How to Pitch Journalists Like a PR Pro

• Keep your media lists to 15–20 journalists max and make sure every single one is a genuine fit before you hit send
• Target journalists who cover your topic regularly and have published within the last month — that’s your Goldilocks zone.
• Lead your pitch with one to two sentences setting up the story, followed by three bullet points with mini-headlines the journalist can visualize.
• Instead of reacting to today’s news, pitch the angle reporters will naturally need to cover two weeks from now.
• Talk to the sales team before you start pitching so the stories you go after are tied to real business goals, not just coverage metrics.

If you’ve ever sent a pitch and heard nothing back, this one’s for you.

We sat down with Carly Martinetti, co-founder of PR agency Notably, to talk about what actually makes a pitch land, and what most people are getting wrong.

Carly has spent years securing coverage in places like CNBC, Fortune, Fast Company, and Gizmodo, and her approach is pretty different from what a lot of digital PR practitioners are used to.

For starters, her media lists top out at 15 to 20 people. Not 100. (Something that you’re probably well aware of if you’ve read our spray and pray study.

In this episode, Carly breaks down how she finds the right journalists, how she structures a pitch, how she creates compelling angles even when there’s no hard news, and why sending the wrong pitch to the right reporter can cost you more than just that one placement.

Whether you’re coming at this from a traditional PR background or a digital PR and SEO angle, there’s a lot to take away here.

Below is a slightly edited transcription (with the help of AI).

Can you tell us about Featured Creature?

Carly: Yes! Blast from the past. Featured Creature is a website I started in college, so it’s been a minute. I have a passion for unique and weird animals that you’ve probably never heard of before.

At the time, no one was really giving the spotlight to animals that deserved it. The publicist in me wanted to promote the animals that needed one. So I started this website — a lot of them were endangered species, very rare, hard to find.

It’s actually where I fell in love with headline writing and coming up with story angles, because oftentimes the animals themselves weren’t traditionally that interesting, and yet I wanted to get the word out about them for conservation’s sake. Quick example: there was a caterpillar that was fuzzy and white with crazy hair.

If I wrote a headline like “White caterpillar lives in the rainforest and helps other animals survive,” it’s okay. But instead I framed it as “the Albert Einstein of caterpillars” because of the wild, crazy hair — and it took off like wildfire.

That framing laid a foundation for everything I do today, where I work with companies that are either not well known or in industries that aren’t traditionally exciting. It’s my job to figure out what story is going to skyrocket them to fame.

Vince: I love it. It’s a fantastic website. I take it it’s not active anymore?

Carly: Not these days — I’m a little busy. But honestly, I’d love to get back to it. I was thinking of launching a Substack version. If anyone listening wants that, let me know.

Vince: Do it! It’s all about the newsletter these days. I’ll put a link in the show notes. I was actually showing my kids some of the animals — they’re really into animals right now. I think it sets a great groundwork for some of what we’re going to talk about today.

Is there a difference between digital PR and traditional PR?

Carly: I think there are more similarities than differences, for sure. The biggest standout difference is that digital PR is often measured by backlinks — the number of backlinks you achieve from a campaign equals success.

That’s not the goal of traditional PR. The goal is more to get coverage in tier-one media that’s going to be brand-building and helpful to the company in some way, whether that’s expert commentary, thought leadership, or a feature story on the company or the person behind it. It’s more about the coverage and the story versus securing a link at volume.

That SEO value is the main delineation, I think — digital PR has that SEO focus, while traditional is more about brand awareness and brand building.

How has AI impacted your workflow?

Carly: It’s a good question. I do think there are elements of digital PR — more specifically around data — that we’re now leaning into more than ever. We’re telling clients: we need original research, we need original data, because that’s what’s going to rank in LLMs as the primary source. That used to be a nice-to-have, and now it’s getting close to a need-to-have. Clients still aren’t asking much for backlinks in my world — it’s more about: did we get our message across? Did we get a story in a major publication that’s going to move the needle on a business goal? So it’s not that different yet, but things are changing quickly.

Have you seen more clients interested in using PR to get into AI citations?

Carly: We still have to tell them this is even a thing. There’s a gap between awareness on the client side and how much PR people recognize that it matters.

People are hearing whispers about it, but they don’t really understand how it all works. We make it part of our story now to say: not only does PR help with brand building, brand awareness, trust, and third-party endorsements — it’s more important than ever to have that LLM through-line so you’re consistently cited and picked up.

It’s going to happen, but it hasn’t reached an inflection point yet.

Vince: That’s really interesting. It makes sense when you consider how traditional PR teams interact with brands versus digital PR teams. In our State of Digital PR report, we ask which areas of the business digital PR interacts with most closely — and it’s almost always the SEO team. The brand team and traditional PR teams are very low on that list.

