Editing tricks to upgrade your pitch

Why brutal cuts and thinking like an editor will help you get a "yes"

Back when I was training to be a journalist, I would lovingly craft a 500-word story at my tutor’s request - and then as soon as I’d submitted it, he’d say: “Right, cut it down to a 50-word nib [news in brief].”

The process was brutal. You’d have put so much effort into building up a full-length news story you were proud of, only to be immediately told to tear it up and reduce it to a couple of sentences.

But it taught me a really important lesson: how to distill a complex story down to its essence.

It also taught me that the editing process can be both ruthless and soul-destroying, something I’m grateful I was prepared for before I was thrown into a real newsroom!

When you’re putting together a pitch, you often have to summarise broad, abstract or complex stories in just one email. But the more concise and to-the-point you can make your email, the more likely you are to have success with your pitch.

It’s a metaphor… Photo by Tim Umphreys on Unsplash

It’s not just me who thinks so. A recent analysis of more than 5million PR pitch emails by Buzzstream found emails under 300 words long were more likely to be opened and twice as likely to get a reply from journalists. (More on why this might be the case below…)

But as I’ve said before, you also need to ensure your email contains everything a journalist needs to make it as easy as possible for them to say “yes” to your pitch. I personally get very annoyed by pitch emails which ask me to “get in touch” if I want all the information - as a general rule, journalists’ inboxes are inundated and they don’t have time for this.

So how can you streamline your pitch, without losing anything important? Here are four techniques I use on my own pitches to editors, which you can try with yours: