Seven Things Businesses Get Wrong About the Media
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Written by Jordan Baker, PR Agency Founder
Jordan Baker is the founder of Fair Public Relations, a journalist-led PR agency supporting founders, experts and growing businesses. A former UK national journalist, he has more than a decade of experience in PR, media relations and earned media strategy.
When I worked as a journalist, I could receive several hundred public relations (PR) pitches in a day, so there simply wasn't time to properly read every one of them. Usually, I'd scan the subject line first. If something caught my attention, I'd look at the preview, and if I was still interested after that, I'd open the email and read more. The whole decision could happen in a matter of seconds. I wasn't particularly bothered about who had sent the email. I was much more interested in what they were actually offering me. Was there an expert available? Could I interview someone? Was there a product or service to review? Was somebody offering me a real life story? Was there actually a news story here? I needed to know quickly.
I've now spent more than 11 years working in PR, and I think this is something businesses often forget. They spend a lot of time thinking about how to persuade journalists to cover them, when the better question is usually much simpler, why should the journalist care? There are plenty of useful guides to getting media coverage, but before worrying about media lists, press releases and follow ups, it helps to understand what is actually happening at the other end of the email.
Journalists do use PR
It is easy to talk about journalists and PR professionals as if they are on opposing sides, but that isn't really how it works. Journalists need content. Depending on what they cover, they might need stories, experts, interviews, data, case studies, opinions, products, photographs or interesting people. PR can provide all of those things. Muck Rack's 2026 State of Journalism research found that 86% of journalists say at least some of their published stories start with a PR pitch, so the idea that journalists simply hate PR pitches isn't true. What they tend to dislike are pitches that aren't useful to them.
The problem is usually that the thing a business wants to talk about isn't necessarily the thing a journalist wants to write about. Those two things can overlap, of course, but the skill is finding where they overlap and then making that obvious.
Here are some of the mistakes I see businesses making most often:
1. The little black book is overrated
I've never really bought into the idea that the secret to PR is having a mysterious little black book full of journalists. Relationships help, of course they do. There are journalists I've known for years who I can WhatsApp and say, "We sent you something yesterday. Is it one for you?" Sometimes they'll tell me they haven't seen it and take another look. That is useful, but it only takes you so far.
What has never happened, in more than 11 years of doing this, is a journalist writing a story they didn't want to write simply because they were doing me a favour. That is why I think PR is much more content led than relationship led.
Knowing a journalist can get your pitch another look, but it cannot make a bad story good. A journalist still has an editor, an audience and their own judgement to think about. If they work online, they may also have traffic and engagement targets. Their job isn't to keep their PR contacts happy.
Some PR advice puts a lot of emphasis on networking with journalists before approaching them. There can certainly be value in that, and Brainz has previously published some good advice about pitching businesses to the media. I just wouldn't make the relationship the main event.
If you have something genuinely relevant for a journalist, you don't need to spend six months liking their LinkedIn posts before you're allowed to email them. You need something worth sending.
2. Make the subject obvious
When somebody is scanning hundreds of emails, clarity matters far more than cleverness. I always wanted to know what I was being pitched, and one of my frustrations was a subject line along the lines of "Exciting opportunity for you!"
What does that mean? Is it an interview, an expert, a review, an event or a story? Are you trying to sell me something? If I have to open the email simply to work out what you're offering, you've already made the process harder than it needs to be. Most journalists aren't sitting around hoping somebody will make their inbox more mysterious.
Personally, I like very obvious subject lines. If you've got an expert, tell me there's an expert. If somebody is available for interview, say so. If you want me to review something, make that clear. If you have a story, give me enough of the story in the subject line to decide whether I might care.
The same applies to the opening of the email. You don't need three paragraphs telling me when the company was founded, what its mission is and how passionate the team are before finally revealing why you've contacted me. If the interesting bit is buried, there's a good chance the journalist will never reach it.
3. Your announcement isn't automatically news
PR inboxes are full of "exciting announcements", but quite a lot of them aren't terribly exciting outside the company making them. A new website might have taken your team nine months to build. That doesn't necessarily make it a news story.
You've hired somebody. Great, but why would a reader care? Your company has turned ten. That's a lovely milestone for the business, but what is the story for everybody else?
This doesn't mean those things can never generate coverage. Sometimes they can, but usually there needs to be something more. Maybe the appointment says something interesting about where an industry is going. Maybe the business has grown from somebody's kitchen table into a multimillion pound company in ten years. Maybe the new product solves a problem everybody is suddenly talking about. Maybe the person behind the business has a much better story than the announcement itself.
One of the most useful things you can do in PR is separate "this matters to us" from "this might matter to them". They are different tests, and confusing the two is one of the easiest ways to end up with a pitch nobody wants.
4. Stop pitching everyone
I used to receive a lot of pitches that had very little to do with anything I actually wrote about, and it was usually obvious that somebody had found an email address in a database, added it to a large list and pressed send. I don't think there's anything wrong with sending a pitch to a decent number of journalists when the story genuinely warrants it. The problem is relevance.
Muck Rack's 2026 research found that 43% of journalists say they seldom receive pitches that match what they cover, while another 4% say they never do. That's quite poor when you think about how basic relevance should be to the process.
