There’s a particular kind of desperation that sets in around week three of a product launch when nobody’s covered it yet. The temptation is to widen the net. Email more people. Add more names. CC the editor. Maybe try the weather reporter—who knows, maybe they’re branching out.
Don’t do this. The solution to nobody responding is almost never “email more people.” It’s “email the right people.”
Why specificity matters more than volume
Journalists are specialists now. The era of the general assignment reporter covering everything from city council to product launches is mostly over, especially in tech. A reporter covering AI infrastructure is a completely different person from someone covering consumer gadgets, even if they both technically write about “technology.”
When you pitch someone off-beat, two things happen. First, they ignore you. Second—and this is worse—they mentally file you as someone who doesn’t do their homework. That’s a reputation that follows you.
The three-layer filter
Here’s a framework that works. Before you add anyone to your pitch list, run them through three filters:
Layer one: Beat match. Does this journalist cover the topic you’re pitching? Not the general area—the specific topic. If you’re pitching a fintech product, you need someone who covers fintech, not just “finance” or “startups.”
Layer two: Recency. Have they published something in this beat in the last 30 days? If not, they may have moved on. A journalist who hasn’t written about your topic in three months might as well be on another planet.
Layer three: Angle fit. Even within a beat, journalists have preferences. Some like trend pieces. Some like founder profiles. Some want hard data. Read their last five articles and you’ll see the pattern. Match your pitch to their pattern, not the other way around.
Where to actually find journalists by beat
The old way was to read a bunch of publications, note bylines, cross-reference on Twitter, and hope for the best. It worked, sort of, if you had unlimited time and a strong tolerance for browser tabs.
Now there are directories that organize journalists by what they actually cover. Glyph.social, for example, categorizes over 1000 journalists across 100+ specific beats—everything from AI safety to climate tech to cybersecurity. You search by topic and get a list of people who actually write about that thing.
That’s a fundamentally different starting point than Googling “tech reporters” and guessing.
The pitch is only as good as the targeting
I’ve seen mediocre pitches land because they hit the right person at the right time. And I’ve seen beautifully written pitches disappear because they went to someone who hadn’t covered that topic in two years.
Targeting isn’t the boring part of PR. It’s the part that determines whether everything else you do matters. Spend 70% of your time finding the right journalist and 30% writing the pitch. Most people do it the other way around, and most people don’t get coverage.
Find the right journalist for your story.
Glyph is a free journalist directory organized by beat. Search 1000+ journalists across 100+ topics at glyph.social
