How long should I wait before pitching a new journalist?

Before Christmas we published data on MVPR that busted a bunch of myths associated with pitching journalists - and which subsequently informs how we pitch journalists on behalf of our clients.

One question - which causes arguments time and again between agencies and their clients is:

"How long should we wait before pitching this story to a journalist elsewhere?"

The commonly adopted rule for this is to wait 24 hours to give a journalist time to respond, but our data actually shows that if you don't get a response from a journalist in the first 1 - 4 hours, you should move on.

One graph that we shared, also above here, shows same day response times for pitches MVPR clients sent to journalists last year. It shows a broad cross-section of pitches and responses, where responses were received from journalists on the same day that they were pitched.

But what does the data tell us?

The graph indicates that if you're going to get a response from a journalist on the same day you pitch them - you're most likely to receive that response in the first two hours after you sent the first message.

After 2 hours has past, there is a small chance the journalist will respond, but the likelihood falls away dramatically after 4 hours.

We have tracked these response times against every type of content, from announcements, to thought leadership, to reactive commentary. Interestingly there is little difference in the results between the content types.

So how should you use this information?

One way to use this insight - is to speed up the rate at which you offer content to journalists when you're on a deadline. We know plenty of examples where PR agencies wait 24hrs before moving on to the next journalist because they don't have the data to suggest a different approach.

For journalists where the data is conclusive, we know you're losing valuable time to pitch that story elsewhere.

For more information about how we use data to improve the effectiveness of our agency work, click here.