3 Top Tips for Building Better Media Relationships (Without Being Annoying)

The relationships you create and maintain with reporters is an often-overlooked facet of media relations that can make or break whether your pitch gets picked up. Knowing what journalists need and the behaviors you need to avoid that may hurt those relationships is critical.

After working as a professional journalist for five years, I left the field to begin my career in public relations. I quickly realized that working on the other side of the news desk has given me a huge advantage by understanding how reporters work and what they need.

This post will highlight how you can maintain and build successful relationships with reporters — and what not to do if you want to stay on their good side.

1) Do Your Homework Before You Pitch

This may seem obvious, but it’s one of the main reasons why most pitches get ignored. Don’t just blast out an email to dozens of random reporters — actually read their work and curate a list of journalists who would actually make sense to pitch.

What’s their beat? What’s their tone? What topics does their outlet usually cover, and what does their audience care about? When you can match your pitch to their style and audience, you go from “just another annoying flack” to someone they might want to hear from again. I can’t overstate the massive number of pitches I used to get from PR professionals who clearly didn’t bother to do their research. If you’re pitching an agriculture story to a finance story (with no finance angle in sight), you’re not only wasting the outlet’s time, you’re damaging your reputation.

2) Respect Their Time And Deadlines

A reporter’s life revolves around deadlines, whether it’s putting a package together in time for the 10 p.m. news or filing a story for the Sunday paper. In today’s landscape of shrinking newsrooms, journalists often need to turn around multiple stories daily, or else face consequences from their editors. This is where you can help.

If you’re pitching an expert source, for example, journalists love if your outreach email indicates that they’re willing and available to take interviews within a certain time window. This lets them know quickly whether it’s a story they can tackle in time to meet their deadline that day (or plan on for later in the week).

If a reporter responds to your pitch that they would like to arrange an interview, be ready and available to make this happen. They don’t have time to wait for approvals from your clients are to reply to several back-and-forth emails.

3) Avoid Repeated Follow-Ups

Nothing can sour a relationship faster than being a pest. According to Cision’s 2024 State of the Media report, almost half of reporters have little tolerance for repeated follow-ups.

Reporters get it: you’re convinced you have the most interesting, fantastic story pitch that would be perfect for them to cover. It’s OK to show your excitement, but don’t kill your potential relationship by being too pushy. Remember: journalists are busy and have competing priorities, just like you. A follow up email after a couple of days to bump your pitch to the top of their inbox is fine, but avoid repeated messages, or even worse, cold calls if you don’t already know this reporter.

An example: At my first newspaper job, I got a pitch that seemed like it may be a good fit for my beat. I told the PR person I may be interested, but I would need to run the story by my editor first. Not even 30 minutes later, he called me to forcefully explain why I needed to write this story. I’ll never forget that he ended his speech with, “So, does this mean you’re giving it the green light?” It turned me off from wanting to write that story or work with his company ever in the future.