pitching Archives - Clapperton Media

PR agencies large and small are under constant pressure to deliver results efficiently. Yet many teams find that one task quietly drains far more time and energy than they realise: ineffective media pitching.

For many agencies and in-house teams, the cycle is all too familiar. Drafts that don’t quite land. Endless rewrites. Promising stories that somehow never make it out of the inbox. Hours lost to a process that should take minutes, and opportunities slipping away simply because the initial pitch missed the mark. Journalists just don’t care, hence the shruggy image.

At Clapperton Media Training, this is exactly the problem our Pitch Perfect session is designed to solve.

An Investment in Skills — and in Efficiency

When PR managers send junior colleagues to our masterclasses, they’re not just supporting early-career development. They are strengthening their own pipeline. Stronger pitching skills mean fewer rewrites, fewer dead ends and fewer hours spent salvaging work that was never likely to succeed.

This isn’t just training. It’s an operational upgrade.

What Better Pitching Really Delivers

Our training helps delegates understand:

How journalists actually think — and what makes them respond.
What to cut from a pitch to avoid instant deletion.
How to spot weaknesses before the email is ever sent.
How to build long-term media relationships rather than chasing one-off wins.

The result?
Managers spend less time correcting and amending pitches. Success rates increase. Junior staff gain the confidence to craft smarter, tighter, more relevant story ideas. Teams become faster, sharper and more aligned with what journalists genuinely need.

A single story placement can be a success — but long-term relationships built on intelligent, relevant pitching are far more valuable. Our sessions are designed to help PR teams move from the former to the latter.

Upcoming Pitching Masterclass — 8 December

Clapperton Media Training still has places available on our 8th December morning and afternoon courses in London.

For agencies asking themselves where their time and energy are disappearing, this is often the most effective place to start.

For details, or to reserve a place, simply get in touch.

One of lead trainer Guy’s favourite games when training junior PR people to pitch to journalists, if not his absolute favourite, is to pull out his phone. He never knows what he’ll find because he’s looking at emails that have come in, often since the session started.

He has a look to see who’s been targeting well and whether there are any completely irrelevant pitches, stuff that he would never have written about in around 35 years of journalism (this doesn’t mean they’re poor products or whatever, just that he’s not the right journalist and never was).

So he thought he’d try the same trick just before recording a video and see what happened…

Newsjacking is something you’ll have seen. You might not be aware of the term but you’ll be familiar with the principle. You take a current event and you twist whatever announcement you want to make to fit it.

There was a lot of it about a couple of years ago. Journalists had press release after press release that would start “As we emerge from Covid…” or “In these difficult times”.

You can see why people do it. They want to seem current and relevant and newsjacking is a good way to do it. Today (Wednesday 19th July 2023 just to date this piece when you read it) we’ve read one person’s newsletter/tip sheet that includes leadership tips taken from Novak Djokovic’s tennis style. There are still a lot of people making tenuous links to Ukraine when they write about leadership or adversity.

Lighter examples might seem less risky. A few weeks back speakers were talking about wheeling out your best stories rather than relying on the new stuff and linking it to Glastonbury. We were almost tempted to suggest blur made quite a statement by kicking off their Wembley gigs (where our lead trainer Guy took the picture at the head of this blog, you might have wondered about its relevance) with a song from the new album rather than playing it safe.

There is a drawback to newsjacking though. It’s what stopped us.

Newsjacking needs to stand out

When we go into one of our regular clients to help with their new intake of PR people our focus is to help with pitching skills. One of the exercises we do is to get people to read out a pitch they’ve sent to journalists, which we then critique.

A year ago or so most of the pitches started off, as we’ve outlined above, with something about Covid.

This will have seemed an excellent idea when the writer was putting it together. It drew on shared experience. Everyone went through it. Everyone had a view. In the same way, maybe not everyone is a tennis fan but most people will have been aware of the Wimbledon tournament. So these young PR people set about relating their pitches to emerging from Covid…

…and in doing so threw all of their chances of standing out away with a few keystrokes. Sitting on the other side – and Guy still produces his podcast (relaunching in September, thanks for asking) so he does get pitches – we’d seen about five “Covid” pitches before we’d even come into the office.

Likewise if you scan Linkedin from the last couple of days you’ll find quite a bit on tennis. In a few weeks’ time as the women’s football world cup enters the more advanced stages you can expect to see a lot about teamwork. Extended cricketing metaphors are going to abound over the next few days.

And from the journalist’s point of view all of these pitches are going to look the same. None will stand out.

It’s like a game of chess (we are enjoying our tenuously-linked images today). You might think of a move that looks good to you. You might think “That’s good enough, it’ll do”. Only…everyone else will have anticipated it. Your story, no matter how good, is just going to look like one of the many. So, as you might if you wanted to improve your chess, look critically at your first move or first draft of your pitch – and if it looks too samey, see if there’s a better one.

Details of our pitching masterclass for public relations executives are on this link.