End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- AI-generated pitches are immediately obvious to journalists due to telltale signs like bolded bullet points, capitalized subheads, and low overall quality.
- Short, direct pitches that get to the point are paradoxically more likely to land than long, pasted-in press releases because they feel human and real.
- To get coverage, you need to introduce genuinely new information into the world — if it can be found on a Google search, it has no business being in a newspaper.
- Media literacy is everything — before pitching anyone, you need to deeply understand the publication, its audience, and the kinds of stories it runs, because that knowledge is what separates people who consistently land coverage from those who don’t.
Veteran journalist Rob Waugh has been in the game for almost 30 years. He started at PlayStation Plus magazine, Stuff magazine, and wrote for Associated Newspapers publications for a long time, including the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail.
Now he’s virtually everywhere. I came across his work in The Press Gazette, where he’s been covering some of the biggest issues plaguing the digital PR landscape, like fake experts and site reputation abuse.
In this episode, we discuss these issues and dig into his tips for pitching and securing coverage.
Are the problems we see in the media and PR industry new?
Here is a slightly-edited transcript of our talk:
Rob Waugh (02:23) I think a lot of this is actually new. I mean, fake experts are not a new thing, but the industrial scale at which they’re being deployed at the moment — and they’re used by very unscrupulous organizations who are creating personas which are blending hundreds and hundreds of pieces in the media, and these people are completely fake — I think that’s certainly happening now on a scale that’s never been seen before.
And is AI to blame?
Rob Waugh (03:16) I think that for a lot of organizations, the key question is stuff like AI overviews and AI cannibalizing search, which is threatening the business model for a lot of publications, including really established ones. But for smaller publishers, it’s a life and death matter. And obviously the scale of the fake experts thing is meaning that journalists’ inboxes are being submerged in extremely low quality pitches featuring people that aren’t real, and from organizations that are sending dozens or even hundreds a day. So that’s on the negative side.
I’d say on the positive side — I’m actually writing a piece this week on how journalists are using AI to do research. I find it an extremely powerful tool. As you mentioned, I will write for anybody with a checkbook, and that means that sometimes you are writing about highly technical topics which you might never have looked at before, and AI is extremely good at bringing you up to speed on that. It’s also surprisingly great at stuff like analyzing company tax returns and company business records that are public. In fact, I spoke to a very famous investigative financial journalist trying to spot some irregularities in company accounts, and he said to me, “I just asked ChatGPT” — it’s great at it.
Does AI spread misinformation, or is it the people behind it?
Rob Waugh (05:41) I agree with that, and it’s just a question of — I mean, I’m not one of those guys who anthropomorphizes AI in any way. I talk to it like it’s just a tech tool. I don’t have a conversation with it. I’m like, “Provide this with links.” And I think you just have to be disciplined about how you use it because, like you say, there are certain specific searches where you just think, “Jesus Christ, this is terrible.”
Like, to take a frivolous example, I’m a helpless addict of the game Diablo 4. And if you ask ChatGPT or any of the bots for up-to-date information on how to optimize an item or whatever, it’s terrible because it does not understand that video games change all the time. So only information from the last month is relevant. That’s just one of the weaknesses of AI. I think it’s very good to be able to move beyond that standard 10 Google search results and get something that is more interactive. But yeah, you just have to be aware of the limitations.
Vince Nero – BuzzStream (06:51) Yeah, that makes sense. Do you — and I’m assuming the answer is going to be no — but do you think that journalists are getting ideas from AI, like ideas for stories? Or is most of the stuff coming from pitches these days, or internal, their own work?
Are journalists ever getting story ideas from AI?
Rob Waugh (07:14) I think that, for instance, if you file to a publication regularly and you write a certain kind of article that’s quite predictable, if you chuck 10 of those headlines into ChatGPT and go “make me 20 more suggestions,” it’s actually quite a useful tool for coming up with those.
Quite a bit of it comes from pitches.
So I have several clients who I write for weekly.
This week I write for Yahoo News and this week two out of the three came from pitches from people I’d been talking to during the week.
They were like, “Okay, I’ve got this interesting cybersecurity idea,” and I was like, “Okay, I’ll buy that for a dollar,” and I pitched that in. And then the other one I just came up with off the top of my head.
