How to Follow Up on a Media Pitch Without Burning the Contact

The short answer

Send one follow-up, three to five working days after the original, and make it add something rather than repeat something. Then stop. With 46.1% of outlets running on a single journalist who does every job, silence is overwhelmingly capacity rather than a decision about you.

What silence actually means

The instinct is to read no reply as no. In practice a working journalist receives far more pitches than they can answer, and answering a pitch they are not going to use produces no benefit for them at all. Not replying is the efficient behaviour, and it is not personal.

It also means a pitch can be genuinely relevant and still get no response because it arrived on a filing day. The same pitch, resurfaced once at a better moment, can land. That is the entire argument for following up, and it does not extend to a third attempt.

How to write the follow-up

The failed version says “just checking whether you saw my email below”. It asks the recipient to do work, adds nothing, and reads as pressure.

The version that works adds a reason to look again: a new figure, a development since you wrote, a link to something related they covered, or a narrower and easier offer — the data on its own rather than the full interview.

Keep it to three or four lines, keep the original thread so context is one scroll away, and do not restate the whole pitch. If the news has genuinely moved on, a new subject line is more honest than reviving a stale one.

What not to do

• Do not follow up more than once. The second follow-up converts almost nothing and is what gets a sender filtered permanently.
• Do not follow up within 24 hours. It reads as automation.
• Do not escalate to their editor. This ends the relationship with both.
• Do not use guilt. “I assume you're not interested” is a manipulation and it is recognised as one.
• Do not follow up on a bulk send at all. If the pitch was not personal, the follow-up cannot be.

The better use of the effort

A second follow-up has a worse expected return than a first pitch to a different outlet — and with 2,993 outlets in the database and 73.3% of them running four staff or fewer, there is no shortage of unpitched ones.

The compounding move is to keep the contact warm instead. Journalists who have covered you once are far more likely to cover you again, and the cheapest way to earn that is to be the source who answers fast when they ask, rather than the sender who follows up three times.

About this guide

Structural figures from the Media List database of 29,083 journalists across 2,993 outlets, measured 15 August 2026. Practice guidance reflects standard newsroom norms. Last reviewed 15 August 2026.