Spotlight Communications, LLC

I’ve been reading a book on pitching, and one story stopped me cold. It’s about an e-reader launch that should have required elaborate pitches, detailed spec sheets, and carefully crafted positioning. Instead, the PR person sent three-sentence emails that outperformed everything else—and got reporters lining up to talk to the CEO.

Here’s what those emails said: It’s cheaper than a Kindle. It comes in multiple colors. You can try one yourself—when can we meet?

That’s it. No promises of “revolutionizing the reading experience.” No “I hope this email finds you well.” Just three facts that a reader would actually care about, written like how a normal person would say them. And it worked better than any of the fancy pitches that came before.

Why simple beats clever

This pitch works because it answers the only question that matters: What’s in it for the readers that journalist is trying to reach? Not what’s impressive about the company or how many years of R&D went into the product. Just the facts: the price point that undercuts the market leader, the colors that make it stand out, and the immediate opportunity to get hands-on access. Those are the things that help a reporter write a story their readers will click on. Why? Because those are the things that a reader cares about the most. 

What this taught me is that the reader determines the pitch, not your marketing team’s positioning document or your PR team’s messaging document. Don’t get me wrong, those are all very important when you need to teach your CEO or leadership team message discipline, which is a problem a lot of them has. But that’s a story for another day. 

When you are writing a pitch, the goal isn’t to communicate everything all at once—that’s the trap I kept falling into early on and still struggles with from time to time. When pitching, your job is to get the journalist to do one specific thing. And in order for that to happen, you need to make it easy for them to say yes.

Put yourself in their inbox for 30 seconds

Close your eyes and picture a typical reporter in today’s newsroom. They’re under tight deadlines, overworked, and pressured to produce stories that will attract or retain the outlet/magazine’s readership. They’re in the middle of their day staring at 250 unread emails, and they have maybe 30 seconds to decide if yours is worth opening. They don’t care about your company’s origin story unless it directly helps them write a better article.

At a journalist convention this year, I was sitting next to an Associated Press reporter during a workshop who gave emails whose title attracted them a solid 5 seconds before they swiped left. 

So what would make them stop swiping? Not a four-paragraph wind-up about the company’s mission and values. Not your client’s credentials before you get to the actual news. The thing you’d care about, if you’re in their shoes, is “Are there any concrete details that tell me “why should my audience care about this?”

A framework that actually helps

If you’re stuck on how to distill your pitch down to what matters, there’s a simple framework that works: [Company X] is the [familiar thing Y] for [new context Z]. 

For example: X was the Y for Z

• Instagram was the Facebook for pictures.
• Airbnb was the Craigslist for spare rooms. 

But this isn’t just about creating a catchy comparison, it’s about anchoring your client to something the reporter and their readers already understand.

This works because you’re doing the cognitive heavy lifting for them. When you say “we’re the Uber for dog walking,” the reporter immediately knows the business model, the target audience, and probably the controversy they’ll need to address in their story. They don’t have to spend mental energy figuring out how this new product fits into the bigger picture or which trends matter most to their readers. You’ve handed them the frame, and now they just need to fill in the details.

The same principle applies when you’re pitching thought leadership. If your client has a unique take on remote work, don’t make the reporter connect the dots between your client’s background and why their opinion matters. Tell them upfront: “As someone who built a distributed team before it was trendy, here’s why the return-to-office mandates are missing the point.” You’ve just inserted your client into a conversation their readers are already having, and you’ve made it easy to see why this perspective adds something new.

You can layer in a unique angle if you have one—maybe the founder’s backstory is genuinely compelling, or the timing ties into a bigger trend, or you’ve got a contrarian take that challenges conventional wisdom. But start with clarity first. Give them the comparison that makes the rest of the pitch make sense.

What you’re actually trying to accomplish

The goal of pitching is to get in and out as quickly as possible with the result you want. You’re not there to educate them on your entire industry. You’re there to get them to take one small, easy action—and that action should be something they can say yes to without thinking too hard about it. 

So before you hit send on your next pitch, ask yourself: If this reporter has 30 seconds and 250 emails competing for their attention, did I just make their job easier—or did I give them more work to do?