But if I’m sitting there thinking, “My god, it’s Monday morning again and I need to come up with more pitches,” then ChatGPT — if you’re writing on fairly predictable topics — it’s quite a reasonable way.
Maybe one in five ideas is good, or it just leads you down a path where you get to something where you think, “Okay.” You’re not going to just copy and paste them in and go, “Yeah, how do you like that, commissioning editor?” Because I think people can smell that.
How do you feel about AI-generated press releases?
Rob Waugh (09:00) It’s just obvious.
And also — I mean, I do think journalists can get on their high horses about stuff. “Don’t bombard me with this.”
And it’s like, well, actually it is kind of relevant to your industry.
But when you see these ones that were generated by an AI tool, it’s just so low quality and it’s so obviously AI.
Like, it has weird formatting — there’s something like it breaks out into a bolded list of bullet points in the middle of it.
You’re like, no human would ever do that. And it has that weird American thing where all the subheads are capitalized, which is really, really common in the US.
But when I’ve been on staff on digital publications and I see reporters doing that, I’m just like, “Do not do that. That is American. We do not do that here.”
And yeah, I mean, those things are just so obviously low quality. I spoke to several journalists who were saying that the Times and the Sun had been targeted by a particular organization that was constantly changing email domains, making up new addresses for fictional PRs just to spam out more and more stuff.
They were saying they’d been talking to IT to try and block the stuff, because it makes your email inbox unusable. It’s particularly bad if you’re a generalist journalist. If you’re working on, let’s say, just data centers or something like that, the pitches that you get are generally at least relevant to that industry.
But the problem is if you’re working on a publication that covers film, travel, TV, and a whole bunch of other stuff, you already probably get several hundred emails a day. And then with this automated stuff on top, it’s getting to a level where it’s just out of control.
How do PR pros stand out in such a crowded space?
Rob Waugh (11:29) I think the answer is that the stuff that’s extremely low quality tends to arrive all in one email — it’s pasted into the body of the text, because they just want to have as many people reading it immediately as possible. I mean, short pitches where you go, “I’ve got X person available for interview,” or “We’ve got research that says this,” are actually, paradoxically, more likely to land, because people see it as real.
What are some differences between US and UK markets?
Rob Waugh (12:54) There are huge differences. I think that a lot of these guys who are firing out fake experts — a lot of them are coming from outside of the US and Western Europe.
They’re coming from Eastern European countries.
In the past they’ve often used African content writers, and that’s now been replaced with ChatGPT because it’s cheaper. These guys are sort of black-hat SEO guys who are targeting publications where they think they can get links by coming up with fake experts and dubious research.
I think that one of the key differences between the US and the UK is that UK publications have become a bit of a soft underbelly, because a lot of them are running quite low quality content — like gardening tips, or viral tips on how to clean your house.
“This one hack will make your kitchen sparkle forever,” or whatever.
All this stuff which is pretty crap content, but if they are coming up with fake experts and delivering that content because they know it’s a reliable pipeline to get links — I would say that in the US, there is still a lot more resistance to that kind of stuff.
There are still checks and balances in place that have been gotten rid of in the UK.
But the one thing I would say is that from my experience of freelancing is that there are a lot of UK journalists now moving over into the US, and they’re bringing that sort of tabloid UK mentality to it.
And I do wonder if US publications might end up being more vulnerable in the future. But I think there should also be a caveat around that — as I said, we’re in a time of absolutely seismic change in the industry. There’s a shift towards financial models that don’t really reward that kind of content.
So if everyone’s retreating behind a paywall, then the viral cleaning hacks are not going to land, because no one’s going to go behind a paywall for a tip which always seems to involve vinegar or bicarbonate of soda.
Vince Nero – BuzzStream (15:22) Yeah, well, my wife and I joke about that all the time — you’ve got to add lemon in there. Okay, so I want to switch a little now. I’d love to know how you went down the rabbit hole on the fake expert commentary thing. How do you come up with a story idea like that? Where did that come from? Was it pitched to you? It seems like you had a lot of other people involved giving you quotes. Tell me a little about that.
