Understanding a publication's audience before pitching
Launch library · evergreen read
Every publication exists because it serves a particular kind of reader with particular concerns, and a pitch that quietly ignores this simply asks a journalist to justify coverage to an audience the pitch itself never actually considered in the first place at all, even when a simpler, faster shortcut is sitting right there.
Reading several recent articles before writing to anyone reveals far more than a masthead's stated remit ever could on its own, showing the actual tone in regular use, the level of technical detail assumed, and the kinds of stories that recur most often, long before any formal review of the work takes place.
A story angle that suits one masthead's readers can fall completely flat with another covering the same broad industry, because the underlying question each audience is really asking, what does this mean for me personally, differs noticeably from title to title, especially when several teams are working from different assumptions.
Practitioners who skip this step tend to send the same pitch everywhere without adjustment and then wonder why response rates stay stubbornly low, when the real problem was never the story itself but the failure to match it to a reader, even in the smallest and least visible of organisations.