Get Your Pitch Noticed by a Major Publisher

Today, editorial voices are outnumbered by public relations professionals by almost 5:1. The problem is that publishers are implementing strict spam filters to keep public relations pitches out of their inboxes. I conducted a survey with more than 500 leading digital publishers to find out what we can do to improve the noise-to-value ratio for people who want press.

Writers at nytimes.com, theguardian.com and cnn.com report they receive more than 38,000 emails a year. And 26,000 of those emails are sent from people trying to get press coverage. These writers also report that they “never” write a story based on a pitch.

This epidemic, what I like to call the robot invasion, came about when public relations specialists started writing templated pitches to spam publishers for press, a tactic that when paired with high-authority publishers can be used to improve Google rankings.

Here’s the good news: Our survey found that 70% of publishers are open to getting pitched a set of ideas that fit their beat.

Thirty-nine percent of writers said the perfect piece of content possesses exclusive research;