The pitch test that kills 88% of what you send

Relevance is a geography and sector test, not a topic test. In the 2026 Australian media survey, 88% of journalists said they discard a pitch immediately if it is off their beat, and 78% defined a relevant story as one that directly affects the community their audience belongs to.

Read that second number carefully, because it is the one that changes how you build a media list. Relevance is not whether this is about construction. It is whether this changes something for the people who read me.

The three questions, answered in writing

Before you send anything, write down the answers. Not think about them. Write them.

Who is helped or harmed by this? Name the group. Not businesses. Not consumers. Something like commercial tenants in strata buildings in inner Sydney, or civil contractors bidding on state transport panels.

Where are they? A suburb, a postcode range, a state, a corridor. If the answer is Australia, you probably do not have a story for a metropolitan masthead, you have a story for a trade title.

What changes for them, and when? A price, a rule, a deadline, a risk, an availability. With a date.

If you cannot fill all three with something specific, you are holding company news, not a story. That is fine. It just means the release goes on your own site and your customer newsletter, and nobody gets pitched.

Beat, not masthead

Most media lists are built by outlet. That is why 88% of pitches get binned.

The unit that matters is the round, and rounds shift constantly as newsrooms consolidate. The reporter who covered property in March may be covering property and small business now, or may have left.

Find the round by reading, not by looking it up. Pull the last ten bylines from the journalist. Note what they actually wrote about, what angle they took, and whether they use data or human stories. Ten minutes per journalist. Twenty journalists is a serious afternoon, and it will outperform a list of 400 from a database every time.

Two signals in those ten pieces tell you almost everything. Do they quote named companies, or do they only quote associations and government? And do they use numbers in the first three paragraphs? Match your pitch to what they demonstrably use.

What this does to product news

It kills most of it, and that is the right outcome.

A new product, a new office, a new hire, a rebrand, an award: none of these change anything for a community. They change something for you. A metropolitan journalist has no route to run them and will not reply.

Product news has a proper home, and it is trade press. A new fixing system is genuinely news to the readers of a construction trade title, because it changes what they can specify next month. The same release sent to a daily masthead is a deletion.

Getting to national

If you want national consumer press, you need one of two things.

A national data set. Something you can break down by state or by city, so every outlet has a local angle inside your national story. This is why data-led campaigns work: one piece of research generates thirty locally relevant versions of the same story.

Or a human story with real stakes. A person, named, willing to be photographed, whose situation illustrates something larger. Harder to source, harder to manage, and far more likely to run.

Nothing else gets you there reliably. Not a strong opinion, not a well-written release, not a relationship.

The version of this that actually scales

Build one story a quarter that passes the three questions at national level, and build a rolling stream of trade and local stories that pass at their own level. The trade stream keeps you visible to buyers and keeps your relationships warm. The quarterly piece is what gets picked up broadly and earns the links and citations that compound.

Trying to make every announcement national is how teams end up with an 88% deletion rate and a belief that PR does not work.

Answer the three questions before you write a word, and send far less.