Faith Cedela
There's a particular kind of dread that creeps in when you've spent hours crafting the perfect pitch — researched the journalist, personalized the angle, checked the send time — and heard nothing back. Not even a polite no. Just silence. It's not new. But something has shifted in the last two years that makes the silence feel different, more structural than personal. The rules didn't just change. The whole game got rebuilt around a shorter attention span, a flooded inbox, and a journalist who's now also a content creator managing three platforms before lunch.
So we asked the question out loud: is cold pitching actually dead?
The Short Answer Is No — But It's Lost the Plot
Traditional PR pitching hasn't died so much as it's been outcompeted. A Muck Rack State of Journalism report found that 77% of journalists receive more than 50 pitches per week, with the majority going unread. The problem isn't pitching itself. It's the assumption that a polished email, sent cold to someone who doesn't know you, still carries the weight it once did.
It doesn't.
What's changed isn't the desire for good stories. Journalists still want them. What's changed is the supply of mediocre, AI-generated, "hope this finds you well" openers flooding their inboxes daily. The bar for standing out hasn't gone up because the standards got stricter. It's gone up because the noise got louder.
This is exactly what Winsome's head of PR, Faith Cedela, and marketing manager Cassandra Morse broke down in the first episode of Pitch, Please — a new weekly show about what's actually working in PR and content marketing right now. Their take: cold pitching still has a place, but it has to compete with DMs, voice notes, relationship check-ins, and short-form video clips in a way it never did before.
LinkedIn Changed the Game More Than People Admit
If you're still treating LinkedIn as a résumé platform with a feed problem, you're leaving placements on the table. Faith has built ongoing editorial relationships — including a streak of eleven AOL feature placements from a single connection — through nothing more sophisticated than a short, human DM and consistent follow-through.
This isn't an outlier. Journalists are increasingly active on professional networks and more likely to engage with direct, personalized outreach than unsolicited email. The logic is simple: LinkedIn DMs have less competition, more context, and the green dot tells you exactly when someone's online.
The implication for PR is significant. If your pitching strategy doesn't include a LinkedIn component — managing client profiles, actively networking, and creating a trail of visible expertise before you ever ask for coverage — you're working harder than you need to.
Winsome has written about this shift in how professional services firms build visibility. The same principle applies here: the relationship comes before the ask, always.
The AI Problem Isn't What You Think
Here's the tension everyone's dancing around. AI makes pitching faster. It also makes pitching worse — not because the tool is bad, but because most people use it as a shortcut instead of a starting point.
Cassandra made the point bluntly: if you can tell it's AI, it's already failed. Journalists can tell. Not just from the writing style, but from the absence of specificity — a pitch that could have been sent to any of fifty reporters that week, because it essentially was.
What's being missed is that AI should be doing the research scaffolding, not the voice. Use it to audit a publication's recent coverage, identify gaps in their editorial calendar, find the angle they haven't hit yet. Then write the pitch yourself, in your own voice, like a human who actually read the room.
Most journalists said personalization was the single most important factor in whether they opened a pitch. Personalization doesn't scale through automation. It scales through relationships built early enough that the pitch is almost a formality.
What "Casual" Actually Means in Practice
There's a version of "be more casual in your pitching" that translates to sloppy, underprepared, and presumptuous. That's not what's working.
What's working is warmth with competence underneath it. Faith checks in on editors between pitches — not to sell anything, just to be useful. Do they need a quick expert comment on a breaking story? Is there a topic gap she can help fill? This is PR as service rather than PR as transaction. The placements follow because the relationship exists, not the other way around.
This maps onto something psychologists call parasocial reciprocity — the principle that people feel obligated to give back when they've received something, even from someone they don't know well. Research from Cialdini's influence framework suggests that small, genuine acts of helpfulness create a felt sense of debt that outlasts any single interaction. In editorial relationships, that translates to being the publicist they call when they're on deadline, not the one they ignore in their inbox.
We've explored how this dynamic plays out in content strategy more broadly here on the Winsome blog.
The Format Shift That's Actually Producing Results
Faith and Cassandra have spent the past year building a simple content engine for clients: a twenty-minute interview once a month, filmed or recorded, then cut into short clips that populate the client's LinkedIn with real voice, real opinions, and real personality.
This is not a gimmick. It's infrastructure.
The clips do three things simultaneously: they give journalists something to reference before they respond to a pitch (social proof that this person is quotable and credible), they build a warm audience that makes cold outreach less cold over time, and they create a content record that reads as authentic expertise rather than ghost-written polish.
Short-form video generates 2.5x more engagement than static posts across professional platforms. But the more important data point is qualitative: clients who show up consistently on video are easier to pitch because editors already have a sense of who they are before the email arrives.
The lesson isn't "do video." It's "make the pitch easier to say yes to by doing the work before you pitch."
Cold Pitching Isn't Dead. But the Cold Part Has to Go.
The most honest answer to whether cold pitching still works is: it depends on how cold it actually is. A pitch to someone who's seen your client's content, who you've interacted with on LinkedIn, who you've helped once before — that's not really cold. That's a warm pitch dressed in a cold format.
The pitches that are dying are the ones that arrive with no context, no relationship, no evidence that the sender did anything other than find an email address and hit send. Those deserve to be ignored. They were always going to be.
What's replacing them isn't a single new tactic. It's a different orientation: PR as relationship-building first, placement-seeking second. The publicists who understand that are getting their clients featured. The ones still batch-sending to media lists are wondering why the inbox has gone quiet.
Faith's one-sentence pitch for 2026: Here's a story your audience will actually care about. And I made it easy for you.
That's still the job. It always was.
At Winsome Marketing, we build PR and content strategies that make getting placement easier — because the relationship does most of the work before the pitch ever lands. Let's talk about what that looks like for your firm.