Earned Media Is Getting Harder. But “Pitch More” Isn’t the Answer.

There’s a conversation that happens in almost every PR team I’ve ever been part of. Someone observes that earned media is getting harder to secure. Journalist headcount is shrinking. Beats are consolidating. Response rates are falling.

All true. All accurate.

And then comes the response that makes me want to quietly leave the room.

“We need to pitch more.”

I’ve spent a decade in communications agency floors, corporate boardrooms, everything in between and the one thing that has remained stubbornly constant is this: when earned media gets harder, the industry’s instinct is to work harder at the same thing. Not smarter. Just harder.

More pitches. Bigger lists. Higher outreach frequency. As if volume were the problem, and more volume was the solution.

It isn’t. And I think it’s quietly doing real damage to journalist relationships, to the quality of communications work, and to how PR is perceived by the business functions.

What “harder” actually looks like on the ground

When I started out, a well-crafted pitch to the right journalist, sent at the right time, with a genuine hook, could reliably get a response. Not always a yes. But a response. Which was itself a relationship.

Today, journalists at major publications are fielding hundreds of pitches a week, covering two or three beats, and filing more content than ever for leaner teams. The math is against you before you’ve written a subject line.

Meanwhile, the media landscape has fragmented. A placement that felt impossible five years ago might now be achievable but the publication carrying it may not move the needle the way it once did. Audiences have dispersed. Authority has diluted. Readers are more sceptical of what feels organic and what doesn’t, the lines between editorial and advertorial have blurred, adding to the pain of landing the stories that create perception and trust.

And yet, most teams are still running a broadcast-era model: identify a message, build a list, send a pitch, follow up, repeat. Volume goes up. Returns go down. And when returns go down, more volume is pushed out . A loop with no learning and no real end.

My take here: We have confused activity with strategy. And that confusion has been expensive.

The actual problem

Somewhere along the way, PR internalised the idea that earned media was primarily a function of relationships and persistence. Know enough journalists, follow up enough times, and coverage would come.

And I am not saying that’s wrong, in fact that’s the foundation! Relationships do matter, they always will. But persistence without genuine story value was never a strategy. It was just noise with a contact sheet.

The story that earns coverage today needs to do something a press release was never designed to do: give a journalist a reason to care that has nothing to do with your brand. It needs to be about something larger… a trend, a tension, a cultural shift, a real human angle and your brand or spokesperson needs to genuinely illuminate that thing. Not just be present in the room where it’s being discussed.

That’s a different brief entirely. It requires thinking like an editor, not a marketer. It means knowing what a journalist is actually working on, what their readers care about, and how your story creates value for both of them. It requires intellectual honesty about whether you have something genuinely worth saying, and the courage to admit when you don’t.

That’s hard. It doesn’t scale the way a mass pitch does. It doesn’t fit neatly into a weekly activity report. Which is probably why it gets avoided.

Three things that have actually worked for me.

Do your homework before you do your outreach. Even without an existing relationship, spend real time understanding what a journalist covers, how they cover it, and where you can add something to their beat, not just interrupt it. A note that says here are five things my spokesperson can discuss that are genuinely relevant to what you write about is worth fifty templated pitches. It signals respect for their work. That signal lands. And probably becomes your first step in building a larger safety net, when things go south.

Be useful before you need something. The journalist relationships that have saved me in difficult moments, the ones where I needed a favour, needed a story steered, needed someone to hear me out, were built over months of being a non-transactional presence. Flagging a story that had nothing to do with my brand. Connecting a source. Getting a commentary from a spokesperson without direct relevance, Sending something interesting with no ask attached. You cannot manufacture this at a quarterly planning meeting. But once it exists, it’s one of the most valuable things a communications professional can have.

Start with the world, not the brand. The best pitches I’ve ever sent, and the ones that landed almost always started with here is what is happening in the world right now (establish a trend, cultural shift, human emotion etc), and here is where our perspective adds something credible and interesting to that conversation. Not, here is what our brand wants to say. That inversion sounds obvious. It is genuinely difficult to institutionalise, because it requires someone willing to say “this isn’t a story yet” and leadership willing to hear it.

A note for anyone early in their career

If your pitches aren’t landing, it’s almost certainly not because you’re not sending enough of them.

Read the publications you’re targeting, not just the latest issue, the last six months. Understand what stories they actually commission. Have enough data to approach a journalist in an event and initiate “so called” but much needed — small talks which compliment them about their last well crafted story. Write pitches that solve a journalist’s problem, not just your brand’s. And start building relationships before you need them. The communicators who seem to “get lucky” with coverage have usually been working quietly toward it for years.

What we should look at changing…

Some of this is on individual practitioners. But a lot of it is structural.

PR teams need to be measured on the quality of coverage, which means leadership needs to stop asking “how many clips?” and start asking “what did this change?” Agency models that reward activity output over strategic value are incentivising exactly the wrong things. And the industry needs to be honest that a 500-name media list with a templated pitch is not a strategy. It’s a hope.

The media landscape is not going to get easier. Newsrooms are not going to grow back. Journalists are not going to become more tolerant of low-value pitches.

The only real adaptation is to get genuinely better at what earned media was always supposed to require: a story worth telling, told to the right person, at the right time, in a way that makes their job easier, not harder.

More pitches won’t get us there.

Better thinking will.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — The author has spent a decade in communications across agencies, corporates, consultancy and all things in between — and has sent more bad pitches than she’d like to admit.