This has happened to every single one of us.

You have a great story. You know it’s a great story. It’s perfectly aligned with the publication and the editor’s beat. It’s timely, relevant, targeted, interesting, and genuinely creative. It would be interesting to the reader. It’s not a stretch. It’s not spin. It’s really real.

And you pitch it and nobody bites.

You’ve pitched national publications. Maybe some local outlets with a regional tie-in for your client, maybe some trade publications, maybe some mid-tier, entry level, nice-to-haves. You’ve even pitched the tiny little detail that usually no one would care about. And that’s the thing that got picked up. The bigger story, the one with so many exciting and relevant factors? Crickets.

Not a no. Just complete silence.

Meanwhile, your client is asking why the story isn’t everywhere yet. (Because when you shared the strategy, you were obviously excited. You thought this was a home run. A slam dunk. How many sports references can I get in one article? Let’s find out.) You told them, “This is really good, I have a good feeling about this one.” Now they’re frustrated and you’re hearing crickets.

So let’s talk about what to do when you’ve pitched every angle you can think of and you’re getting completely ghosted. That little tiny detail is nice to have, but the impact the bigger story would have on your client is so much more meaningful, especially in this era of AI discoverability.

It Messes With Your Head

There’s a piece of this that I don’t think a lot of other PR professionals or coaches talk about when it comes to earned media, and that’s the mental aspect.

Even a no is better than nothing. A no is feedback. A no means I know they got my email. I know they read it. They might have considered it. (Sometimes we even interpret a no as “not right now.”) A no you can work with. Silence just sits there. And you’re like, what the heck is wrong with this? Why is it not getting any traction?

That gets in your head, and it messes with your confidence. Where it usually goes is that you start assuming it’s you. Maybe you’ve lost your touch. Maybe your relationships have gone stale or cold. Maybe the market’s just too competitive. Maybe what we do isn’t even relevant anymore, or the opportunities are just too hard to convert. Is it even worth it?

And sometimes you think, maybe I was never really that good at this at all. Maybe they only wrote about my clients because they were interesting, not because I was good at the positioning and the storytelling and all the things that make us exceptional at our jobs. Finding the right story, the right angle, the details that matter. What’s the benefit to the reader? Why is this timely? Why should we care?

And we think, maybe we kind of suck at this.

I have felt that way. If you have ever felt that way, I hope you kill that feeling right now.

It’s Not You, It’s the Market

I’ll say this as a blanket statement: yes, it is more challenging than ever to secure placements.

Newsrooms are smaller. Our contacts aren’t fact-checking like they used to. (We used to love getting fact-checking calls, right? You’d get a sense of what the story was about, and a chance to correct things or ask them to add in one little detail. Then you could go back to your client knowing how they were going to be positioned. Fact-checking was awesome.) I have not fact-checked a story in at least a decade. Easily.

Staff is smaller. Freelancers are juggling four, five, six media outlets. Inboxes are worse than ever. And the reality is that a great story is no longer enough on its own. That’s not a you problem. That’s an actual market challenge.

It used to work better for securing national features because we could work our relationships. We had contacts who were rising through the ranks, and we invested in them and they invested in us. We were adding value to the work they were doing.

That’s how I landed three clients on national TV on the same day. Two were on the Ellen DeGeneres Mother’s Day giveaway. I took my clients with me to watch the episode tape, and we watched it in the green room. It was so incredibly exciting. That same day in New York, another client was making her national TV debut on The Today Show.

I was about five years into running my business, and I’d cultivated those relationships for a big chunk of that time. On Ellen, the moms in the audience were screaming, and she was mentioning all the celebrities we’d seeded our baby and kids products to (and rubbing the cozy blankets on her face). The Today Show opportunity happened because my client was a party planning expert with a huge blog and millions of followers. She was going on to talk about how to plan a Kentucky Derby party, complete with big hats, hat making activities, and mint juleps. The Today Show was hosting the Kentucky Derby. Perfect alignment.

Here’s the funny part. The biggest press features we ever got took less time than the smaller opportunities, because we’d already worked the relationships. We knew exactly what we were pitching for.

Now contacts are bouncing around, and you try to invest in these relationships without knowing where people are going to end up. It’s a lot more competitive. It’s a lot more challenging. It is not just you. If you’re feeling this way, it’s my whole community. But I’ll tell you, there are people in our programs crushing it. And my team is crushing it for our clients.