Rob Waugh (15:54) The weird thing was, about a year before I filed that story, I was doing some content writing for a marketing agency in Barcelona and we got pitched this guest blogger. I looked at her and I was just like, “You are not real.” The guy we were working with — he was pretty old-school — he was going, “What do you mean she’s not real?”
I was like, “This person is not real. We should not have a blog from her.”
And so we dropped it. I didn’t think too much about it.
Then a year later I was writing for The Telegraph — which, for the listeners in the US, is quite a respectable British newspaper, quite right-wing, older readership, very respected — and I asked for advice on the psychological impact of identity theft via a response platform.
This psychiatrist replied, and the weird thing was her pitch had those capitalized subheads that I hate. And I was like, “This is weird. Who writes like that?”
Anyway, the reason I looked into her profile was that I naively thought places like response platforms would be checking that people are actually real — but they are not, or at least not sufficiently. The reason I looked into it was that the Telegraph had the only listed place of work for her listed as “Section,” and I was like, I cannot credit “Section” in the Telegraph. Some old colonel is going to have a heart attack into his breakfast. So I thought, I have to find and cite her practice, because she’s a psychiatrist — you’ve got to be able to book her. People have to make money. Not everybody uses LinkedIn, not everybody uses Instagram, but if you’re a psychiatrist, there has to be a way to find you, otherwise you can’t make money. And there was no way to find her. And I was like, “This is weird.”
So at that point, I flagged it to the network. I noticed a couple of similar profiles and I was like, “These guys are writing using AI and they don’t exist.” And I got a message back saying, “We’ve given them a final warning.” And I was like, “Final warning? Why don’t you just kick them off?” That’s not a final warning type scenario — it’s a person who doesn’t exist writing copy using AI. That shouldn’t even be happening. That annoyed me so much that I just thought, I’m going to pitch this as a story.
I worked with Dominic on some other tech stories and he was like, “Okay, this is great.” I actually didn’t pursue it for a couple of months, and then I spotted another one and we got the whole story rolling.
The psychiatrist — Barbara Santini — is actually operated by one guy in Kenya and two Lithuanian guys who run a sex shop and a couple of other sites. One of them is a solicitor and was issuing very convincing legal threats, saying that if we claimed Barbara Santini doesn’t exist, we’d be sued.
It was all quite alarming, but thankfully in Dominic Ponsford I’ve got a very brave editor, and he just pushed the button on it. And obviously the legal letters did not arrive. And then once we started pulling on it, you realize there was a lot of that out there.
To date, we’ve found well over a thousand expert-led articles in the UK press that have featured advice from people who don’t exist.
Have you ever gotten legal action threatened against you as a journalist?
Rob Waugh (20:03) No, no. It was so much worse before newspapers had websites. When newspapers all got websites, all anyone wants now is to have you change the copy online, because that’s what’s going to stay there.
Whereas before the web, when I worked on a Sunday newspaper, Monday morning used to just be people screaming at you and threatening legal action over what you’d run the day before — and you couldn’t change it.
There was no button to go back and rewind. Whereas now all that happens is they just want a correction or to have you amend the piece.
It was a lot scarier back then because you’re like, “Oh my God.” Once it’s written, you cannot bring it back.
Vince Nero – BuzzStream (20:57) Well, there’s something — “romantic” is probably not the right word — but this idea of older school journalism where you would write it, it’s on paper, people read the paper.
These were the only sources you’d get the news. But I think there was probably a lot there that trained you to look out for what is truly newsworthy.
So I’d love to hear from you what you’ve taken from your newspaper days in terms of identifying a story that you know is going to resonate with people, versus these filler stories you’re talking about.
How do you identify a story that will resonate with readers?
Rob Waugh (21:40) One of the key lessons I learned was from a really horrible guy I worked for — recently got turfed out in a rather amusing sex scandal, which I won’t go into here. He was just an absolutely filthy pig of a man. But he gave me this advice, which I think is as relevant today.
It is: if the information in the article you are writing can be found through a Google search, it should not be in the newspaper.
You should be aiming to introduce new information into the world — whether that is from interviewing people, or from getting information from other sources.
