Why your guest post or news pitch was rejected

It doesn’t matter if you are a 20-year veteran with a long history of PR success or a new pro just getting started. When the door is slammed in your face, it can feel like an affront.

A common step along the five stages of grief when mourning your PR pitch’s demise is often to seek feedback. You want to know why your pitch fell short—maybe even hope to be told that you checked all the boxes and, simply, a horrible mistake was made. The New York Times would love to run your story ASAP.

We all get delusions of grandeur, but as Occam’s Razor tells us, the simplest answer is often the correct answer. The PR version suggests: Your pitch was flawed.

Here are five of the most common reasons we reject pitches at PR Daily—and the associated pitch behavior that might be holding you back across the board.

1. Your pitch or story is poorly written.

If an editor can’t understand your pitch or find the thesis of your story, it’s going in the trash. If you are lucky, you might get a reply saying they’ll pass. If you follow up asking for writing advice, you might get blocked.

Editors are busy—and rewriting or rehashing your poorly constructed ideas is a huge time drain, to say nothing of the time it would take to email writing tips to improve your article.