Worst Pitch of the Week: Ghosting, killed stories and one bright spot

Disappearing Acts 👻 | Worst Pitch of the Week 💀 | Best Pitch(es) of the Week 🏆

I keep getting ghosted.

More than thrice in the past few weeks, I’ve responded to a cold pitch to set up an interview or learn more to no avail.

It’s kind of awkward to bemoan such things, because I understand how incredibly busy everyone is, and no one owes me a reply.

However, I do find it odd that in a very crowded space—where I get more than 300+ daily pitches—when I do respond with interest on something it’s met with silence.

I’m not sure whether it’s because of mass pitches and email routing issues, but at least on two of those three occasions, the message was personalized so I’m at a loss.

Has anyone else been having this issue? Let me know.

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Another week where I can’t include a screenshot, because this happened over a month of exchanges.

I’ll preface that in my 15+ years of doing comms, this has happened only a handful of times.

After replying to a pitch, assigning a reporter, doing the interviews, and writing the story, the publicist emails asking to kill the story.

Why?

I don’t know.

No reason was given. (That was a new experience.)

I’m sure whatever happened is NOT the publicist fault. It rarely ever is. But to not give even a morsel of reasoning is frustrating to say the least.

As I said, this seldom happens, but to foster a good working relationship, some frankness goes a long way.

(We’re all just flesh bags typing words into a screen. It’s all good on my end, and I hope all is well on the other end!)

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with publicists and account executives both online and in-person, which all have been great and productive.

Shoutout to the lovely publicist who scheduled a 10-minute call over the phone. Most of the time, that’s all you need and neither of us wants to commit to a 30-min call on camera. (I should clarify that I—me, myself, personally, individually, not the collective—don’t take pitches over the phone. These were broader conversations.)

And shoutout to Plot Twist reader Kathie Gonzalez again who came through with another great pitch AND connected us with some great sources. No notes. Thanks, Kathie!

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