Part of what makes this hard is that we’re measuring ourselves against a version of this job that doesn’t exist anymore.

Over time, clients saw PR wane a little, and they diversified. They spent on paid influencer campaigns. They set up affiliate programs (sometimes having us manage them, sometimes working with in-house teams). They threw ad budget behind influencer content and organic user-generated content for more amplification. They’re still doing those things.

But now, in the era of AI discoverability, earned media (PR features on high domain authority outlets) really does have an impact. They’re calling it GEO, generative engine optimization. It’s the new SEO. It’s basically how you show up in AI answers. Think of the large language models like Claude and ChatGPT, and even Google, where the search box at the top is now powered by AI. Instead of clicking through a bunch of links, you ask your question and get a summary of the research Google found to answer it.

A huge factor for brands and experts who want to show up in AI search is earned media, and how the media positions you. How you pitch the stories determines how they position your products, ideally in a way that lines up with how your target customers are asking their questions. Earned media is considered high domain authority, high value, very trustworthy content by these AI models.

So baby, we’re back. We’re highly relevant again.

This is the sibling problem to the client who rejects every opportunity you bring them. That one is your client saying no. This one is the media saying nothing. (And like we said, a no is at least information. Saying nothing is so annoying and so frustrating, but we gotta deal with it.) Different problem, same spiral.

So here are three reframes to get you unstuck and out of your head, where you’ve decided you’re the problem:

• Silence is usually a hook problem, not a story problem.
• You’re probably aiming too high before you’ve aimed narrow.
• An editor holding your story until later is a win you might be looking at as a loss.

Reframe #1: Silence Is Usually a Hook Problem, Not a Story Problem

You’re pitching the thing, but they need the story.

When we’re excited about a client, we pitch the asset. Here’s the book. Here’s the product. Here’s the founder. Here’s the new launch. Here’s the history. But an editor isn’t asking, “Is this interesting?” They’re asking:

• What’s the headline?
• Why now?
• Why would this run this week?
• What’s in it for my readers?

Here’s how to test your pitch. Could the editor write the headline from your subject line? Is it obvious? If your subject line couldn’t read as a headline, you’ve probably handed them some research. Some ideas, some bullets. Not a fully baked story.

The move is to work backwards from a curiosity headline. Not a topic. A question, a discovery, something a reader would actually click. What do they want to learn? What’s the thing you’re positioning that gets them thinking, “I need to know about that”?

Let me show you what this looks like.

On a recent coaching call inside The Pitch Lab, a member brought one of her clients, a home with a lot of historic significance. (I don’t want to give too much away, because I never asked if I could share the details.) A lot of people are interested in seeing this home. We were troubleshooting other ways to pitch it.

Before: The history of this property. This is where XYZ happened, and that’s significant in this way, and this is how much of the property remains intact from that era.

That’s not a story. That’s not a headline.

After: “Why do 200 tour buses stop in front of this house every single week?”

I need to know. Tell me about it! What is it about that house that makes everybody want to go look at it? I gotta click on that. See the difference? You’re not just giving them interesting history. The subject line is a headline.

Before: Our client wrote a book about archives.

After: “What was found hidden in the walls, and what is it worth now?”

Click. I want to know exactly what was in those walls. And they were valuables? Tell me more. Same facts, completely different pitch. You’re not saying “this is interesting, this is historic, this is unprecedented.” You’re answering the why. Why now? Why do I have to click on this to find out?

A great fallback angle: the career transition story. It’s especially good right now. My inbox has been blowing up. (Message me on Instagram @jenerationpr and tell me if yours has too.) Are you getting messages from people in your network like, “Hey, remember me? Thinking about you, wondering if you could use my help”? Not random people, people you know. I feel like I’m getting a lot of them from folks in transition. They’re going out on their own, exploring a side hustle, or they’re just a little slow in their work or business and looking to connect.

It’s always been a good story idea, but especially now. Mine is a pretty good example if you know the two industries. I went from being a litigator practicing law to beauty and cosmetics, baby and kids public relations. That’s a 180. I’ve been doing this for 21 years, and back in the day I got quite a bit of exposure for my story. Interviews. It was great.

