Your Pitch Is Perfectly Written. That’s the Problem.

It can also be annoying. VERY annoying. It nags, it follows up, it follows up on the follow-up. Lately, we’ve made it even worse. Claude and its fellows have turned the pitch into something we now produce too much of, and far too easily. Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia CEO, recently warned his own staff that no one wants to read overwritten documents with pages of fluff. That’s a CEO talking about internal docs from people he pays. Now imagine how a journalist feels about the four-hundredth AI-polished pitch of the week.

Here’s a confession most of us will recognize. For a while, we fought back with deliberate sabotage. Sometimes we still do. We plant slang, typos, or swap capital letters for lowercase ones to sound casual, human, or dashed-off-from-my-iPhone. We constantly study how LLMs write so we can edit sentences to sound like they weren’t written by one. AI-written pitch with strategically placed imperfections is arguably the saddest genre of text people have ever produced, just 400 years after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. But the thing is, there’s nothing wrong with writing a pitch with AI. That’s the new standard, and everyone knows it. 

So what’s left to differentiate? First of all, the headline. Two of them, actually. The first is the subject line. In a world with many more PR folks than journalists, the vast majority of pitches will go unread, which makes the subject line not the packaging but, quite often, the pitch itself. The second headline matters no less: the one the journalist is already writing in their head. If they can’t picture it, no amount of beautiful paragraphs will conjure it for them.

And that headline runs on exactly one fuel: news.

I spoke the other week with a leading tech podcaster (name withheld) who told me he’s done interviewing founders who raised $100 million a year ago and have nothing current to say. I told him I wouldn’t even pitch that, but apparently, most of the pitches he receives are exactly that. A journalist would much rather hear a CEO respond to Alex Karp’s latest take on the dying token economy than get another pitch about a founder’s incredible personal journey to a $120 million round. A journey that is indeed incredible, but also didn’t happen this morning.

Which leaves us, the comms and PR people, with a job description that’s simpler than we would’ve liked to admit: think like a journalist first. Your client wants a CNBC interview? It’s wonderful, but so does everyone. The question was never whether the story is good, but whether it’s a story today. Even Dario Amodei needs news to go on record.