How to write a pitch a reporter will actually open.

A reporter at a major outlet receives, on a slow week, somewhere between two hundred and four hundred pitches. On a busy week, a thousand. She reads almost none of them. The ones she does read, she reads in the preview pane of her inbox, on her phone, in the four seconds between meetings. She decides whether to open the email based on the first eight words of the subject line and the first sentence of the preview.

If you have not written for that reader, you have not written a pitch. You have written a press release with a salutation.

What the reporter is looking for.

She is not looking for your product. She is looking for her next story. These are different things. The pitch that gets opened is the one that hands her, in the first sentence, something she could imagine writing about — a fresh data point, an unfamiliar tension, a credible source she did not have yesterday.

Three rules follow from this.

The subject line is the entire pitch in eight words. Not a teaser. Not a hook. The whole argument, compressed. “Dental insurance codes haven’t changed since 1998. Here’s the data.” — that is a subject line. “New software helps dentists save time” — that is not.

The first sentence is the second pitch. It expands the subject line by one degree of specificity. It does not start with “I hope this finds you well.” It does not start with “I’m reaching out because.” It starts with the fact, the fight, or the figure. The salutation belongs at the bottom of the email, next to your name.

The third sentence offers the reporter something to do. A draft of the data. An interview with the source. A graph she can reproduce. If she has to email you back to ask “what would this look like as a story?”, she will not email you back.

A pitch that worked.

The shortest pitch we have ever placed was forty-seven words. Subject: Adult learners over 40 now outnumber undergrads in three states. First sentence: Census data, released this week, confirms a shift higher-ed analysts have been predicting for a decade — and almost no one is covering it. Then two sentences offering the dataset and the source. Then the sign-off.

The reporter wrote back in nineteen minutes. The story ran on a Tuesday.

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” — David Ogilvy, on advertising. Equally true of pitches.

What kills a pitch.

The diseases are common. Attachments — open rates collapse the moment Gmail flags them. Adjectives — “groundbreaking,” “innovative,” “best-in-class” are all signals that the writer could not find a fact. Length — anything over a hundred and twenty words is being skimmed, not read. Templates — the reporter has seen this template before, last Tuesday, from someone else.

If you have written a pitch and you are unsure whether to send it, do this: read only the subject line and the first sentence. If, as a stranger, you would not open the email, do not send the email. Rewrite both.