It has everything. It’s a little timely. It’s inspiring. It gives people steps to go through the same transition. It lets people see themselves in the story, and the more polar opposite the two fields are, the more interesting it gets. We love founders who left one field for another (or left and came back). That’s a business story, an economy story, and a “what does this say about the job market” story all at once. And it gets you into outlets that would never consider your product news. A wider net.

So before you write another pitch for your client or for yourself, write five headlines. Not five pitch angles. Five actual headlines. What’s going to stop the scroll? (Not cutesy. Not gimmicky. Not spin.) What’s the headline that gets someone to click?

The gap between a pitch angle and an actual headline is where most pitches die. Because you’re just sharing facts. We know so much about our clients, and we think, this is so interesting, everybody should want to write about it. But the reality is it has to answer why now, what’s timely and relevant and topical right now, and what’s going to make readers stop what they’re doing and click.

Reframe #2: You Went Big Before You Went Narrow (And Access Is the Currency You Forgot You Had)

There’s this reflex. A cultural moment lands near your client and you go straight for the biggest outlets you can name. Sometimes that works. That’s the newsjacking approach.

One of our members was on our coaching call last week, sadly right after Dolly Parton passed. She’s really connected in the music industry, and as soon as the news came out, she had more than one client she could pitch. Not to capitalize on a sad situation, but it was very timely for organizations they support and the efforts they make to give back. It lined up with the Dolly Parton music industry story and all the positive things being said at the time. She was able to quickly figure out how her clients could lend a voice to a story everybody was talking about.

But sometimes those moments mean you’re competing with everyone who saw the same news. So the reframe is: what do you have that literally nobody else can offer?

Nine times out of ten, it’s access. Something never photographed. Never toured. Never opened. Never explained by the person who actually knows. That’s how we helped our member think about her historic house, where something creepy and surreal happened. It’s never been available to the public, never explained room by room, never even photographed. Now you have the person with full access who can stand in the room where it happened and explain it.

Access is not a nice-to-have. It’s the only thing on your list that a competitor cannot replicate. That’s your unique advantage.

So find the people who cover the insider version of a place or a scene. Business Insider, for example, does the insider version of how people founded their companies. All the ins and outs. How old were they? What were the roadblocks and hurdles? Where’d they get their funding? What was the exit? They get into the numbers.

I know because I was on Business Insider talking about my career transition, and they wanted numbers. I did not love sharing that. But a career transition wasn’t enough. They wanted something juicy. They wanted the whole path: the ups, the downs, the hoops, the hurdles, the fears, the breakthroughs, and the revenue and the growth and all those metrics we don’t have to disclose as private companies. They wanted that access.

Also look for local culture writers. For something like the historic house, look for hidden city accounts, regional lifestyle bloggers, and freelancers who show the non-touristy version. A real insider’s guide. Everybody’s talking about what’s in the spotlight, but you’re going behind the scenes and offering visibility nobody else can give.

Offer them something real. In the pitch, you can say: “No media has ever been inside, and I’m offering you first access.” Before it becomes a thing everyone’s writing about (maybe there’s an event, it’s timely, it’s an anniversary), you say: “Everyone is going to cover the version you can see from the sidewalk. I can get you behind the door with the owner, walking you through what’s actually true and what people have gotten wrong for a hundred years.”

Say there was a very famous murder inside this house. You can say: “Some of this is genuinely grim. We’re not going to soften it. We’re opening the doors so you can get the real story, in the house, with the owner who will tell you exactly what happened.”

Two things make this work.

Exclusivity is real leverage. Small outlets say yes fast. A smaller writer with real access gets picked up, quoted, and possibly followed and amplified by bigger outlets. That’s how the PR food chain is actually running right now. We get a story in one outlet, it gets picked up by BuzzFeed or Huffington Post or Yahoo, and all of a sudden the reach is in the hundreds of millions.

Journalists move. Like I said, we invest in these relationships, and then people move around and freelance at a bunch of outlets. The freelancer at a niche outlet might be somewhere bigger in six months, or pick up a bigger assignment anytime. And they’ll remember exactly who gave them access, who gave them a good interview, or who ignored them when they were at a small publication that wasn’t as appealing.

