To pitch a journalist well, lead with why the story matters to that outlet’s readers, not with your own statistics. Britt Klontz, a digital PR consultant, learned this when a trade editor answered her statistics-heavy pitch with a template for rewriting it. Treat any reply as free feedback, then rewrite.
Britt Klontz was an intern at an SEO agency when someone handed her an infographic about writing a CV and told her to get it into Mashable. She had never studied PR. So she found a blog post by one of the Mashable journalists explaining how she liked to be pitched, and followed it to the letter.
Britt put it like this when she came on the podcast: “I copied that exactly and I heard from her, and she ended up covering the infographic.” Years later she was running her own consultancy, Vada Communications, and a pitch to a trade editor went the other way. That pitch is the story I want to unpack here.
Why do journalists reject PR pitches?
Mostly because the pitch is irrelevant to their readers. Britt interviews journalists for her Digital PR Explained podcast, and she told me the complaint never changes: “the journalist has a problem with the irrelevant pitches that they’re receiving from PRs.”
She blames the ease of automation, which is fair. In her words, it is “the ability for people to just put together pitches and then spray and pray.” Her fix sounds old-fashioned and works: “read the work of the journalists that we want to build connections with, understand the stories that they want to tell.”
The numbers make this more urgent. I told Britt that in the UK there are now more PRs than journalists, and Reach announced 220 journalist job cuts in September 2026, with Google’s AI overviews cited as a pressure on its traffic. Fewer reporters are reading more pitches, so a lazy one barely survives the first line.
The mistake: Leading a trade pitch with a pile of statistics and no reason the outlet’s readers should care.
Why it happens: The data came from a temporary-labour campaign, so Britt packed in everything it showed rather than the one point that mattered to construction readers.
The fix: Open with the single stat that matters to that readership, then reshape the story around the editor’s own framework.
What should you do when a journalist says no?
Read the reply as feedback, then answer it. A short rejection often contains the exact brief you were missing, and the journalist has already told you what they need.
Britt’s example is a client in invoice factoring. She pitched an editor at Metal Construction News using construction data from a wider labour study. In her words: “What I did wrong was I led with the stats.” She sent so many figures that the editor replied saying he did not see why the data mattered to his readers.
That was not really a no. He also gave her a framework, which Britt shared on the show: “I need you to explain because of X and Y, now is precisely the time to Z.” She went back, admitted he was right (“I ate humble pie”), sent a sharper pitch, and he wrote about it. One cold reply had effectively turned a stranger into a free co-editor.
Britt credits a guest on her own podcast, a PR at the agency Mission North in New York, with the phrase she now uses for this: “rejection is redirection”. Here is the routine I would copy:
- Thank the journalist and say plainly what you got wrong.
- Rewrite the story using their framework, one reader benefit at a time.
- Send a fresh pitch, then reuse the framework for similar outlets.
If your team still sends one pitch to fifty inboxes, our PR training for in-house communications teams covers writing pitches, building media lists and managing journalist relationships.
How do you pitch trade titles instead of the national press?
Start with the readership, not the circulation. Britt did not know which magazines covered construction, so she researched them before writing a word. That homework is the pitch.
I told her I think there is a coming surge of smaller, better audiences, and that a niche title can beat chasing the Wall Street Journal or the BBC. Britt agreed completely, and added podcasts to the list, because the audiences build what she called parasocial relationships with hosts.
She also has a practical reason for caring about trade titles. When she searched her freight client’s operations manager in Google’s AI Mode, the citations pointed to the contributor columns they had placed in trucking publications. Britt’s method for getting those columns is simple: “I act as a journalist. I interview her often.” The expert’s real knowledge becomes the pitch.
(Bizarrely, Britt also runs PR for the Seattle Christmas Market, which I questioned on the pod.)
My take: a pitch is a conversation
I started blogging before Facebook existed, and an account director at the network agency where I worked asked me who on earth would read it. That blog got me my next job and ended up listed in PR Week. So I am biased towards anyone who builds an audience outside the usual gatekeepers.
I also remember telling Sony about blogger relations when they were terrified of people reviewing their product. Their fear was about losing control. Journalists feel the same pressure from the other side, now that PRs outnumber them, and the pitches that win are the ones that respect their time.
We have to be more interesting than the average PR. That is the whole job in 2026-27.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the full episode with Britt Klontz on YouTube, find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk, and hear Britt’s own show, Digital PR Explained.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where marketing leaders share the career mistakes that taught them the most.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
