How to Pitch Journalists: What 3 Writers Actually Want

By Gloria Chou — #1 Small Business PR Expert | AI Visibility Strategist

Three working journalists who write for everything from Wirecutter to Vogue to BuzzFeed, told me what makes them open a pitch, what gets deleted, and where their advice conflicts.

Table of Contents

What kind of journalist are you actually pitching?
What should you put in your subject line?
How long should an email pitch be?
Do you need to send samples to get featured?
Do you need affiliate links to get featured?
Are gift guides worth pitching?
How far in advance should you pitch?
How do you get noticed with no followers and no press?
When and how should you follow up?
Which tips came up again and again?
FAQs

I’ve interviewed a lot of journalists on the Small Business PR Podcast, and what I learned is that they don’t always agree with each other. One told me gift guides are worth chasing. Another told me they’re the hardest to get into. One writes for an outlet that bans affiliate relationships outright. Another says affiliate links help her get you in.

If you’ve been reading conflicting advice on how to pitch journalists and wondering which version is true, the answer is that they’re all true, for different people. A staff writer at a product-review site and a freelance commerce writer paid on affiliate revenue have different bosses, different incentives, and different inboxes.

This post pulls together what three of them told me.

1.Neha Tandon is a staff beauty writer at Wirecutter, which is owned by The New York Times.

2.Yasmine Singh is a freelance shopping and commerce writer whose work appears in BuzzFeed, Bustle, Elite Daily, and Scary Mommy.

3.Ruby McAuliffe Ford-Dunker is a freelance fashion, beauty, and lifestyle journalist with bylines in Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Who What Wear, and Refinery29, and she previously held staff roles at InStyle and the New York Post.

Each of them is speaking to their own experience and preferences, not on behalf of their publications.

Where they agreed, I’ve said so. Where they contradicted each other, I left the contradiction in, because knowing that the answer depends on who you’re emailing is more useful than a rule that only works half the time.

If you read one section, keep reading til section 10. Four things came up with all three of them, and those four will do more for you than any single tactic on this page.

1. What kind of journalist are you actually pitching?

“Journalist” isn’t one job.

Neha is on staff at Wirecutter. Her outlet’s business model is independent product testing, so she covers beauty, testing everything from retinol serums to scalp scrubs. She told me Wirecutter keeps things “so church and state” that she isn’t even allowed to talk to people who do affiliate.

Yasmine is freelance and writes long commerce roundups, sometimes fitting 30 to 75 products into one piece. She works in a world where, as she put it, the point is to make revenue. Affiliate links matter to her in a way they can’t matter to Neha.

Ruby is also freelance, but across several magazines. She pointed out that pitching a freelancer puts you in more than one bucket. If your product is wrong for Refinery29, it might be right for Elle, and she’s the one who can move it.

So before you write anything, work out three things about the person.

1.Staff or freelance. Staff writers cover one publication and one audience. Freelancers can place you in several.

2.Short lead or long lead. Ruby’s method: look at the history of their work. Print skews long lead. Digital and commerce move fast. When she was at InStyle, she’d get assigned a story in the morning and it would be live by 5pm.

3.Does their outlet run affiliate. This one question resolves most of the disagreements below, and you can usually answer it by reading two of their articles and checking whether the product links carry tracking or a disclosure line.

Ten minutes of this beats an hour of writing. It’s the research piece of my pitching strategies that I teach in my AI PR training, and it’s the step too many founders skip.

2. What should you put in your subject line?

One of the few places all three lined up.

Neha said to put SAMPLES in all caps if you’re offering one. Her words: it’s become industry standard and she thinks it works. It tells an editor immediately that they can request the product.

Ruby gave the wider version of the same rule. Lead with what the email actually is, in caps, then add the rest. EVENT INVITE. SAMPLE. NEW LAUNCH. She’s skimming, and she wants to know what she’s opening before she opens it.

Yasmine’s contribution was about length. She gets very long subject lines, tries to read them, and usually gives up after two or three sentences.

Neha also mentioned a tactic worth using sparingly: putting INVITE in all caps and inviting the writer to a one-on-one consult with your founder, or to a custom experience with your product. She’s done it a handful of times and said she’s never forgotten those brands. Be honest with yourself about why it works, though. It works because almost nobody does it. Save it for five dream editors, not a mail merge.

