How to Avoid Journalists’ “No Call List”
May 15, 2025
By: Scott Westcott
Long hours. Low pay. Angry trolls. Emerging AI.
Those are some of the top challenges facing journalists these days.
As a PR pro, one of your primary aims should be to avoid adding to those challenges.
Yet based on Cision’s newly released 2025 State of the Media report, it seems some PR types just can’t help themselves. And it’s landing them on what Cision describes as journalists’ “do not call” lists.
The newly released report is chock full of interesting insights derived straight from working journalists around the globe.
Here’s our best advice for making sure you avoid journalists’ naughty lists – and become a trusted resource they actually want to work with:
1. Stop spamming
Journalists reported their top turnoff is “spamming me with irrelevant pitches.”
In related news, “relevance” was what those same journalists said they valued most in PR pitches and press releases.
How do you ensure relevance? It starts with crafting timely pitches with strong news hooks that ideally connect to their beats. Yet relevance also means knowing enough about a specific journalist and their work to conclude your story will catch their interest and advance or broaden their coverage on a specific topic.
2. Sell it somewhere else
Journalists also hate PR pitches that reek of marketing materials. The reason is simple: they’re in the business of sharing useful and relevant information not shilling products, services, or experiences.
PR and marketing are not the same. If you want to attract news copy, avoid cut-and-pasting marketing materials and instead create pitches based on legit news angles that aim to educate or inspire rather than sell.
If you’re stumped after brainstorming potential news angles, maybe your marketing team should instead connect with a publication’s advertising department. Media outlets, particularly newspapers, could use the revenue. And you don’t need to end up on a journalist’s bad side.
3. Check your facts – then doublecheck
Journalists will also cancel you if you send them inaccurate or unsourced information. With a big stack of assignments on their plates, journalists rely on PR pros to provide accurate facts and information.
If during an interview, you or a source doesn’t have an answer to a specific question, don’t try to make something up on the fly. Instead, tell the journalist you will get back to them promptly with accurate information.
Ultimately you want to avoid the worst-case scenario: Inaccurate information you provided ends up being published or aired.
4. Don’t be a pest
Sometimes you have to be willing to accept silence as an answer to your pitch, as journalists cited “following up with me repeatedly” as their fourth reason to banish a PR pro.
This is a tricky one because with the number of emails journalists get there are plenty of instances in which they simply miss a pitch, or see it, but don’t have time to respond. Follow-ups can in fact lead to positive results – we often get some of our most valuable placements on follow-up outreach.
In general, the better the story you are pitching, the more sense it makes to give a journalist a second nudge after a few days. But a third follow-up should be rare — and it might get your e-mail blocked for good.
Ultimately, when taken together, these points add up to common sense. By treating journalists with respect and professionalism and providing them with stories that will help them do their jobs, you can find consistent success.
And steer clear of landing on a list that is hard to get off of.
