Journalists are getting buried by irrelevant news pitches

As a journalist, I spend a good portion of each day deleting email pitches from public relations workers trying to interest me in their products or companies. The problem with many pitches is that they don’t fit my coverage area and are irrelevant to me.
I don’t cover cryptocurrency, health care and other fields, but I still get a lot of pitches in those areas. These PR workers are essentially spamming as many journalists as possible hoping to get lucky.
Public relations professionals outnumber journalists six to one in the U.S. You would hope that they would “do their homework” and make sure that their pitch are appropriate for certain writers or publications. But many don’t.
On April 15, PR software firm Cision released its 2021 Global State of the Media report, which highlighted the problem.
The 12th annual report surveyed more than 2,700 journalists in 15 countries from Feb. 1 to March 1.
“Journalists are inundated with spam,” the report said. “Fifty-three percent of journalists receive more than 50 pitches a week, and 28% receive more than 100 per week. Yet the vast majority of journalists (69%) say only a quarter (or less) of the pitches they receive are relevant to their audiences.”
Public relations workers need to build highly targeted media lists, Cision suggested. They also need to better understand the needs of specific journalists and their publications, the report said.
I concur.

Photo: Graphic from Cision’s 2021 Global State of the Media report.