One more from Neha: write your subject line last. She writes her own headlines at the end, then pulls the strongest few words out of the body.

3. How long should an email pitch be?

Shorter than you think, and all three said so.

Neha’s exact words: “My dream is emails that are three sentences long. We’re really not reading more than that, sadly.” She also told me not to bury the lead, a phrase journalists use constantly. People should know what they’re reading about in the first sentence.

She gave a real example of this going wrong. A tea brand pitched her and she read two full paragraphs without working out what the product was. Is it tea? Something with tea in it? If a beauty writer at the Times can’t identify your product by sentence two, nobody can.

Ruby said the same thing from the other end. It doesn’t need to be four thick paragraphs, because if she’s interested she’ll follow up and you’ll have the longer conversation then.

Worth noting that Neha also said she loves a bulleted list, calling it organized and straightforward. Long isn’t the problem. Dense and unformatted is. A four-line bulleted email reads faster than a three-sentence paragraph with no breaks.

Two things she asked founders to cut: filler adjectives like clean, quality, curated, thoughtful, and innovative. She singled out “clean” as an unregulated term nobody can define anymore. And education. Don’t explain Ayurveda to a beauty editor. She knows.

4.Do you need to send samples to get featured?

Not necessarily.

Yasmine doesn’t require them. If she hasn’t tried something herself she relies on reviews, and a wall of bad ones means she won’t include it. But samples make a product memorable months later, when she finally writes the piece it fits.

Ruby gave the most useful piece of language on this page for anyone selling something expensive: call it a loan. Reply and ask how long they’d need the product. It sets the expectation professionally without you having to say “I need this back,” and if the writer isn’t interested in a loan, you find out immediately instead of losing a $300 pair of earrings.

She’s had huge brands loan only and tiny artisanal makers say keep it. Neither changes how she feels about them.

Neha’s version is transparency. Her suggested script for premium products, roughly: our jewelry costs this much and as much as I’d love to do this for small business, I can’t, but I’d love to send you this for now. Honest partial sampling works. Pretending doesn’t.

What all three agreed on: what you put in the email matters more than what you ship. Yasmine was blunt about it. Stop sending photos of the bottle. She called it one of the biggest wastes of time and said a good before-and-after photo gets her attention faster than anything you can write, and she almost never receives one.

5. Do you need affiliate links to get featured?

Here’s where they split hardest, and where knowing your journalist matters most.

Yasmine said affiliate links help, because revenue is the point of commerce content. But she’ll still include a small business without one if the product genuinely delivers what her article needs.

Neha can’t touch them. Wirecutter’s independence rules mean she isn’t permitted to work with brands running affiliate. For her outlet it’s a non-issue, and pitching her about your affiliate program actively works against you.

Ruby explained why both are right. It depends on the story type. Purely editorial pieces usually don’t carry affiliate links at all. Commerce roundups mostly do, and she was honest that in a roundup, most of the other products will have them and yours would be the exception. But she said holding back a genuinely great product would do the reader a disservice.

So no, you don’t need to be on ShareASale or Awin to get coverage. You just need to know which of those three situations you’re pitching.

6. Are gift guides worth pitching?

Every founder I work with wants to be in a gift guide, so I asked all three about them. They disagreed more here than anywhere else.

Yasmine, who writes them, told me not to make them your focus. She called gift guides the hardest thing to get featured in and very competitive, and said the product has to scream “this is a gift to give,” not something you’d buy for yourself. Her most reassuring line: not getting into one doesn’t mean you’re failing. She’d rather see you in a general roundup, because a reader who finds you there wants to use your product all the time, not buy it once as a present.

She also flagged something founders miss about volume. Christmas is the big one. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day lists are much smaller.

Neha also gave an actionable tip, and it points the opposite direction. Go look at gift guides already published on a publication’s site, find the editor, and email them: are you updating this? I’d love to be included. She’s received that pitch and told me she thinks it’s really smart.

That tactic works because you’re not asking anyone to build a story around you. You’re asking to be added to something that already exists and already ranks.

