We turn down roughly half the Digital PR requests that come to us — not because we’re at capacity, but because half of what gets requested isn’t a story, and pitching it anyway would just teach every journalist on our media list to ignore the next email from us too.
What a request we decline usually sounds like
“Can we get some coverage around our new feature launch.” “Can we get on a ‘best tools for X’ roundup.” “Can we do a data study that ties back to the product.” Each of those is a reasonable business goal and none of them is, on its own, a story — they’re outcomes a client wants, described as if describing them hard enough makes them newsworthy. A journalist reads dozens of these a day and has gotten fast at recognizing the shape: client name in the first sentence, product benefit in the second, “we’d love to explore coverage” by the third. It reads as a request for free advertising, because that’s structurally what it is, and it gets filtered before the second paragraph.
What we say yes to
A client with a genuinely counterintuitive, defensible opinion about their own industry — something they’d say even if it made a competitor’s product look better by comparison. A real, verifiable first: first company to do something specific and provable, not “one of the first.” A data set that reveals something surprising even to people inside the category, gathered honestly rather than shaped to produce a pre-decided headline. All three survive deleting the client’s name from the pitch entirely, because the story was never really about the client — the client just happens to be where the story came from.
The conversation this requires with clients
This means telling a client, some months, that we don’t have anything worth pitching on their behalf right now — an uncomfortable sentence for an agency to say out loud, and one most won’t. We say it anyway, because the alternative is manufacturing a mediocre pitch to justify an invoice line, and that pitch’s failure teaches the same journalists to open our next, better pitch with less attention. Selectivity isn’t a nice-to-have in this line of work. It’s the entire asset a Digital PR relationship with a journalist is built on, and it’s spent every time you send something that wastes their time.
What being selective actually buys
Fewer pitches, sent to a shorter, more carefully matched list of journalists, land at a rate that becomes obvious inside a single quarter — clients who’ve worked with agencies optimizing for pitch volume notice the difference in hit rate almost immediately. The coverage that results tends to be longer, more substantive, and more likely to include an actual quote from the client rather than a passing mention, because the journalist chose to run the story on its own merits rather than as a favor. Links were never the metric. A reader finishing the piece, and a journalist willing to open our next email, always were.