You don't need to know a journalist's life story before emailing them, and you certainly don't need to reference an article they wrote in 2019 just to prove you've done your research. But you should have a reasonable idea of what they actually cover. Otherwise, not only is that particular email likely to be ignored, but you risk becoming somebody whose emails get ignored automatically.
If I receive five irrelevant pitches from the same person, I'm probably not approaching the sixth one with much optimism. I'd rather send a story to 30 journalists who could genuinely use it than 300 who couldn't.
5. Don't make journalists work
Some pitches turn something fairly straightforward into hard work. The email is enormous. There's a brochure attached. There are 12 links. There's a link to the homepage, another to the founder's LinkedIn, another to a YouTube video, another to a Dropbox folder and several more to pages you apparently need to read before you'll understand what is going on.
Most journalists are not going to do all of that. The email itself should give them enough information to decide whether they are interested. If you want to include one useful link where they can access good images, further details or supporting material, that's fine. In fact, that can be very helpful.
The journalist just shouldn't need to conduct an investigation to discover what they're being offered. The same goes for length.
Muck Rack found that 69% of journalists prefer pitches to be under 200 words, which doesn't surprise me at all. You don't always need to fit every piece of information into the first pitch. The first job is to get the journalist interested enough to want more. If they then want the research, photographs, full interview, extra statistics or a 900 word biography, you can send it.
6. Speed really matters
People underestimate how quickly journalism moves. Let's say a journalist is writing something this afternoon and needs an expert. You happen to know the world's greatest authority on the subject, but they can't answer until tomorrow. I have somebody who's suitably qualified, understands the issue and can give a useful answer in the next 20 minutes. Very often, my person is more useful to the journalist.
That's particularly true with expert commentary and reactive PR. Being the best possible expert in theory isn't much help if the article has already been filed by the time you respond.
I've seen businesses take several days to approve something that needed to be with a journalist that afternoon. By the time it comes back, it can be beautifully written, carefully approved and completely useless.
Journalists have deadlines. Stories move. News changes. Editors decide they want a different angle. Somebody else responds first. If it's a reactive opportunity, you usually need to respond quickly enough for the journalist to still be able to use it.
You don't need to drop everything for every media request that comes in, but you do need to recognise when an opportunity has a shelf life measured in hours rather than days.
7. Stop chasing journalists
This is probably where I differ most from a lot of standard PR advice. I'm not a huge believer in constantly following up with journalists who haven't replied.
When I was a journalist, I received the email. Emailing me again to say, "Just bumping this to the top of your inbox" didn't suddenly make the story more interesting.
There are exceptions. If you've got important new information, that's different. If there's a genuine deadline, tell them. If you know the journalist and think they may simply have missed something that's very relevant to them, you might want to check.
But repeatedly asking whether somebody has seen an email isn't much of a strategy. I'd usually rather try somebody else, change the angle, find another opportunity or come back to that journalist later with something they might actually want.
The goal isn't to wear somebody down until they finally agree to write about you. I'd much rather journalists get used to receiving useful things from me, because then, when my name appears in their inbox, there is at least a decent chance they'll take a look.
Relationships still have value
None of this means I think relationships are pointless. Quite the opposite. I just think good media relationships tend to come from being useful rather than from trying to manufacture friendships because you want coverage.
Years ago, I represented a 90s themed brunch and invited an intern from Cosmopolitan to come and review it. She was very honest with me. She said she couldn't promise any coverage, but if we were still willing to have her, she'd really like to come.
We said yes. She came along, had a great time, and later messaged me to say they were going to give the brunch a double page feature.
We hadn't made her attendance conditional on coverage. There was no agreement, and I didn't spend the afternoon trying to persuade her to write something. We simply offered her something she wanted to experience, and something positive came from it.
That is what I mean when I say relationships can help. Being helpful, fair and easy to deal with can lead to opportunities later. It is very different from believing a journalist owes you editorial coverage because you've taken them for lunch or known them for ten years.
Think like the person receiving it
If you're struggling to get media coverage, try looking at your pitch without thinking like the business owner for a moment. Imagine you've just opened an inbox with several hundred unread emails.
Does the subject line tell you what's being offered? Is it relevant to something you cover? Why would your audience care? Why does it matter now? Can you see the story without digging for it? Could you actually do something useful with what you've been given?
If the answer to those questions is yes, you're already in a much stronger position. Small businesses don't necessarily need huge budgets or years of media connections to get coverage either. There are plenty of ways to get published in the media as a small business if you understand what you have to offer.
PR isn't about convincing a journalist that your company deserves some publicity. Journalists aren't a free advertising service.
It's about finding the point where something your business genuinely has to offer meets something a journalist genuinely needs. To me, that's always been the simplest way to understand media relations.
If you'd like help finding the stories, expertise and media opportunities already sitting inside your business, you can find out more at Fair Public Relations.
Read more from Jordan Baker
Jordan Baker, PR Agency Founder
Jordan Baker is the founder of Fair Public Relations, a founder-led, journalist-led PR agency working with founders, experts, professional services firms and growing businesses across the UK, US and Canada. A former UK national journalist, Jordan has more than a decade of experience in public relations, media relations and earned media. He founded the agency in London in 2015 and remains directly involved in client strategy, positioning and campaign direction. His work focuses on helping credible people and businesses turn their expertise, stories and ideas into meaningful media opportunities.