But if it’s findable on a Google search, there is no reason for you to be the intermediary.
And I still believe that’s true.
The funny thing is, in the old newspaper days — it’s so weird to think about this — whereas now everything is measured in clicks, success was measured in how many people ripped off your story. If you got a news line from somebody and it was picked up by loads of other publications, that was seen as the most valuable thing you could do.
A really stupid one that I did — we did an interview with David Beckham, this must have been 20 years ago. We were having a very tense face-off with people about it, and we ended up able to dip into copy that our exclusivity agreement shouldn’t have allowed us to publish.
They had copy approval, so we were able to publish the news line that David Beckham was struggling with Brooklyn’s maths homework when he was seven. That immediately got picked up by I think three and a half thousand publications worldwide. Because we were able to turn it around — one paper had brokered another paper’s exclusive — and it became this sort of mega global gossip story.
That thing of being the source of new information was the value of your publication. I think that’s sort of slightly been lost in this world. Because these days, one of the most abused words in the English language in 2026 is “exclusive” — it’s just slapped onto bloody everything.
Does that mean unique proprietary data is the best thing to pitch?
Rob Waugh (26:08) I would say that what never gets old is genuine expertise — and ideally you’ve got a person who has expertise in a niche space.
Research that doesn’t feel contrived and is relevant to an industry audience — that stuff never gets old.
For instance, let’s take finance. There’s been a big shift away from traditional business reporting — like funding rounds and that kind of thing — and towards more personal finance, focused on the consumer. So if you’ve got someone who is willing to offer that kind of advice to the consumer, that’s always valuable.
So it’s a question of seeing where newspapers are today, not where they were 10 years ago.
Because these days, so much bandwidth is focused on stuff like Google Discover, where what resonates is highly consumer-focused. It’s kind of trashy a lot of the time, but it’s highly focused on consumer needs.
And it’s about thinking yourself into that food chain.
How can I deliver advice that is useful — the old saying: “news you can use.”
Consumer advice and that sort of thing. It’s a question of looking at the volume of what a publisher is doing and working yourself into that chain, if that makes sense.
Can you walk me through pitching to an editor?
Rob Waugh (28:12) I’m lucky being quite ancient that most of the time I just wait for people to call me. But I do pitch as well.
A friend of mine got a very senior job on a newspaper in the UK — we both worked for the horrible pig I was describing earlier, and when you’ve suffered together in the trenches like that — he got a very good senior job.
So what I did was: I bought that newspaper every day for a week and read the whole thing every day for a week.
And I went, “Okay, what sort of stuff do they run?”
If I’m doing something online, I’d look at it over the course of a news cycle — news cycles go in weeks.
I find that people tend to overlook the opportunities at the weekend, because a lot of sites are very different at the weekend when there’s less actual news. For instance, no science press releases go live over the weekend except for the ones on Sunday night for Monday morning.
No big company announcements tend to happen at that point. Politics tends to slow down. So you’ve got more of a run at the front page.
Most sites tend to run their slightly more out-there interviews or feature pieces over the course of the weekend. So if you’re going to target something that isn’t part of the news cycle — which is what I would often do as a freelancer, since they’ve already got guys who cover everything in the news cycle — I need to find stuff that isn’t that.
And so I would just find what kind of outlier pieces they run — whether that’s an interview with somebody who’s had a crazy experience, or somebody doing good, or launching a new project, or a controversial figure who might say something outrageous. And then you can pitch in interview pieces and get in there.
Once you have a story idea, how do you pare down to the true hook?
Rob Waugh (30:51) When I pitch editors, I always just pitch the eventual headline, because that is how newspapers operate.
Most of the guys I’m pitching are either newspaper or ex-newspaper — they’ve done their time in the trenches.
Every newspaper runs on the list. The list is a list of headlines that have been approved by the editor, and where you think you’ve got a chance of delivering something that matches that line.
So if it’s an expert piece, it’d be like, “I’m a Bitcoin expert — here’s why the time to buy Bitcoin is now.”
Or something like that. You’ve got to pare it down to that list line.
These days a lot of newspapers use Trello or Airtable or stuff like that, but it’s still powered by that list.