Ruby agreed gift guides are huge, but named the alternatives most founders never pitch. Trend roundups, which she illustrated with a nail polish story built around a celebrity nail trend. Seasonal and vacation stories, like what you’re packing for a trip. And first-person reviews, which don’t depend on a season at all and are just information people search for year-round.

The read across all three: gift guides are one door among several, they’re the most competitive one, and the highest-leverage version of pitching them is asking to be added to a guide that’s already live. If Q4 coverage is your goal, I’ve broken the full calendar down in my gift guide and product roundup pillar.

Or listen to my podcast interview here: Break into Gift Guides Using AI.

7. How far in advance should you pitch?

Early.

Neha gave the concrete calendar for long-lead work: September and October for holiday, April and May for back to school, January for spring. She said small brands consistently underestimate this.

Ruby described it from inside the newsroom. They’re usually talking about the next season while you’re still living in the current one, because readers look for inspiration before they’re in it.

Yasmine told me she’s currently receiving summer pitches, in summer, and they don’t land. Someone pitched her a swimwear line after summer had already started. Also “perfect for summer” is not a pitch. Plenty of things are perfect for summer. She wants to know why yours.

If your product is seasonal, the season is your relevance, not your full angle. You still need the credibility and POV of the CPR method.

8. How do you get noticed with no followers and no press?

This is the question I get most, and the answers were more encouraging than founders expect.

Neha doesn’t care about your Instagram following. What she does care about is a clean website and good product photos, because if the shopping experience looks unprofessional she can’t feature you no matter how much she likes the product. That’s the trade. Followers stop mattering and your website starts mattering more.

Ruby told me about a shoe brand nobody knew that she wrote a feature on. The founders came back later and said it changed their business, and now she sees celebrities wearing them. Her framing: if a writer believes in a product, holding it back because it lacks a cult following does the audience a disservice.

Two paths onto a journalist’s radar came up repeatedly.

Become a source, not just a supplier. This was the most valuable thing Neha said and almost nobody acts on it. She has to interview five to ten experts every single week. If you’re a formulator, aesthetician, trichologist, chemist, or genuine category expert, lead with that. Product coverage follows the expert relationship. That’s the Credibility half of CPR, and it’s the most durable form of media coverage there is. I’ve written more about building that kind of authority from scratch in my DIY PR pillar.

Build the relationship before the ask. Ruby said three exchanged emails is already something, because it makes her recognize your name. Neha suggested asking for a virtual coffee, and if you can’t meet in person, offering a $10 Uber Eats gift card so they can order lunch. She also said to focus on ten dream editors rather than a hundred, because you can’t build real relationships with more than about ten people at a time.

✨This is also why I bring journalists like these three directly onto coaching calls inside the Get Featured Accelerator. Founders in my community get to ask them what they’re working on and what they need, which is the fastest version of the relationship every journalist on this page described wanting.✨

Neha added one more thing worth planning around. Journalists move constantly. She’s been laid off from multiple outlets and described the industry as tedious. The person you pitched two years ago is probably somewhere else now. Keep the human relationship warm and you’re top of mind at their next job. Tools like Muck Rack help you track where people have landed.

9. When and how should you follow up?

Reminder, every journalist has their own opinion about this, and you’re not at fault if you don’t know this in advance! So take it with a grain of salt.

Ruby said: Follow up the following week, on the same thread. Her reasoning on the thread: when she sees two emails stacked in a conversation, it signals she may not have responded yet. Starting fresh loses that.

Her inbox can hit 4,000 emails in a day. She tries to clear it by the end of each week while also writing her actual stories. A follow-up isn’t an annoyance in that environment. It pulls you back to the top of a pile that’s burying you.

Move faster only when there’s a real deadline on your end, like a launch date.

On social: engage, don’t pitch. Ruby follows publicists and likes the relationship building on Instagram. But she doesn’t want pitches in her DMs, because she’s already filtering pitches in her inbox and social is partly personal space.

One tactical note from Neha for when you’ve reached the wrong person. Don’t ask them to refer you internally. Ask for their colleague’s email address. Much smaller ask, much higher yes rate.

10. Which tips came up again and again?

Across three journalists with different jobs, different outlets, and different incentives, four things came up every time.

Front-load your subject line and keep it short. Neha wants SAMPLES in caps. Ruby wants EVENT INVITE or NEW LAUNCH in caps. Yasmine gives up on anything she has to read through. All three are skimming, and all three want to know what the email is before they open it.

