Subject Lines for Media Pitches: What Works and What Gets Deleted

The short answer

A media pitch subject line should be under 50 characters, state the news rather than tease it, and contain a number if you honestly have one. Mobile mail clients cut around 40 characters, so anything after that is written for nobody — and journalists triage on their phones between other work.

What works

• The news, flatly stated. “Regional grocery chain closing 14 stores” needs no explanation.
• A specific number. Numbers read as fact rather than claim, and they survive truncation well.
• A local anchor. Naming the city or region tells a regional editor instantly whether this is theirs.
• A plain offer. “Data on X, if useful” is honest, low-pressure and easy to say yes to.

The common thread is that each lets the recipient decide in under a second. That is the entire job of the subject line, and every word spent on anything else works against it.

What gets deleted

• Curiosity gaps. “You won't believe what we found” is the format of the mail they delete without opening.
• “Press Release:” as a prefix. It spends the visible characters saying this is bulk.
• ALL CAPITALS. Reads as shouting and trips filters.
• “Quick question” and “Following up”. Sales-email conventions that journalists recognise instantly.
• The company name first. Unless the company is famous, the first words should be the news.
• Exclamation marks. One is enough to move a pitch into the marketing category.

The mechanics people forget

The preview line is doing as much work as the subject. Most clients show the first sentence of the body next to the subject in the list view, so the opening line is effectively part of the subject and should not be a greeting.

Emoji are a real risk in this context. They perform acceptably in consumer marketing and poorly with journalists, who read them as a signal of bulk mail.

Finally, subject lines cannot be judged by open rate any more. Privacy features in mail clients pre-load tracking images, so opens are inflated and largely disconnected from whether anyone read anything. Judge by replies.

How to test subject lines when opens cannot be trusted

The standard method — split two subject lines and keep the higher open rate — stopped working when mail clients began pre-loading tracking images on the recipient's behalf. Those pre-loads register as opens, so a substantial share of any open rate is machinery rather than people.

Three approaches still give a real signal.

Measure replies, not opens. A reply is unambiguous and it is also the outcome that matters. It needs a larger sample, because reply rates are low, which is the honest cost of a real metric.

Measure clicks on a link that only a genuinely interested reader would follow — the data, the images — rather than any link in the footer.

Test in blocks, not in halves. Send subject line A to the first tranche, B to the second, and compare replies. Cruder than a formal split test and considerably more informative than a corrupted one.

If a tool reports a 60% open rate on a cold media list, that number is measuring mail infrastructure, not interest.

About this guide

Written for pitching the kind of outlets in the Media List database — 29,083 journalists across 2,993 outlets, of which 73.3% have four or fewer staff. Last reviewed 15 August 2026.