If you’ve ever read about the five love languages, then you’ve heard of people like me – those who show their love with gifts. Lots of gifts. Nothing brings me more joy than pebbling those close to me with presents. Take a minute to fill out the love language quiz for yourself, and be sure to read more about pebbling at The Elyse Edit: “Penguin pebbling + the most misunderstood love language.”
It’s time you all got some love (and gifts!), so welcome to what I’m calling “The Twelve Weeks of Christmas” (TWOC) – because naturally, Christmas is my favorite holiday season. This year I’m celebrating harder than ever. Every Friday between now and Christmas, I’ll give away one real PR resource. No opt-in gimmicks, no “link in bio.” Just the thing itself. Each gift is something I use regularly for my tech startup clients, so everything is battle-tested and proven to work.
During the first week of Christmas, my PR pro gave to me (A cold pitch template)
I once worked with a founder who’d been cold pitching reporters for almost seven months before he ever got a (positive) response. Yes, it’s harder than ever to get attention in a crowded market, let alone stand out in a journalist’s crowded inbox. But seven months of radio silence is a lot of swinging and missing, and that can get old (and expensive) very quickly.
Here’s what 18 years of pitching has taught me: Reporters don’t ignore pitches because the news isn’t good enough. They ignore them because the pitch reads like it went to 200 other people, too: a generic subject line, an opening line about the sender instead of the reporter or their readers, and the actual news buried under adjectives.
How to fix every pitch
The fix is specificity (and ideally, brevity).
—> Reference something the reporter actually wrote.
—> State the news in one plain sentence.
—> Explain why it matters this week, not just generally. Name one detail that’s genuinely different, not a claim that it’s “revolutionary.”
—> Make a small, specific Call to Action (CTA). And, for the love of data, prove everything with facts and credible sources.
A cold pitch subject line and email template
This is the exact fill-in-the-blank template I use with clients before every cold pitch goes out. Swap in your details, and you’ve got a pitch built the same way as the ones that get responses instead of silence.
Subject line problem + fix (with data)
Most subject lines get skipped because they read like press-release headlines instead of reasons to open the email. In an analysis of 400,000 pitches, reporters opened about 46% of them but responded to only 3.43%, while pitches with short, specific subject lines saw response rates jump to 4.73% (Sword and the Script). Separately, a Muck Rack survey found that 83% of journalists want personalized pitches (PR Daily), not generic ones, so the fix is to keep it short, make it specific to that reporter or beat, and save the full story for the body.
The Email Pitch Itself
The email pitch follows the same five-beat structure every time: connect, state the news, explain the timing, offer something exclusive, then make a small ask. Here’s why each piece earns its place. Here’s the outline:
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Optional/connection line: This line is what separates you from the 200 other people in their inbox that day. A specific reference proves you actually read their work instead of blasting a list, and if you’ve pitched them before, it reminds them you’re not starting from zero.
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Line 1 (the news): Reporters are scanning, not reading, so the news has to survive in one sentence with zero decoration. Adjectives make a reporter suspicious; facts, sources, and links make them curious.
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Line 2 (why now): Without a real reason to cover this now, your pitch gets filed under “someday,” which is where most pitches die. A calendar hook, a threshold being crossed, or a deadline gives them a reason to act this week instead of eventually.
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Line 3 (the differentiated detail): This is the line that gets you covered instead of skipped: something only you can offer, not just describe. “Innovative” is an opinion nobody has to believe; a number, a name, or an exclusive is a fact they can build a story around.
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Line 4 (the small ask): A vague ask like “let me know if you’re interested” puts all the work back on the reporter, so most won’t bother. A specific, low-effort CTA is easy to say yes to because it skips the part where they have to think through logistics.
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Sign-off: Offering more background signals you’re trying to make their job easier, not rush them into a yes. It’s also the natural spot to hand them a media kit or backgrounder link, so the extra material is a click away instead of a follow-up email.
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Contact info note: Reporters work on a deadline, often from their phones, and email isn’t always the fastest way to reach you. A second option like mobile or text removes the one excuse they have for not following up when they’re ready right now.
That’s the anatomy of a pitch that actually gets read. Now let’s see it in action, back before anyone on your beat had ever heard the word “Dropbox.”
What a cold pitch looks like IRL
Let’s go back to the early days of cloud collaboration and shared storage apps, and pretend we’re cold-pitching journalists covering apps for small business. Remember, at this point, no one has ever heard of Dropbox. For this example, we are pre-launch, and we want to give journalists more information about the launch itself while also securing interviews for additional color and a demo of the app. This is what a cold pitch might look like:
Subject: Intro to stealth co.? Your article on SMBs drowning in email attachments
Hi Sarah – You’ve written about how small teams are cobbling together tools to stay organized, so I wanted to reach out ahead of an upcoming launch.
Two MIT students, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, founded a company on June 1, 2007 to fix a problem most small businesses just live with: the files that only exist on one laptop, in one email thread, or on one USB drive.
That’s a bigger risk than it sounds. A 2005 survey of 900 taxi drivers across nine cities found more than 11,300 laptops and over 31,000 Pocket PCs left behind in cabs in just six months. Any one of those could’ve been a small business’s only copy of a client file.
Houston and Ferdowsi are opening a private beta to a small group of small-business teams ahead of next year’s public launch, and briefing a handful of reporters on this beat first. Would 15 minutes this week work for a call and a live demo? I can also get you into the beta same-day to test it with your own files before it’s public.
Best, Lindsey
Mobile: 360-961-3554
Consider this newsletter my version of pebbling, just with fewer smooth stones and a lot more PR templates.
Week 2 preview: How do you tell a story people want to read?
Gift one of twelve, delivered. Next Friday brings the next one, focused on newsworthiness, so keep an eye on your inbox until then. And if you want a second set of eyes on your next pitch before it goes out, you already know where to find me. Reply anytime; I read every one.
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