Public Relations Firms Editing and Proofreading Services

Public relations depends on persuading journalists, who receive several hundred approaches a week and open perhaps a dozen. The pitch is the whole job, and most of what is sent is not a pitch — it is a press release attached to a paragraph explaining that the sender thought this would be of interest, addressed to a reporter who does not cover this beat, about a company announcement that is not a story. The response rate for that approach is close to zero, and agencies send more of it rather than less.

We edit what PR agencies and in-house teams produce — media pitches and journalist approaches, press releases and announcements, exclusive and embargo offers, spokesperson and expert commentary offers, reactive and news-jacking pitches, feature and thought leadership pitch documents, press kits and media resources, briefing documents for spokespeople, media lists and targeting rationale, campaign proposals and pitch documents for clients, coverage reporting and evaluation, award and speaker submissions, and client reporting and forward planning documents. Our editors work on the email a journalist opens or does not.

The pitch is where PR is either a service to a journalist or an interruption, and the difference is legible in the first two lines. A pitch that opens by introducing the agency, the client and the announcement has spent the reader's attention before making a case. We write these so the first line states the story rather than the subject — not that a company has published research, but the finding, in the form a headline would take; so the pitch is addressed to what that journalist has actually written, specifically enough to prove it was read, because a reporter can tell the difference between research and a mail merge; so what is being offered is stated plainly — an exclusive, an interview, data under embargo, access to a person who does not usually speak — since a journalist is assessing whether there is something here they cannot get elsewhere; so the release is a link rather than an attachment; and so the pitch is short enough to be read on a phone in the eight seconds it will get. Agencies that pitch this way send a tenth as many and get more coverage.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including embargoed material, client information and campaigns before launch. We are editors rather than publicists or legal advisers, and we offer no view on media strategy, defamation, privacy or regulatory questions. What we can do is make the pitch worth opening.