Every press release sent into a blast list is a symptom of the relationship the sender does not have. If you actually knew the journalist, you would not need the press release — you would have a phone number, a context, a sense of what they were working on this week. The release is a substitute for all of that, and not a good one.
Our PR practice is built around thirty editorial relationships. Not three thousand contacts. Thirty. The ones who answer when we message because we have spent seven years not wasting their time.
What an editorial relationship actually is
A relationship with a journalist is not a contact in a database. It is a record of value exchanged — usually one-directional, from us to them — that creates the social permission to ask for something later.
Value to a journalist looks like:
- A story tip on something they actually cover, with enough context that they can decide in two minutes whether to chase it
- An expert source for something they are already writing, available in their deadline window
- An off-the-record context call when they are trying to understand a complicated situation
- Not pitching them things outside their beat
- Not following up three times when they did not respond the first time
The journalists who matter are over-pitched and under-informed. The discipline that earns access is being one of the few sources who reliably delivers the second thing without inflicting the first.
What this means for client work
When we pitch a client to a journalist, we are spending relationship capital we have built over years. We do this deliberately, and we do not do it for every client moment. Some moments do not warrant burning a pitch.
This sounds inefficient. It is, in the short term. In the long term, it is the only way the relationship survives. The agencies that burn out their journalist contacts within twelve months are the agencies that pitched everything.
The thirty
The thirty journalists we have real relationships with are spread across roughly twelve outlets. Mint. The Hindu. ESPN. Forbes India. The Athletic. A handful of trade publications in golf and cricket specifically. A few international correspondents who cover Indian sports for global outlets.
Each one knows us by name. Each one knows what we are likely to be working on. Each one trusts us not to send them something they will regret reading. This trust took years to build and would take a single careless email to damage.
The hiring implication
We do not hire PR people who came from blast-list firms. The habits do not transfer well. We hire former journalists who already understand what it means to be on the receiving end of a bad pitch, and who instinctively edit themselves before pressing send.
This is also why our team is small. You cannot run thirty relationships through fifteen account managers. You can run them through three or four senior partners who treat the relationships as their own.
What it produces
The number we track is not press releases sent. It is tier-1 placements delivered. Three placements a month, across the team, is a good month. Five is a great one. Each placement is the product of a relationship maintained over years, deployed at the right moment, on a story the journalist would have wanted to write anyway.
The press release is not the work. The relationship is the work. The press release is what gets sent when the relationship is missing.