What is the Best Time of Day to Pitch Journalists?

Having your ideas tossed into a stack of countless others makes for a real challenge to be heard. Even worse, your idea often sits deep in the middle, or even at the very bottom of that stack. Now you’re left frustrated and muttering, how will we ever get through to these journalists? And when?

Knowing exactly, throughout the course of a day, when journalists are taking the time to sift through media pitches might just be a game changer for your outreach success rate.

Thanks to our PR software, we have answers. 

We collect real-time data that quantifies every aspect of pitching through our media database. In this post, of course, we’re focusing on what times of day experience the highest volume of open rates by journalists.

Our data reveals that journalists open the majority of the media pitches that they receive at 11 a.m. (13.11%). From here, the open rate follows a relatively even curve, but leans more strongly toward the right. In other words, journalists open the most media pitches between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., and they generally open more pitches in the afternoon rather than in the early morning. See the chart below for a full breakdown: 

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Pitch Open Times

Despite these opening activity hours, it is important to note that comms teams are currently sending the majority of their pitches at 9 a.m. While they are on the right track, it may be useful to adjust outreach timing to match up more closely with the peak open-rate times (i.e., closer to 10-11 a.m.). See a full breakdown of pitching hour volume in the chart below:

Relative Pitching Activity by Hour

Time to start sending your media pitches when someone is ready to open them… brilliant! As professional communicators, we all know how valuable our time is. 

Use our latest PR software research findings above to help optimize your pitching process.