start.
Land the plane
You’ve set your hook, the journalist is along for the ride. Now it’s time to land the plane. In other words, move them from being interested to understanding why their readers should hear your story.
I feel that every pitch needs to demonstrat Impact. Before you even write your pitches, you should have a good sense of who it is you’ll be sending those pitches to, what it is they cover, and what their threshold is for a meaningful impact on their readers.
In one of my most straightforward pitches, Criminals’ Black Friday Sales Generate Millions, no words were wasted between setting the hook and offering impactful data:
2019: Black Friday for Cybercriminals
Hi XX — did you know cybercriminals celebrate Black Friday? I didn’t, and I’d bet your readers would be fascinated by the dark side of shopping holidays.
I can give you exclusive access to data from [cybersecurity client] that shows just how big cybercrime shopping sprees can be. We’re collecting data like:
- How much money changed hands on the cybercriminal underground from Black Friday through Cyber Monday?
- What was the average price of particular items, like Netflix accounts, Microsoft or Adobe product keys, or cybercrime tools?
- What products did cybercriminals discount most heavily for the holiday?
- Who was the most popular dark market seller?
- What were some odd products the team found for sale?
The pitch continued with some specifics around the offer for exclusivity, but retrospectively, I probably could have just cut it off right there and waited for a response.
Either way, if you get 10 seconds to set your hook, your reader won’t stay with you for another 60 unless you demonstrate the impact.
Give and Receive
It’s important to close a pitch with a clear offer. I try to write these offers to be binaries; does the journalist want to interview my client, yes or no?
A lot of pitches fail because they assume the story deserves coverage when it really doesn’t. This is your classic “Company X announces launch of product update 6.2.5” – it was old news before the release hit the wire.
Leaving that category of failure aside, many more pitches fail because the offer doesn’t match quite match the value of the story. In 2022, I pitched automotive business journalists a story built on research I completed with J.D. Power. We found a significant profit opportunity for car dealerships who started renting cars in addition to leasing and selling vehicles.
The classic big-agency approach to this story is to set the hook, show the potential impact, and then offer the company executive for comment. But journalists can see right through this, and it’s disrespectful of their responsibility to their readers.
Say it with me: Journalists are not a conduit for your sales pitch.
The best way to win coverage on research is to prove the hypothesis in the real world. For our automotive research story, we lined up two different customers who were actually succeeding with the type of rental program our research said could generate profit.
While reporters took calls with the CEO and one of these customers, you won’t be surprised that significantly more ink was spent capturing what those customers had to say. It’s more important to the reader to get the story from the real source. To me, if you give reporters great sources, you’ll get back much more valuable exposure for the initiative you’re promoting.
The lesson: offer real-world stories, because great PR is a reflection of real-world value. Pitch spin long enough and journalists will see you as an obstacle instead of a source.
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