Carly: We never talk to SEO — like, ever.

Vince: Which I think is a missed opportunity, honestly. The other thing we’re seeing is that because of AI, digital PR practitioners are now more able to say it’s not just about links. There was even leaked Google information a few years ago that solidified the belief that it’s not all about links. Now with AI, there’s correlated data between AI mentions and brand mentions. So people are more confidently saying it’s links and coverage now — not just links.

One of the things you mentioned was this idea of a through-line. In digital PR, success has been tied to keyword rankings. A smaller percentage focus on just brand awareness.

What metrics do you use to measure success?

Carly: We actually link up with the sales team most of the time to figure out what’s going to move the needle for them — what kind of coverage, what headline, would make their lives easier.

We start from the business goals side rather than the traditional PR metrics side. We still count things like number of hits, impressions, and domain authority, but at the end of the day, if you can tie what PR is doing to help the sales team be better at their job, that’s the best outcome.

I end up talking to everyone from the CEO to the CMO to the head of sales to figure out where the gaps are.

Where is the sales team getting pushback? Is there a competitor perceived as more accessible?

If we can get a story that corrects that narrative, that’s a win. That also lets us be very strategic with the types of coverage we secure, the publications, and the audiences we’re targeting.

Always start there — if you’re doing traditional PR, make sure you align on what success looks like early and often, otherwise you’re setting yourself up for failure.

What services do you offer most frequently, and what tends to be most effective?

Carly: Media relations is what we do most frequently and most effectively — that’s number one.

But when I say media relations, I don’t mean the traditional spray-and-pray approach of blasting out press releases and hoping someone bites.

We’re very targeted.

Everything is almost one-to-one.

I’ll spend 30 to 40 minutes writing a single pitch to a single reporter because the hit rate is so much higher when you actually take the time to research them and what they’ve written about.

A lot of firms are still stuck in the blast-everything mode, but I’ve found the targeted approach is more effective even if it takes more time. That’s our reputation — consistently delivering higher-tier coverage because of how we work.

Hero content comes up frequently too, but more as a nice-to-have. There are so many other ways to get commentary and coverage that we don’t always need it.

It often comes down to client budget and whether they want to invest the time and energy, especially for more complex interactive pieces.

We very rarely see that as a core part of our process.

Vince: You brought up spray-and-pray, which is basically why we built List IQ — the research shows hyper-relevant, personalized pitches dramatically outperform blasting to hundreds of journalists.

Can you walk me through how you build a media list?

Carly: I’m pretty old school — I basically just use Google.

What I’ll do is, say I’m working with a client in the biometric authentication space — I’ll look up anyone who has recently written on a topic I want the client to weigh in on.

I put the keywords in quotes along with a specific publication, like “site:publication.com,” to really hone in on which writers within that publication most frequently cover that topic or an adjacent one.

Adjacent topics are actually often more effective — if a reporter just wrote on a topic, they’re not going to write about the same thing the next day. So I look for that Goldilocks zone: interested in the topic, writes about it frequently, and has published within the last month so I know they’re actively on the beat.

I bucket them out and spend the most time on the pitches I think are the best fit, then tier them down to the ones I’m 50-50 on. My lists are short — 15 to 20 contacts maximum per pitch. That keeps me super targeted.

Vince: I love the Goldilocks concept. I see a lot of people operating in the 100-to-200 journalists-per-pitch zone, and it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Carly: Well, it also hurts you in the long run. If you pitch someone something that’s completely wrong for them, and then next time you actually do have a great fit, they’re already turned off. I always think about my future self — is this worth trading on my reputation for, or am I better off going to someone else who’s a better fit right now and saving this person for when it’s a perfect match?

Vince: Yes — you’re ruining your reputation with that reporter.

I think the reason a lot of digital PR agencies fall into that trap is because they’re coming at it from an SEO perspective and it’s very much metrics-based — links and quantity over quality.

On top of that, there’s a huge influx of link builders now positioning themselves as digital PRs, plus all the AI-generated slop pitches flooding journalists’ inboxes. So the ones who can’t get to that Goldilocks zone are just adding to the noise.

Carly: Exactly.

Vince: You mentioned your lists are 15 to 20 for campaigns where you’re creating the angle.

How do you benchmark success?

Carly: It depends on the pitch.

The 15 to 20 is for when there’s no hard news and I’m essentially inventing the angle.

When it’s a larger campaign or broader message, the list might be bigger. But for those smaller, targeted lists, it’s all about making sure those people are genuinely the right people.

Vince: Can you tease out the idea of making news where there is none — pitching a feature angle — versus piggybacking on a trend where the journalist can more easily fit it into their existing coverage?

How do you make news when there is none?

