Hey there,
Summer’s here, and “silly season” doesn’t mean no pitching!
Journalists still need fresh angles, insights and case studies that land coverage. You have something great? Pop your pitch into the Synapse marketplace or email it to pitches@synapse.media, and we’ll get it in front of the right journalists.
Now, welcome back to The Loop – your weekly drop of live journo requests, PR expert tips and media news.
Here’s what’s making waves this week…
🔥 MUST READ
…advice we’ve spotted from the experts
“Make sure your pitches don’t look phishy…”
PR and Content Consultant Jasper Hamill’s near-miss phishing story is a reminder: check every detail, including spelling, sender credentials and links before you hit send.
👉Read the LinkedIn post here
🔎 JOURNO REQUESTS
Here’s what journalists are currently looking for on Synapse:
Insider Media:
- Looking for all dealmaking-related announcements from B2B press teams in the West Midlands area – legal, accountancy, and corporate finance advisers
- Seeking dealmaking news from Dorset-based professional services – legal, accountancy, and corporate finance firms.
Stylist:
- Looking for someone for a Stylist feature on the mistake of lending a friend or family member money.
The i Paper:
- Keen to speak to people who have 5+ year mortgage fixes ending in the next year and are worried about the higher costs.
- Looking to speak to financial advisers who have seen an increase in the number of inquiries about the pension commencement.
- Looking to speak to someone who received a higher inheritance tax bill because they disputed the value of their property.
- Looking for someone who is less likely to use a cash ISA if Reeves cut the annual allowance.
- Looking to speak to people who aren’t saving for retirement because they are gonna get an inheritance from their family.
Freelance:
Metro:
Triangle News:
- Looking to speak to young people who have very successful businesses, talking about how they managed it.
- Looking for parents who pay their own parents a salary to look after their pre-schoolers because it’s cheaper than sending them to nursery.
Daily Mirror / Express / Reach titles:
Or head to the marketplace now to look at requests yourself.
🗞️ PR-Y STUFF
Here’s what we’ve read this week so that you don’t have to:
- Why PR firms keep salaries under wraps – A PRWeek podcast digs into why agencies shy away from listing pay ranges in job ads, and how that secrecy could be affecting recruitment and diversity. read more
- Reach to streamline sports coverage with 50 redundancies – Reach plc is merging its regional and national sports teams into one central hub, cutting around 50 editorial roles and sparking fresh concerns over the future of local sports journalism. read more
- Truth, trust and downright lies – Rob Waugh argues that as misinformation spreads, PR must own transparency and ethical storytelling to protect credibility and rebuild public trust. read more
- Tim Davie admits ‘significant failing’ by BBC – Director General Tim Davie publicly apologised for errors in the corporation’s Gaza documentary, pledging steps to rebuild trust and strengthen editorial oversight. read more
- Which agencies are the most transparent? – Parental leave, living wage and pay gaps: a new report reveals all. read more.
📆 NEXT MONTH’S HOOKS
…just because we don’t want you missing out on stuff.
- 1 August: Edinburgh Fringe Festival begins
- 1 August: ‘The Bad Guys 2’ movie release date for the UK
- 7 August: Bank of England MPC Base Rate decision – It will be reviewed to determine interest rates set by lenders and savings providers
- 8 August: ‘The Naked Gun’ release date – A reboot starring Liam Neeson, directed by Akiva Schaffer.
- 9 August: Edinburgh International Book Festival begins – featuring everyone from the rising stars of fiction to Nobel Prize-winners
- 14 August: University Clearing search peak – Searches for ‘Clearing’ spike here. Smart PR timing for universities, fintechs, student accommodation and retail brands aimed at young adults.
- 14 August: UK economic announcements – Balance of Trade, Gross Domestic Product, Index of Services and Industrial Production announced.
- 21 August: GCSE Results Day – MailOnline’s social platforms reach 2 in 5 school leavers. BBC’s informed that students will receive their results via the Education Record app this year.
- 21 August: Reading & Leeds Festival begins
- 22 August: Women’s Rugby World Cup starts – London, Bristol, Sunderland, Brighton, Northampton, Exeter, Manchester and York are the host cities.
- 24 August: Notting Hill Carnival
- 27 August: ‘School shoes’ searches peak – According to MailMetro Media, 46% of parents use payment schemes for back-to-school items.
✨ BEFORE YOU GO
Got something great but in a rush?
Send it over to pitches@synapse.media and we’ll get it in our marketplace for you.
Hey there,
Silly season is here, but that doesn’t mean the pitches stop.
Now more than ever journalists need stories to fill those lighter news pages, and ideally, they’re looking for something with a longer shelf life. Think campaigns that can resonate for the whole of summer (not just July).