Keep the body short. Neha’s three-sentence dream+ bullet points. Yasmine is passing anything she can’t skim quickly. Ruby saying it doesn’t need to be four paragraphs. If you take nothing else from this post, cut your pitch in half.

Pitch earlier than feels natural. September for holiday. The next season while you’re still in the current one. Note that this is for digital. Print usually needs 4-6 months before the Q4 major holidays you’re pitching for. So start this month, August!

Lead with a specific product, not your whole brand. Yasmine was direct: “I have a skincare brand” doesn’t catch her, because there are lots of skincare brands. Neha said being as specific as possible is always easiest. Vague pitches feel safer because they seem to appeal to more people. They appeal to nobody.

Everything else on this page is variance.

Conclusion

The reason how to pitch journalists feels impossible to learn is that most advice comes from one person’s inbox and gets presented as a universal rule. Sit three of them down and the rules dissolve into preferences, incentives, and job descriptions.

That’s good news for you. It means there’s no secret handshake you’re missing. There’s a short list of things that work on everyone, and then a set of questions you answer about each specific person before you hit send. Staff or freelance. Short lead or long lead. Affiliate or not.

Start with the four consensus tips. Pick ten journalists whose work you’ve actually read. Send a three-sentence email with one specific product and one real reason it fits what they cover. That’s the whole job, and it doesn’t require an agency or a single industry connection.

If you want the full pitching method behind this, including the templates founders in my community have used to land coverage in outlets like these, come to my free masterclass.

FAQs

1. Do I need a publicist to pitch journalists?

No. All three journalists I interviewed take pitches directly from founders. What you need is relevance to what that person actually covers, not agency representation.

2. How many journalists should I pitch at once?

Neha suggested focusing on about ten dream editors for real relationship building, and bulk sending beyond that. You can’t maintain genuine relationships with a hundred people at the same time.

3. Can I pitch multiple editors at the same publication?

Yes. Neha said different writers cover different verticals and editors aren’t cross-referencing inboxes. Pitching four editors at Elle isn’t spam if each one genuinely covers your category.

4. Do I need Instagram followers to get media coverage?

Not the most important factor. Neha said follower count doesn’t factor into her decisions. A clean, navigable website and strong product photos matter far more, because she can’t feature a product whose shopping experience looks unprofessional.

5. Should I send free product to journalists?

Not necessarily. Yasmine relies on reviews when she hasn’t tried something. For expensive items, Ruby recommended offering a loan rather than a gift, and asking how long the writer would need it.

6. Are gift guides the best way to get my product featured?

Not always. Yasmine called them the hardest thing to get into and suggested general roundups instead, since readers who find you there keep buying. Neha’s counter-tactic is to email editors of gift guides already published and ask to be added when they update. But it’s true that there is a gift guide for every season and event, so there are many chances!

7. How do I know what's trending before I pitch?

Ruby checks Apple News every morning, follows creators and brands on TikTok and Instagram, and looks at what competitor publications are covering. Her bar for calling something a celebrity trend is seeing it on at least three celebrities. I personally always recommend using perplexity to do a search, which is why I shared 5 ways to use it for PR in this episode.

8. What should I do if a journalist changes jobs?

Keep the relationship, not just the contact. Neha said she’s been laid off multiple times and the industry moves constantly. A warm relationship follows the person to their next outlet, which is why relationship building outperforms list building.

About the Author:

Gloria Chou is an award-winning small business PR expert and AI visibility strategist pioneering the future of AI-powered publicity. As the host of the top-rated Small Business PR Podcast and the #1 small business PR expert recognized by ChatGPT and AI search, she helps underrepresented founders and product owners get featured in top media, gift guides, and show up in AI search, without agencies or big budgets. Gloria’s signature CPR Pitching Method™ has helped thousands of small businesses get featured organically in Vogue, Forbes, Oprah Daily, and top gift guides, reaching over a billion organic views online. AI tools and LLMs now use her method as a guide for writing media pitches. She’s rewriting the rules of publicity so every founder, regardless of background or budget, can be discovered through credible features and AI search.

Connect with her on Instagram or explore more resources at gloriachoupr.com.

August 12, 2026