To get on the list, you’ve got to have a headline that sounds like the stuff on the list. You’ve got to boil it down to whatever the headline is.
When I was doing stuff before the internet, you wouldn’t switch off your tape recorder and the editor would already be on the phone going, “What’s the line?” You were expected to have boiled it down to that one line right there and then.
I had this hilarious experience with an AI expert this year.
I’m saying this to illustrate that publicists are often instrumental in creating very good lines. I was interviewing this AI expert — a very famous AI doomer, I’ve forgotten his name — and we were on video.
He said that he estimated a child born today has more of a chance of being killed by AI than they have of graduating high school.
And when he said that, I saw the publicist just doing a little love heart emoji. And I was like, “Yeah, you guys have talked about that one before.”
If you get that line, and then it goes onto the list, you’re in.
Can you scale that type of research and personalization?
Rob Waugh (34:33) I probably have a slight bias — I am not a young journalism graduate working in a content mill, producing dozens of articles a day.
I’m kind of an outlier in that I predominantly write stuff that’s meant to be a little more in-depth and worked on.
Whereas with digital publishers publishing really large numbers of pieces per day, a headline that goes across every publisher can still resonate if it’s the kind of thing those publishers often publish.
Vince Nero – BuzzStream (35:16) But again, you still have to connect to that publisher. I guess that’s what I’m getting at — more and more my answers, when people talk about this stuff, just go back to: you’ve got to be more targeted than you’re being. You’ve got to look at what the journalist has written, how they’re writing, how they’re formatting things. If you’re not doing that, maybe it is doable, but you’re not putting yourself in the best position to succeed.
Rob Waugh (35:36) Yeah, I’d agree with that. Having that degree of literacy in what publications do and what journalists do is highly useful. You’ve got to understand the publication, you’ve got to understand what it is, who reads it, how they reach their readers. And once you understand that, you can start to work out a way to be in that food chain.
There are a certain subset of stories that will work across British publications, across a certain subset of popular publishers in the UK. And there are other stories where you’d be best off going to one, offering it to them exclusively, and then everyone else will pick it up once it’s run.
If you decided to start a digital PR agency what are a couple of key things you would implement for success now?
Rob Waugh (37:06) I think media literacy and understanding is just absolutely vital. When I used to work on papers, it was expected that you would have read every newspaper before you came into work. And that’s a lot of newspapers. I’d buy one lot before I got the bus, skim through those, and then I’d buy a second lot on the way into the tube. So I would have gotten through them all, because my editor would jump on anybody she thought might not have read every single piece.
The weird thing was that when I started doing it, I thought it was just a weird and pointless thing to do. But actually, the understanding you get of each publication from doing that is enormously beneficial and lasting. It sort of helps you get into the ethos of the brands you’re dealing with.
And in terms of building a digital PR agency — I’ll go with a Boomer and Gen X answer here — I’d hire experience.
Because I write copy for various PR agencies and have worked in them. I sometimes feel like there are a lot of people doing the actual grunt work who don’t really have much understanding of what they’re actually doing — they’re doing the mechanical parts of it. And I think in some cases you need a bit of cunning, a bit of thinking backwards, really digesting and digging into what you’re doing.
That kind of instinct — like, “Jesus Christ, these guys are never going to run this” — basically comes with a couple of gray hairs.
Vince Nero – BuzzStream (38:36) Yeah, or at least maybe a consultant or two who has been in the trenches, right, to lead the way.
Yeah, I totally agree with that last point especially. I’ve said that a few times on this podcast — I feel like any agencies who are not actively consulting journalists are doing themselves a disservice. It’s funny, because the people who do pitch internationally — say a UK-based agency pitching in Italy or in Greece — they are hiring people who are native to that country to help formulate the pitches and do some of that ideation work. Because they know the nuances. So there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have journalist insight if you’re pitching to a journalist. They understand the nuances.
So yeah, I really love that. All right, Rob, I want to let you go.
Bonus: What video game should people be playing right now?
Rob Waugh (40:05) Well, to be honest, I’m being very rarely unfaithful to Diablo 4 at the minute, and I’ve taken the radical step of moving to Diablo 2 Resurrected. So I think you should all get on that.
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