Drop your story into the Synapse marketplace or send it to pitches@synapse.media and we’ll post it for you!
Now welcome back to The Loop – your favourite weekly scroll of live journo requests, media relations tips and news you don’t want to miss.
Here’s what’s hot this week…
🔥 MUST READ
…advice we’ve spotted from the experts
“Journalists want to speak to spokespeople directly, not just accept written statements.”
Talia Hatch’s takeaways from our Spotlight Session: AI, Public Relations and Building Trust: prioritise real voices, use AI to sense-check relevance, and never underestimate the power of a coffee meeting.
👉 Read the full LinkedIn post
🔎 JOURNO REQUESTS
Here’s what journalists are currently looking for on Synapse:
Insider Media:
- Looking for all dealmaking-related announcements from B2B press teams in the West Midlands area – legal, accountancy, and corporate finance advisers
- Seeking dealmaking news from Dorset-based professional services – legal, accountancy, and corporate finance firms.
The i Paper:
- Looking for expert comments/case study of someone in one of the vulnerable groups that have lost out on the winter fuel payment u-turn for
- Looking to speak to someone who keeps physical cash at home, hidden away safely, for emergencies.
- Looking to speak to someone who received a higher inheritance tax bill because they disputed the value of their property.
- Looking for someone who is less likely to use a cash ISA if Reeves cut the annual allowance.
Newsquest:
Metro:
- Looking to hear from couples who bought a house together about their deposit.
- Looking to chat to couples of all ages about how they split their money.
Triangle News:
- Looking to speak to young people who have very successful businesses talking about how they managed it.
- I am looking for parents who pay their own parents a salary to look after their pre-schoolers because it’s cheaper than sending them to nursery.
Express:
LADbible:
Daily Mirror / Express / Reach titles:
Or head to the marketplace now to look at requests yourself.
🗞️ PR-Y STUFF
Here’s what we’ve read this week so that you don’t have to:
- PR pay gaps fuel major PRWeek project – PRWeek is gathering comprehensive salary data from agencies to spotlight pay disparities and drive transparency across the industry. read more
- Why PR beats advertising in the AI age – As AI starts churning out ad copy and creative at scale, PR pros can breathe easy. read more
- Google accused of causing “serious irreparable harm” to the UK news industry. – a legal claim has been submitted to the CMA over the impact of Google’s AI overviews on news publishers read more
- PR salaries grow in 2024 – Average PR salaries rose last year, agency employers in an attempt to retain staff, according to the latest survey by The Works Search. read more
- Nearly half of UK adults have used AI tools to stay up to date with news and current affairs – that’s according to research from PR agency Portland. They also found that 81% of ‘decision-makers’ are using AI to access news. read more
📆 NEXT MONTH’S HOOKS
…just because we don’t want you missing out on stuff.
- 1 August: Edinburgh Fringe Festival begins
- 1 August: ‘The Bad Guys 2’ movie release date for the UK
- 7 August: Bank of England MPC Base Rate decision – It will be reviewed to determine interest rates set by lenders and savings providers
- 8 August: ‘The Naked Gun’ release date – A reboot starring Liam Neeson, directed by Akiva Schaffer.
- 9 August: Edinburgh International Book Festival begins – featuring everyone from the rising stars of fiction to Nobel Prize-winners
- 14 August: University Clearing search peak – Searches for ‘Clearing’ spike here. Smart PR timing for universities, fintechs, student accommodation and retail brands aimed at young adults.
- 14 August: UK economic announcements – Balance of Trade, Gross Domestic Product, Index of Services and Industrial Production announced.
- 21 August: GCSE Results Day – MailOnline’s social platforms reach 2 in 5 school leavers. BBC’s informed that students will receive their results via the Education Record app this year.
- 21 August: Reading & Leeds Festival begins
- 22 August: Women’s Rugby World Cup starts – London, Bristol, Sunderland, Brighton, Northampton, Exeter, Manchester and York are the host cities.
- 24 August: Notting Hill Carnival
- 27 August: ‘School shoes’ searches peak – According to MailMetro Media, 46% of parents use payment schemes for back-to-school items.
✨ BEFORE YOU GO
Got something great but in a rush?
Send it over to pitches@synapse.media and we’ll get it in our marketplace for you.
Local and regional media coverage is a goldmine. These outlets are highly trusted by their communities and incredibly well-read.
Reach PLC, owner of 120 news brands including MyLondon, BelfastLive and the Manchester Evening News, pulls in an audience of 36.6 million, just in May, which is the highest audience among commercial news publishers. Plus, nine of the ten fastest-growing news sites year-on-year are regional titles owned by Reach (Press Gazette, 2024). This trust and reach make regional press hits a powerful part of your PR strategy, as long as you’re pitching the right local angle.
