Faith Cedela
If you are still pitching the way you did three years ago, you are not just behind. You are invisible. The inbox a journalist opens in the morning looks nothing like it did before AI made it effortless to generate a hundred pitches before breakfast, and the rules for standing out have shifted accordingly.
On a recent episode of Pitch, Please, Cassandra Morse and Faith Cedela ran through the questions PR professionals are asking right now, from what makes a pitch get opened to whether sending more pitches is ever the right answer. Here is what they covered.
What Makes a Journalist Open Yours Out of a Hundred
The subject line gets you in the door. Relevance keeps you there.
"If you're pitching on Quoted or HARO, it has to be a unique perspective," Faith said. "If you can take something and spin it so that yes, this is what you asked for, but this is where my client is the expert, adjacent to it but tied back — that gives you a hand up."
The pitches that get ignored are the ones that answer the question literally without bringing anything to it. The ones that get picked up offer a perspective the journalist could not have anticipated, from someone who can actually back it up.
The Biggest Misconception Brands Have About Media Coverage
Most brands go into PR expecting coverage to be about them. It is not.
"Not everybody cares about your brand," Cassandra said. "Journalists really just care about what's in the news, what's trending. They want the expert with their name and their credentials, not necessarily the company they're attached to."
Faith has worked with multiple editors who do not want the brand mentioned at all in the pitch. The company gets its moment when the piece runs and the client reposts it with links back. That click-through is the return. The pitch itself has to lead with the expert and the insight, not the agency or the logo.
This is also why the pitch inbox has become so saturated. Remote work expanded who could sit down and pitch on behalf of a client, and AI made it faster. The result is that journalists are wading through more volume than ever, most of it generic, and the bar for what actually catches attention has gone up significantly.
What Makes an Expert Media Ready
Being knowledgeable is not the same as being media ready. The clients who get placed consistently share a few specific qualities.
"I have a really good relationship with a lot of my clients and I'm able to get direct quotes from them immediately," Faith said. "They email me back within a day. I take their thoughts, create a pitch and send it."
Speed matters enormously in a news cycle that does not slow down for anyone. An expert who takes four days to respond to a request for a quote is not an expert a journalist can rely on. Media readiness is about responsiveness as much as expertise. The other piece is that journalists in 2026 want people who are continuing their education in real time, not experts whose thinking stopped evolving a decade ago.
"We don't need to get an old-school quote about how this has worked the past fifty years because everything is evolving way too quickly for that to even matter," Cassandra said.
How to Make a Pitch Feel Human Instead of Like a Sales Email
The fastest way to kill a pitch is to make it obvious you sent the same one to a hundred people.
"There's nothing worse than getting an email that says 'Hi, [insert name here],'" Cassandra said. "You need to take a few minutes to learn who you're pitching to. They're human."
The pitches that work feel like they came from someone who knows the expert they are representing. Warm, specific, direct. Faith's approach is to communicate that she knows her client well, that they have real examples, that they have been through the thing the journalist is writing about and can actually contribute something. That is a fundamentally different message than "I represent six hundred people, here are ten that might work."
Keeping brand mentions minimal in the pitch itself also helps. Lead with the person and the perspective. The brand gets its moment later.
How LinkedIn Has Changed the Pitch Relationship
LinkedIn has become part of the vetting process on both sides, and PR professionals who are not treating their own profile as a professional asset are missing something.
"A lot of the journalists and editors I work with, we've connected on LinkedIn and a few have found me there," Faith said. "They can see that I cross-promote when my clients get placements. They can see I'm invested."
Cassandra's point of view is that anyone you are pitching is likely going to look you up before they respond. Have you posted recently? Who do you follow? Does your profile reflect someone who is genuinely embedded in the industry? A dormant LinkedIn profile from a PR professional pitching on behalf of a client sends a signal, and not a good one. A strong LinkedIn presence functions as a credibility check that runs before any conversation even starts.
Is Sending More Pitches Ever the Right Answer
Sometimes, with conditions.
For a client who has no social presence, no existing credibility trail and nothing for a journalist to verify, volume makes sense early. Send the pitches, make the connections, get the name into circulation. Once organic traction starts building and the expert is actually being noticed for what they know, the approach shifts toward being more selective and more targeted.
"Once I have some credibility, yeah," Cassandra said.
The blanket pitch blast is a starting point for clients who are starting from zero. For clients who already have a presence, it is a waste of everyone's time and it erodes relationships with journalists who start to recognize the pattern.
What Every PR Strategy Needs to Change Right Now
Cassandra's answer: stop waiting for the perfect story. Start with what you know about the person and the brand and start pitching. An audit first, always, but then move.
Faith's answer: get creative because traditional pitching is finished.
"This isn't a newspaper," she said. "You're pitching to really fast news sources and you have to be creative."
A thirteen-minute live LinkedIn with a client produced sixteen posts, with links back to the client's personal LinkedIn, the company page and the showcase page connected to both. That kind of content ecosystem is what builds the AI visibility and earned credibility that makes future pitches land better. One session, done well, does more than a hundred cold pitches to journalists who have never heard of the client.
The clients who are getting placed right now are the ones showing up consistently, responding quickly and saying something worth quoting. The ones who are not are waiting for conditions that no longer exist.
Ready to build a PR strategy that works in 2026? Let's talk.
Want to hear the full conversation? Watch the episode here.