300 emails a day

Here's one I've told in a few rooms but never put in writing.

Years ago, when I was working at a TV station in a major US market, we had an advertiser spending a million dollars a year.

Real money.

He called one day and demanded that we send a news producer to cover his company's event.

His logic: I'm paying you a million dollars. Show up.

Our news producer refused.

She said, and I've never forgotten this line: "He could be spending ten million. If it's newsworthy, we'll cover it. If it's not, we won't."

I was in the sales department at the time. My job was to keep advertisers happy.

And I remember feeling a strange kind of respect for her.

She was doing her job. He was doing his. But the line between paid and earned was a line, and she wouldn't let a million dollars move it.

That was the moment I understood what media is actually worth.

You can't write a cheque and get on CNN.

You can't wire money to Fox Business.

The whole reason a segment builds authority is because everyone knows it can't be bought.

Which brings us to the other side of the desk.

The producer's inbox.

I hear the number from working journalists all the time.

150 to 300 emails a day.

Most of them come from people who've never met the journalist, have no relationship with them, and don't particularly care about their audience.

The producer isn't scanning for the best story.

They're scanning for reasons to delete.

Here's what an instant delete looks like.

Subject line: "Expert available for interview."

Body: "I'd love to offer my client, [Name], as a guest on your show to discuss [vague industry topic]."

What does the producer see?

They see work.

No hook. No angle. No audience takeaway. Nothing about why this matters right now.

You're asking the producer to figure all of that out, translate your credentials into a segment, decide what the viewer should care about, pick the talking points.

That's an hour of thinking on a day when they've got 300 other emails and a live show to produce.

Delete.

Now here's one that stops the scroll.

Subject line: "Why 60% of parents are making this mistake before school starts."

That's not a pitch.

That's a segment.

The producer reads it and already sees the chyron on the bottom of the screen.

Body: "New data shows 60% of parents are doing [X] and it's creating [Y problem] for their kids. Back-to-school is next week. Three mistakes parents are making. Three simple fixes. Guest: a paediatric specialist who's been seeing this firsthand."

Everything's done.

The producer isn't deciding "do I want this guest?"

They're deciding "do we run this story." And the answer is usually yes, because the work is already done for them.

There's a reframe in there that I think matters.

Stop thinking like a guest trying to get booked.

Start thinking like a segment producer trying to get a show on the air.

At Thought Leaders America, we've leaned into this so hard that we now create the stories ourselves. We commission research studies, real data, surprising findings, and hand the story to the producer with the expert attached.

The producer doesn't have to build anything. We've done the assembly. They just say yes.

And I should mention this because it matters: newsrooms were decimated during COVID. Unlike most other industries, they never bounced back. With consolidation by big players like Nexstar, Tegna, Sinclair, you've got three TV stations in one market that look like three separate outlets to the public, but they're running out of one newsroom with a skeleton crew.

These journalists have less time than they've ever had.

So the pitches that make them do the work? Gone.

The pitches that hand them a finished segment? Those are the ones that get through.

Your takeaway for this week. Open the last pitch you sent. Read the subject line. Could it run as a chyron on the bottom of the TV screen? If not, you're making the producer do the work. Rewrite it before you send the next one.

Problem. Your pitch subject line says "I want something." It should say "I have a segment."

Tactic. Before you hit send on any media pitch, run the chyron test.

The chyron is the graphic strip at the bottom of the TV screen during a segment. Usually one punchy line telling the viewer what they're watching.

Ask yourself: would my subject line work as a chyron on air?

If yes, you've got a segment. Send it.

If no, you're asking the producer to build the segment for you. Rewrite.

The formula.

A specific number. A surprising claim. A relevant audience. A reason it matters now.

Chyron test fail: "Marketing expert available to discuss AI trends."

Producer has to build the story. What trends? For what audience? Why this guest? Delete.

Chyron test pass: "Why 3 in 4 B2B marketers are quitting their jobs in the next 12 months."

Producer reads the chyron. Fits a morning business segment. Guest is the bridge to the data. Book it.

This works for podcast pitches too. Replace the chyron with the episode title. Replace the producer with the host. Everything else holds.

In practice. Pull up your last five pitches. Run the chyron test on each subject line. My guess is most of them fail. Rewrite the worst one and send it this week.

Four places founders can land press and stages right now.

Source of Sources (SOS)

SourceBottle

MatchMaker.fm

Small Business Expo — Speaker Applications

This book changed how I read the news.

Holiday was a media strategist who manipulated the blog-to-cable pipeline for a living. Then he wrote the confession.

The book pulls back the curtain on how stories actually get made. Who pitches, who gets picked up, how a single blog post can "trade up the chain" from an obscure site to CNN, and why the most-viewed stories are almost never the most accurate.

It's not a happy read.

But if you're trying to build authority in media, you need to understand the mechanics of the machine you're about to step into.

What I took away from it: the press tends to cover what's available, packaged, and ready to go. The founders who understand that get coverage. The ones who keep leading with "I'm an expert on X" don't.

Worth reading if you want to stop taking media personally and start treating it like a system you can work with.

Book a call with us → thoughtleadersamerica.com/book

Know a founder whose pitches keep getting ignored?

Forward this to them.