<b>The pitch list we threw away and rebuilt</b>

<b>The pitch list we threw away and rebuilt</b>

We inherited a campaign with a 400-name media list and a 0.4% reply rate. The data story was solid — wage data by industry for a recruitment client — but it was landing nowhere.

The problem wasn't the story. It was that we were pitching by outlet, not by beat. A "beat" is the specific subject a journalist owns — one reporter covers retail wages, another covers tech salaries, and a generic blast insults both.

We binned the 400 names and spent two days reading recent bylines. We rebuilt a list of 28 journalists who'd each written about pay in the last month, and we matched a different slice of our data to each one. The tech reporter got the tech-salary cut; the retail reporter got the retail cut. Twenty-eight bespoke pitches, not one blast.

Reply rate jumped to 43%. "This is the first pitch this month that's actually about my beat," a labour correspondent wrote.

Result: 12 placements from 28 targeted emails — more links than the 400-name blast produced across two months.

<b>Lesson:</b> A bigger list is a weaker list. Twenty journalists who own the exact beat will out-earn four hundred who don't. Relevance is the only number that scales.