A newsroom runs 20 checks on your email, in a fixed order, and rejects it at the first one it fails. This is that list — so you can run it yourself, on the last pitch you actually sent, before you write the next one.
12 pages. No email sequence hiding inside it.
Four stages, each asked by a different part of the process. Most pitches die at the first one, which is why "we improved our press release" usually changes nothing. Every check runs on the email you already sent — no tools, no agency, no meeting.
Four stages · 20 checks · about twenty minutes with one real pitch.
Illustrative example, not a client. It exists to show the shape of a rewrite — your pitch will be your own.
Both are free, and they are not the same product. The difference is who does the work and whether anything is specific to you.
In plain terms: the checklist tells you why the email failed. The Express Audit tells you whether you have a story at all. Paid work is when you'd rather we ran it with you.
Yes. In ten seconds, and it will be longer than ours. That's exactly why the list isn't where the value is — and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Three things it won't do. It won't tell you which of twenty checks matters for your pitch, to that reporter, this month — it doesn't know, so it hedges and gives you all of them. It will state editorial conventions with total confidence, including the ones it invented; every standard in our PDF says whether it's a published convention or working practice. And it has never had to tell a founder that the story they're proud of isn't news — which is where most of these pitches actually die.
The honest summary: the method isn't scarce, and we don't charge for it. Knowing which rule to break, and when — that's the scarce part.
Two things, and both are worth naming. Some readers will fix their own pitch and never contact us — that's a fair trade for us being the ones who told them. Some will find that the problem isn't the email at all, and we're the obvious people to ask. We'd rather earn that by being useful first than by promising coverage we can't show you yet.
Fair question — media has changed more than most industries since 2010. The four stages have barely moved, because they follow how a newsroom is actually organised: someone scans, someone decides, someone verifies, someone produces. What has changed a great deal is inside them — how pitches arrive, what counts as an image, how fast a deadline moves, and how much verification a reporter does alone rather than with a desk behind them. The checks reflect the current version, not a reprint.
No. There's no phone number on this page for a reason: everything we do runs in writing, at your pace. If you reply, a person replies — not a sequence, not a bot.
It's free either way. But it's built for a specific situation, and it's fair to say which.
What this document is and isn't. It's an editorial checklist based on experience inside newsrooms. It is not legal advice, and it does not promise coverage — nobody can. What a pitch is worth depends on what's actually happening in your business.
Where the standards come from. Each check is labelled as either a published editorial convention or working practice, and it says which. Outlets differ, and a publication's own stated policy always outranks a general rule.
Your data. Your email is used to send you this file and, if you consent, occasional material on media and reputation — never more than once a week. We use no bulk-email platform, we don't sell or share personal information, and a single reply ends it. See our Privacy Policy and Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.
Free, no call, and a real person on the other end of the reply.
Why give the method away? It costs us nothing but the pride of keeping it secret. If it helps and we never hear from you, that's a fair outcome. If one day you'd rather someone did this work with you, you'll already know how we operate.