But what is one of the top complaints we hear from regional journalists? Getting sent stories that have zero local relevance. This leaves many PRs wondering how to get regional coverage and why they’ve had stories published before that weren’t specific to one region.
How Do Regional News Teams Work?
Let’s talk about what a regional news team actually looks like.
When a story shows up in the Leicester Mercury, Manchester Evening News, and Yorkshire Post, it looks like a regional hit. But here’s the catch; the story may not have been picked up by actual local journalists and was instead syndicated by a national or centralised team.
Many large publishers now use central “hub” teams to create general-interest stories, and we mean surveys, trending news and celebrity stories. These pieces are then distributed across regional titles, often with minimal localisation. Local titles then pair these wider interest style pieces with local stories. These local stories are written by journalists specifically working in one, maybe two, regions.
Who to Pitch & When
Let’s say you send out a national story and it appears on a dozen regional sites. Why wouldn’t you then add journalists from those regional titles to your media list, right? Maybe not.
That piece likely came from a central content desk or newswire, not a regional journalist. Now we’re not saying that you shouldn’t pitch these journalists, far from it, but when building your target list (or categorising a pitch on Synapse), it’s important to understand the difference between a national journalist writing for regionals and a regional only journalist.
Why it matters
Pitching irrelevant content can do more than clog a journalist’s inbox. It can affect your credibility. Regional reporters especially are often overworked and stretched thin. They have to prioritise what’s most relevant to their audience, and pitches that aren’t localised stories, only slow them down.
In fact, one of Muck Rack’s surveys show that 71% of journalists say the biggest reason they reject pitches is because they’re not relevant to their audience. And local journalists feel this: their content must be rooted in their region. If you can’t show how your story connects to their community, they won’t cover it. So when you pitch a story that’s not rooted in a place, without local names, local data, or community impact to a region, you risk annoying journalists. Over time, this can damage trust and reduce future coverage.
Bad Pitch vs. Good Pitch
Bad Pitch: “New survey reveals UK work-from-home trends.”
If this is sent to every regional outlet with no local stats, quotes, or examples, then this is pretty bad. Nothing says why readers in Newcastle, Bristol or Glasgow should care. Most journalists ignore it, or worse, block you. Instead pitch the centralised hub team and look for syndications.
Good Pitch: “Newcastle sees highest WFH satisfaction rate in the UK, new survey finds.”
This one includes local case study and a quote from a Newcastle-based company. Suddenly, it’s a Newcastle story, and one that’s relevant, engaging, and easy to cover.
Worse, repeated off-topic pitches can put you on the spam list, no matter how good your future stories might be. Not the most helpful thing, is it?
The bottom line: How to know when to pitch region-specific journalists?
Here’s a quick checklist to keep you honest:
- Why here? If you can’t explain why this story matters to this specific place, it’s probably not regional.
- Who’s involved locally? Is there a person, business, or event based in the region?
- What’s the local impact? Will it affect the community directly?
- Have you included local data, quotes, or case studies?
- Can it run without being rewritten for the local audience? If yes, great. If no, rethink your angle.
Regional media matters, but only if you approach it with relevance and respect. Think local before you hit send. That’s how you get coverage that lands and lasts.
Got a story with local angle? Great. Just make sure you’re pitching it to the right journalist and for the right reason.
At Synapse, we are dedicated to making storytelling easy. Every update we make is designed to help you find better stories, faster, with fewer distractions.
Our latest update is no different. You told us what slows you down, what you wish you could see at a glance, and how you’d actually prefer to interact with pitches. So we listened and built exactly that.
Here are three new features for our journalist users now live on Synapse:
1. Spot case studies and original imagery at a glance
You’ll now see icons on pitches that indicate if they include original images or case studies.
No more guessing or clicking around. If you need assets to build a story quickly, you’ll know right away.
2. Colour-matching to your profile
We’ve added visual cues that light up when a pitch includes details that match your profile:
- Sectors you cover
- Pitch types you prefer
- Extras you care about, whether stats or celebrity commentary
The idea? Help you instantly spot if something’s a fit.
3. ‘Accept’ is now ‘Like’
Sometimes a pitch isn’t quite right, but it’s close. Maybe the expert’s interesting. Maybe the statistics have potential.
Now, instead of ‘Accept’, you can just ‘Like’ a pitch. It tells the PR you’re interested and would love to chat.
Wrapping up
These features are live right now, and they’re all based on real feedback from journalists using Synapse every day. If you’ve got something that would like to see next, hit us up. We’re here to build a better workflow, one feature at a time.
