When I entered the PR world, veteran colleagues would recount the days of faxing pitches with great nostalgia. My Millennial cohort heard a lot of riffs on the “I bet you don’t know about fax machines!” bit.
The joke was on them. My first gig out of college was working for a legal nonprofit. And in 2010, the New York state civil court system was still very much reliant on fax machines.
While PR industry tech has come a long way since the fax machine, there’s still one technology developed in the 1800s that we still use: the phone.
The simple, standard playbook for pitching has been the same since I started in PR during Obama’s first term: email the reporter, follow up the next day, and then try a phone call*.
*Note for my Gen Z readers/fans, a “phone call” is like a voice memo that talks back immediately.
But here’s the thing: Based on survey results, reporters do not like getting phone calls. Or at least, they don’t prefer phone calls over other communication channels. Cision’s 2025 State of the Media found that 96% of reporters prefer pitches via email, and just 7% like phone calls.
Across Meredith & The Media reporter Q&As this year (as of Dec. 1), not a single journalist identified phone calls as a preferred outreach method, although a few noted they would accept calls in certain circumstances.
We asked four reporters for their views to gather more perspective on sentiment toward phone calls. The reporters reacted to the question “do you like receiving phone calls from PR professionals?” without distinguishing between follow-up calls and completely cold outreach. Their answers largely addressed both scenarios.
Ryan Barwick, an M&A deals reporter for Axios Pro, was OK with a yap session, under certain conditions.
In a perfect world, I get an email or a text that asks if I can jump on the phone. It’s always better to talk through stories, to check-in with each other, but sometimes I’m on a deadline, my hair is on fire, and I can’t gab. Of course, this all assumes the information is relevant to my beat!
Lucy Brewster, a reporter at Brew Markets covering markets and investing, was surprisingly OK with calls.
I personally like communicating over text or a phone call with PR pros because it can be quicker, more casual, and straight to the point without the formalities of emailing. There’s also less of a risk of the message getting lost in your inbox. But I think it works best when you already have an established relationship. For initial introductions or more broad pitches, I still prefer email. One trend I’ve noticed is that some Gen Z reporters text their sources or PR contacts, while older generations rely more on email or traditional phone calls.
Noah Kirsch, a freelance journalist who’s worked at Forbes and The Daily Beast, admitted that his Midwestern roots make him too polite to decline calls, even though they can be the worst pitches.
It’s exasperating when people send me pitches that have nothing to do with my beat, and even more exasperating when I’m added to distribution lists I didn’t sign up for. But perhaps most frustrating of all is when someone calls me to outline a pitch that we haven’t previously discussed. I’m from Ohio and too polite to cut people off—but boy do I want to.
Tara Weiss, a freelance reporter for the Wall Street Journal, prefers to chat with PRs that she already knows.
If it’s a trusted PR person who understands the ideas that I gravitate toward, I have no problem with them calling me. Of course casual chats even lead to great ideas through collaboration. But if it’s someone I don’t know and it’s a blind pitch, I much prefer email!
There’s no definitive answer to “do you like phone calls from public relations professionals.” The data and anecdotal evidence is mixed, although the general narrative is that a call is OK after an initial email.
Of course, there are now multiple ways to interact with a reporter beyond emailing and calling — text, Whatsapp, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and even Tinder. It’s possible that the next generation of public relations professionals will have AI-based tech that makes the calls for them. Maybe a Millennial boss will tell them to Ask Jeeves.
Or, years from now, we’ll still be fighting over a small conference room to make phone call follow-ups.
Bill C. Smith is a senior vice president at The Bliss Group and serves on the PRSA-NY board of directors.
