In higher education, public relations often follows a familiar formula: identify an interesting piece of research, support an academic with something insightful to say, craft a thoughtful pitch and send it to a carefully selected list of journalists. You hit send, then wait. And often, there is silence.

You follow up a few days later. Perhaps you receive a polite “thank you, but no thanks”, if you’re lucky.

For university communications and PR teams, this can be one of the most frustrating parts of the job. Hours can go into developing a pitch, researching the expert and finding the right angle, only for it to disappear into an overflowing inbox.

So where are we going wrong? Perhaps the answer lies in the name itself: media relations. The “media” part is obvious. We know who journalists are, what they cover and where their stories appear. But the “relations” part is so important in today’s media environment, where journalists are overwhelmed with emails, under pressure to produce more content and increasingly selective about who they work with. There needs to be relevance and value in every pitch we send – building that relationship with a journalist.

The problem with the numbers game

It may be tempting to measure PR by how many journalists we reach out to – single stories can be pitched many times. And the logic does make sense, because if one journalist doesn’t respond, maybe the next will. But media relations doesn’t always work like a numbers game.

Being relevant to readers

Stories need to be framed through the journalist’s perspective: why this matters now, why their audience should care, and what makes the story genuinely useful to readers. Every post published, journalists are thinking: why should my readers care about this today?

A new research paper may be academically significant, but that does not automatically make it newsworthy. It is our job to translate the findings into timely, relevant conversations that help journalists see why the story matters to their readers now.

Instead of pitching new research from Professor X, a stronger story might be what the research tells us about X problem. This change is small but makes all the difference in how it lands in an inbox. Some of the best pitches present expertise in a way that solves known problems.

If a journalist is covering a breaking story, make the introduction easy. If they are writing about a developing trend, explain exactly what your academic can add that others cannot. If they need a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, lead with the insight, not the institution’s name. In every case, the value of the pitch needs to be obvious within seconds: why this story, why this expert and why now.

Hyper-relevance beats volume

We need to be strategic about who, when and why we pitch. A journalist who has written three articles in the past month about the future of business education is a much better prospect than someone who just so happens to have “education” listed somewhere on their profile. And likewise, a journalist who covers the impact of geopolitical uncertainty on businesses would probably be far more receptive to commentary from an expert professor than a journalist who only covers university rankings.

The difference is being hyper-relevant. Reading a journalist’s work to know their beat and understand what they’ve already covered so you can identify where there is a gap in their conversations and how you, and the research/ profile you have, can fill the gap. Often, it’s also crucial in understanding when not to pitch – because sometimes, the most valuable relationship-building exercise is to not hit send.