How to Write a PR Pitch That Actually Gets a Reply

By Zach Schleien

Stop sending generic press releases. Learn the 5-part anatomy of a PR pitch that earned 200+ media placements in The New York Times, BBC, and TechCrunch.

• A PR pitch is a short email to one specific reporter, offering a story that fits the beat they already cover. It is not a press release and it is not a favor.
• It has five parts: a subject line that states the story, a first line that gets to it immediately, the angle, two or three pieces of proof, and an ask that is easy to say yes to.
• The system rests on three things: angles, targeting, and deliverability. Write one master pitch per campaign, then send it to 200 to 1,000 reporters who cover that beat.

I've earned 200+ media placements across 25+ countries, including 18 TV appearances and 52 major publications. The New York Times, BBC, TechCrunch, The Washington Post. I have never hired a PR agency. I wrote a step-by-step guide in How to Get Press Coverage Without a PR Agency (The Founder's Guide).

Over three years I wrote 100+ master pitches to get there. So when I tell you how to write a PR pitch, I'm not describing a theory. I'm describing the email I've written a hundred times.

Here's the whole thing.

What a PR Pitch Is

A PR pitch is a short email to one specific reporter offering them a story that fits the beat they already cover. That's it. It is not an announcement, it is not a press release, and it is not a request for a favor.

The difference matters more than any writing tip I can give you. A press release documents your news for anyone who wants the facts. A pitch hands one reporter a story their readers would want to read. Reporters get paid to publish stories, not to process announcements.

Early on, before I knew any of this, I sent between 20 and 40 generic press releases through company contact pages. Hours of work each. Zero replies. The fix wasn't better writing. It was sending a different kind of email to a different kind of person.

The Anatomy of a Pitch

Five parts. Keep the whole email short enough to read on a phone without scrolling much.

1. The subject line. This is the pitch for the pitch. It should say what the story is, not that you have a story. "Singles are speed dating on video while stuck at home" tells a reporter what they'd be writing. "Interview opportunity" tells them nothing.

2. The first line. Say the story immediately. Not who you are, not how much you admire their work. The reporter decides in about a sentence whether to keep reading, so spend that sentence on the story.

3. The angle. This is the reason the story exists right now. More on angles below, because this is the part that decides whether you get covered.

4. The proof. Two or three specifics that show this is real. Numbers, names, a result. "We've hosted 18,000 video speed dating events across 150 countries" does work that adjectives can't.

5. The ask. Make it easy to say yes to. One sentence I've used that got me booked on live TV: "Would you like to interview the founder?" That's the whole ask. It tells the reporter exactly what they get and exactly what happens next.

A Pitch Template You Can Copy

Fill in the brackets and cut anything that isn't doing work. This is a skeleton, not a script, so the words should end up sounding like you.

Subject: [The headline the reporter would write. State the story.] Hi [First name], [One sentence: the story. What's happening and why it matters right now.] [Two or three sentences of proof. A number, a result, a name people recognize. Whatever makes this real instead of a claim.] [One sentence connecting it to their beat: what they've covered that this fits alongside.] Would you like to interview [the founder / the person at the center of this]? [Your name] [Company, one short line] [Phone or email]

Notice what isn't in there. There's no attachment and no company history. There's also no request for a call to "explore synergies," because the reporter has exactly one decision to make: is this a story for my readers? Everything in the email should help them make it.

The Three Pillars

Everything I know about press comes down to three things. If a campaign fails, it failed at one of these.

Angles

The angle is why a reporter should write about this today. Your product existing is not an angle. Here are the types that have worked for me:

• Newsjacking. Attach your story to something reporters are already covering. When COVID hit in early 2020, I pitched one angle hard and wide: singles stuck at home were video dating on my app to find love in lockdown. I pitched essentially every journalist covering the pandemic, not just the dating and tech reporters. That timing engine sat behind our whole 2020 press surge. Another real one from my archive: when gas prices spiked, the angle became high gas prices mean fewer first dates.
• Stunt or spectacle. We built a system that detected scammers and bots on our dating app, then quietly put them in a separate fake dating pool filled with other scammers and bots. They talked to each other. We published the funniest conversations. TechCrunch and Gizmodo both covered it.
• Subject matter expertise. You know something the reporter's readers want to understand.
• Data angles. You have numbers other people don't. Our average session length was 200 seconds against Tinder's 110. That's a story.
• Cultural moments, notable investors or partnerships, celebrity attachment. Same principle. Something outside your company makes the story matter now.

Targeting

The unit is the reporter and their beat, never the outlet. It's tempting to think "I want to be in Forbes." But Forbes doesn't write anything. A specific reporter at Forbes who covers your specific niche writes things, and that reporter is who you're actually pitching.

Your press universe is every reporter who covers your niche. That can span 100 outlets, and there can be up to about 20 reporters at a single outlet who might be right. Building that list is the actual work of PR.

There's a version of this for exclusives too. One of my biggest press hits was an exclusive to Business Insider. An exclusive means offering first dibs to the single best-fit reporter on your list, then going wide after it runs. It's real value to them, which is why they take it.

Deliverability

The best pitch ever written does nothing from a spam folder. If your emails don't reach the inbox, none of the rest matters. Send them in a way that keeps your domain healthy instead of blasting from a tool that gets you flagged.

How Many Pitches to Send

This is where people get uncomfortable, so let me be direct about the actual numbers.

I write one master pitch per campaign. It takes one to two hours. Then I vary only the journalist's name and publication, and send it to 200 to 1,000 journalists who cover that beat.

Reply rates are high because every journalist gets a pitch fit to their beat. That's the part that makes the volume work. This isn't spraying the same email at strangers. It's sending a well-fit email to everyone it fits.

When my dad recovered from a severe case of COVID in 2020, I sat at the kitchen table and sent roughly 70 pitches to New York Times writers covering that beat. One of them forwarded it to the op-ed editor. The op-ed ran on April 9, 2020, hit Reddit's front page within minutes, and led to an AMA.

Then it kept going. Fox News, Good Morning America, CNN, CBS, and WABC picked up the survival story. Later waves picked up the children's health angle, then the school reopening debate, with the Washington Post following within a week. I covered this in more depth in How to Find a Good Morning America Email Contact and Get Featured.

Seventy pitches. One forward. That's what the messy version actually looks like.

You Are Not Too Early

Plenty of founders don't pitch because they think they're too small to be interesting. The record says otherwise.

My first real press win was The Washington Post covering 18percent, my mental health community, when it had about 150 members.

The BBC technology show CLICK featured Filteroff, my video dating app, when we had around 500 users and a team of two. From pitch to publication took under two weeks. The piece ran worldwide, we exploded overnight in London, and our servers crashed under the surge.

When I got The New York Times and the BBC, this was before we raised money. Early stages. That press propelled us. I don't think you need to wait.

Press also compounds. Jay Shetty mentioned my app by name on his podcast in an episode about loneliness. I never pitched him and never met him. He picked it up because of the press we'd already earned. A friend texted me: "Did you see Jay Shetty just covered you?"

The Myth Worth Killing

For a long time I believed you had to know people in the press to get press. Then a friend named Michael, who knew how to pitch, walked me through how he did it. I asked a ton of questions and started doing it myself.

You do not need connections. What lands coverage is the pitch and the angle. That's a skill, which means you can learn it, and it means the outcome is in your control.