Just as we serve our clients by giving them access to our media contacts, we serve our media contacts by giving them access to sources, good ideas, information, products to discover, breakthroughs. Even when it’s not our client. We love supporting journalists with sources and making connections, just out of the goodness of nurturing relationships and helping two people out. Maybe someone needs visibility and they’re not your client but they’re a great fit for a story. Maybe a journalist contact is looking for the right source and you happen to know that person. Be the PR pro who supports their work no matter what level they’re at. Freelancers go on to write for bigger outlets, and you’ll be remembered as the publicist who helped them along the way.

Reframe #3: “We’ll Hold This Until October” Is a Win

This is the one I really want you to hear.

Let’s say you get a reply that says, “Love this, saving it for our fall coverage.” And you feel kind of sick. God, I really need something to show my client right now.

Stop grieving it. That’s a win.

The calendar is the only thing standing between you and the clip. (Yes, a lot of things still have to happen. We have to follow up. We have to stay on top of the story.) But you connected an idea with an outlet that’s interested, and now they’re waiting until the timing is right.

The real problem isn’t the timing. It’s that right now, you have no way to show progress that isn’t a published link. A booked future feature (say that fast ten times) looks exactly the same as a rejection on the monthly report.

So show it a different way. We like showing the ideation and what’s in process. Secured and scheduled can live on the report as its own line for that outlet, with the proposed run date. It doesn’t have to be exact. It could be fall, or Q3, or Q4. And here’s what you say to the client:

“We locked in coverage this month. We’re working with the editor for it to run in October or November. It’s not a delay, that’s how long lead works. And it means when the moment hits, we’re already in.”

Everyone pitching in September has already missed the boat. They’re too late.

And you have to know your own calendar. Long leads typically work three to six months out. Right now, in September, we’ve been pitching gift guides. We just did a whole gift guide masterclass inside The Pitch Lab (all members get to come for free). Long leads are working that far in advance. That’s our job.

Pitch Lab members also get our monthly execution plan, which we call The Scoop. It tells you exactly what long and short lead outlets are thinking about right when you get it, and it comes out in advance of the next month. We’ve already released September, and we’re working on future months. It’s what the editors at short and long lead outlets are thinking about, and what to be pitching and when. So if you’re in The Pitch Lab, you don’t have to do that thinking. (It’s not so much calendar management. It’s thinking like an editor so you line up your topics and don’t miss the boat.)

If a cultural moment is landing in the fall, the window for long lead and print closed a while ago. It’s opening right now for short lead and broadcast opportunities in October and November. Pitching the right story at the wrong time reads to an editor exactly like a bad story. It’s about giving them the runway to consider it. They’re not going to do you any last-minute favors. They’re planning ahead, especially long lead. You’ve got to time it.

I think a lot of PR pros feel a little behind and like they’re playing catch up. That’s because their clients are thinking about promotional opportunities much closer to when they actually run. They’ll say, “We have a great opportunity for Black Friday Cyber Monday!” and it’s happening in a week. Well, we’ve been pitching that for six to eight weeks now, and already securing roundups of sale opportunities. The timing has to work for us, and we work when editors are considering things.

When You’ve Pitched Everything, It’s Probably a Perspective Issue

Here’s a mindset shift. When you’ve pitched everything you can think of, maybe you don’t have a talent problem. Maybe you have a perspective problem. Maybe you’ve been staring at it too long.

Every single time I’ve watched someone bring a challenge to a group, somebody else says one thing. One sentence, one idea, one angle, one shift, and the whole thing unlocks. It’s not because they’re smarter. It’s because they haven’t read and thought about that same pitch 40 times. They’re looking at it with fresh eyes, from an uninformed perspective, which is exactly how an editor is going to think about it. Editors come in with their own understanding and their own lack of knowledge, and they fill in the gaps with their own inferences.

Here’s an example. I told one of our members there was some kind of “pick me” energy about her pitch. Like her frustration was coming through. There was something that felt a little desperate. And she was like, “Really?” The pitch was good. The client was good. It was timely and relevant. It had all those elements. But there was an energy around it that was not great.

And I did not hold back. My community knows we all love each other. We’re here to make each other better. I don’t need to massage a note to give it to you. I want to help you improve. So I told her: my first impression is that there’s really desperate energy around this pitch. It’s not coming from a place of abundance, like you know this feature is going to happen for your client. It’s coming from frustration, and that comes across.

So she reworked it. And I’m not even kidding you, later that week she landed TODAY Show.com and AARP for her client. Same idea. Same pitch. Just a different energy.