Carly: I actually think it’s a hybrid approach. I’ll read a journalist’s recent work and try to figure out where the gap is — what’s the next iteration of the story they’ve been covering?

During the pandemic, for example, I had a client who ran women’s networking events.

Everyone was talking about remote work in those early days — that was the only conversation. I thought: once they get past the fundamentals of being remote, they’re going to start asking how to do specific things remotely. Networking was one of them.

Within the first week and a half to two weeks of the pandemic, I went out with pitches to CNBC, Fortune, Fast Company — all the tier ones — with “here’s how to network in the age of remote.”

I got hits in all of them because no one was thinking one step ahead yet. If you can put yourself in that mindset — here’s what the news is anchored on today, but what will it be anchored on two weeks from now based on that? — that’s how you find the white space.

And even if you don’t have the answer from your client, you can go to them and say, hypothetically, what do you think will happen?

That’s really all thought leadership is — working in hypotheticals with a strong point of view about where the story goes next.

Vince: How much information do you give the journalist? I’m assuming you’re reaching out to feature writers, not breaking news reporters?

How much information do you give a journalist when trying to set up an interview?

Carly: Right — more advice and thought leadership pieces.

As for the pitch itself, it’s really just: one to two sentences setting up the premise of the story, then an introduction of who the expert is and why they’re relevant with a few proof points, and then three bullet points max of what they could talk about and why it’s relevant to their audience right now.

I try to have mini-headlines within those bullet points.

That way the journalist can see, in their mind’s eye, if I went with this person, here are all the angles that could come out of the interview. It’s no more than 250 words.

Vince: And you’re pitching with the goal of setting up an interview, not handing them everything they need to write the piece themselves?

Carly: Always an interview, yes.

Though it does depend on the situation. I work with a trademark attorney where our play is to have his analysis already written and posted on his blog, and then we bring the news to the reporter with a link to the blog.

I’m pitching breaking news with him, so those reporters don’t always have time to hop on the phone.

In that case, it makes more sense to have everything packaged neatly so they don’t have to interact with me if they don’t want to.

I literally had a story run in Gizmodo today — I pitched the reporter, never heard back from him, never knew if he was going to write anything, and then it showed up in my Google Alerts this morning.

Great feeling.

But it really is a two-way street with the client too.

That trademark attorney will actually do the analysis himself, which gives us great fodder.

If clients don’t have the bandwidth or willingness to do that, it hurts us, because I can’t do that analysis myself.

Vince: That makes sense.

And there’s an important distinction between pitching a breaking news reporter versus a beat reporter.

A lot of people get hung up on this — they might be pitching a tech reporter who covers breaking news, but the client’s story isn’t really news.

What makes something breaking news in your view?

Carly: With the trademark attorney, he’s spotting filings in real time — things that would be of interest to media.

If Tesla files a trademark for something, we’re the first to jump on it with an analysis of what it actually means, with a link to the filing. That’s happening in real time, we’ve got the scoop essentially.

Versus something evergreen like “why brands should prioritize trademarking their logos before they launch” — that’s not breaking news.

Vince: What about the middle ground — like a survey that says 80% of brands don’t have a trademark attorney? Interesting but not timely?

Carly: Those are the hardest pitches to land, honestly.

There’s no real reason to write about it today.

That’s where I’m less excited. The only way they work is if a reporter coincidentally happens to be working on a story and needs a stat to support it.

Honestly, I hate surveys.

I think they did work back in the day, but not anymore — unless you’re surveying 5,000 enterprise leaders on a very specific, timely news hook. Otherwise it’s a tough go.

And the other problem is that clients always want the survey results to basically say “our product is the answer,” which also won’t work.

It’s always a tug of war getting them to understand that the data has to be interesting and tangentially related to what they do, but it can’t be so on the nose that it’s just self-promotion.

What didn’t I ask you that you want to make sure we cover?

Carly: The one thing that’s top of mind for me — I actually read a post on Reddit in the PR subreddit about it this morning — is that client demands seem to be greater than they’ve ever been.

Day one, clients come in and say “I need multiple tier-one pieces within the first month.” There’s just not a lot of acknowledgment of how hard it is to get that level of coverage that quickly with a company that isn’t already well known.

You’re working from square one — you really have to establish that this is a brand worth paying attention to, someone with an interesting point of view.

I think in the age of AI, people are getting accustomed to things being instant. They think: I’m going to pay you and that’s the end of it. And I wish it worked that way.

I wish I could snap my fingers and have Bloomberg write about you.

But it’s just not realistic.

As an industry, we need to talk more about the ins and outs of how securing coverage actually comes about, the effort that goes into it, and that it’s not just about sending out a million emails. Hopefully that leads to clients being a little more grateful when you do get those wins — they should be just as excited as the agency is.