In the age of AI , our inboxes are more flooded than ever before and it's become increasingly important to cut through the robotic, monotonous emails. As every marketer knows right now, time is precious. So as PR professionals, we need to make the pitch worth the journalist’s time.
When used well, AI should help you research an audience faster and spot the hyper-targeted angle to the person you are pitching to. Used badly, and it can reek of irrelevance and fluff, which loses the journalist’s attention almost instantly – the last thing any publicist wants.
So, considering all this, what makes a stand-out human-led pitch in 2026?
The best pitches, the ones that land, sit at the intersection of two things: relevance and personalisation.
A pitch can be relevant without being personal, or personal without being relevant. But neither is enough on its own. And none of this signals a lack of personal touch. It's merely the failure to understand how the process actually works, what a publication's audience wants, and what's editorially valuable right now. And that understanding has to come before a single email gets written.
This was one of the first things I learnt in my role as a Senior Executive at Compass Studio, where I was taught not to start with "How do I make this personal", but instead with "Why would this reader/publication care?" Once you’ve done the work of understanding relevance, personalisation is where the pitch comes to life, and it’s the bit I enjoy the most. This could look like remembering what a journalist has recently been up to, or complimenting them on a written piece they wrote to create space for further conversation.
Most "personalisation" problems are actually relevance problems in disguise. A PR Director I follow, Corina Leslie, who was a journalist for 12 years before moving into PR, recently shared a few pet peeves that journalists have in terms of being pitched to. The one that stood out to me the most was “publicists who stop at a bio ("covers technology") instead of reading a journalist's last ten pieces”. Ashamedly, I've previously fallen into that exact trap myself, cutting corners to save time that I had convinced myself I didn't have.
Once relevance is established, personalisation shows you've thought about the person, not just the outlet - their interests, their recent work, and how the story lands with their audience. Relevance without personalisation is forgettable (and most often, written by AI). Personalisation without relevance is decoration on a story nobody asked for either. But combine the two, and they tell a journalist you understand both them and their readers.
This gap between personalisation and relevance shows up in the data, too. Muck Rack's 2026 State of PR report found that while 66% of PR pros usually or always personalise their pitches, 73% of those who do only change a few sentences to make it "relevant" to the journalist. Just 15% tailor every part of the pitch. Most of what the industry calls personalisation right now is a tweaked line or two, not the deeper relevance-thinking that actually earns a response.
Conclusion and the part nobody controls
Here’s the brutal caveat to all of this. Even the “sweet spot” doesn’t guarantee coverage. Leslie also stated the decision itself belongs to an editor, and sometimes to people above that editor, and internal deadlines that are ever changing and out of their control. That’s just not just anecdotal either, according to Muck Rack’s 2026 State of PR report, 71% of PR pros cite low responses from journalists as their top challenge this year, with only 2% saying securing earned media coverage hasn’t gotten harder.
Relevance and personalisation don’t override that. What the journalist does is give your pitch the best possible case to make when it lands in front of someone who, frankly, owes you nothing, and also, doesn’t have much time to play with!
At the end of the day, what we can control is giving our pitches the best possible shot, and to make an impact while doing it.
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