So before you decide you’ve exhausted your angles, or your pitch just sucks, say it out loud to another PR pro and ask them if they would click on it. That’s the whole intervention. Or write your pitch, let it marinate for a week, and come back with fresh eyes. You might realize you were filling in the gaps yourself, and the hook isn’t as obvious as you thought it was.

Stop absorbing this as a verdict on your skill level and how competent you are. The client who says, “I thought this would be easy press” might not be wrong to be frustrated. But they’re describing a world that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s different now. Where’s the value? What’s the clickable headline? How do you stand out when it’s more crowded than ever?

Everything is AI generated now. Even decent pitches, and you can tell. There’s a higher volume of content going out because there’s no friction. AI can just crank it out. It’s a numbers game.

We don’t do spray and pray around here. (You know, where you write one pitch, send it to as many publications as possible, and cross your fingers.) It’s a waste of our time, it’s a waste of our clients’ time and money, it makes us look bad, and it doesn’t work. The only thing that works is strategic, timely, topical, targeted pitches. And they need a headline subject that gets people to click because they want to understand, discover, learn, or be inspired. Don’t just explain something interesting and hope an editor sees a story in there.

So here’s your recap:

• Write five headlines, not five pitch angles. Then back into the angles around what your headlines look and sound like.
• Lead with access. A behind the scenes exclusive, an interview, a look behind the curtain, a tour of a house that’s never been open to the public. Lead with what nobody else has.
• Put your scheduled coverage on the report so a win in the future stops looking like a loss.
• Include your ideation on the report. The thinking is our work product. Strategy is our work product. I don’t want clients thinking you’re just sending out “pitches” (who knows what goes into them) that aren’t getting traction. Show them your creative thought process and how you’re positioning the brand.

One More Thing About Silence (Hello, AI Search)

There’s a version of this where your pitching is perfectly fine, and the visibility problem isn’t the inbox at all.

Say you have a client who’s genuinely great, and they still don’t come up when someone asks an AI model about their area. Who should I hire? Where should I go? Who’s the expert on this topic? What brand should I buy as a new parent exploring XYZ product for my nursery registry? Increasingly, that’s the question your client’s customers are actually asking. And that’s where the small, specific, insider placements from Reframe #2 do far more work than the big one you’ve been chasing all quarter. Smaller outlets with high domain authority that are highly relevant to that question.

Let me break down GEO one more time. SEO was people going to Google, searching, pulling up articles with links, and reviewing those links for ideas and recommendations. Now they’re going to Claude, ChatGPT, and even the summary at the top of Google (Gemini), asking a question, and getting a synthesized answer. If your clients aren’t showing up in those results, that’s more than a pitch problem.

Highly relevant smaller niche publications, targeted trade publications, and podcasts do a lot of the heavy lifting. Reddit is huge because it’s viewed as highly credible. So is Wikipedia. And of course, the media outlets we secure for clients. It’s all about consistency.

I think more PR pros are discovering this is something we can support brands with. I’m getting a lot of inquiries because my new website mentions AI discoverability, and a lot of prospective clients are telling me other PR firms aren’t talking about it. (I know that’s not true. I know a lot of them are. But maybe the ones they’ve talked to aren’t.) That’s why I’m teaching all of this. I love this stuff.

I’m teaching it in a free class called Strategic Pitching in the Era of AI: how to get AI models to recommend your clients in 2026 and beyond. It shows you exactly why your clients aren’t included in AI search results, and it gives you the proven four-step pitching plan to fix it so you can be the hero. You’ll be able to show your clients the before and after, which we’ve been able to do. Look, you’re showing up in these searches for the very thing your whole brand tagline is positioned around.

All of our customer-facing content, the brand tagline, and the story angles we’re pitching carry consistent messaging that answers that question when someone asks AI. All the positioning we do is around the answer to what their prospective customers are looking for. I’m going to show you how to do that for your clients, because it’s what brands and experts want to pay for right now, and I want you to be positioned to offer it.

Save your seat at jenerationacademy.com/masterclass. It’s all new content, and it’s coming up in September. I’m super excited about it.

Now go out there and crush it this week. Keep pitching. Keep retooling your pitches. Think headline, not pitch angle. Rework it if you have to. I’ll be over here crushing it too.