The Journalist Who Told Us Everything

We will not name her. She would not thank us for it.

She is a senior journalist at one of Romania's most respected business publications. She has been covering business in Romania for fifteen years. She receives, by her own estimate, between forty and eighty press releases every working day.

We asked her, over coffee and with the understanding that nothing would be attributed, to tell us honestly what PR agencies get wrong. What wastes her time? What makes her ignore an approach that might otherwise have been worth pursuing? And what — if anything — actually works.

What she told us should be required reading for every PR professional in Romania. And for every business that has ever wondered why its communications investment is not producing the media relationships it was supposed to build.

What She Told Us

The press release says nothing new.

The first thing she said, without hesitation, was this: most press releases she receives contain no news. They are announcements dressed as news — the new appointment, the new office, the new partnership — framed in language designed to make the routine sound significant. She can identify within the first two sentences whether a press release is worth her readers' time.

Most do not. She deletes them without reading further.

The press release that works, she said, is the one that tells her something she did not know and that her readers would want to know. Not a corporate announcement. A genuine story — with a specific angle, a real insight, and a human element that gives her something to write toward rather than something to transcribe.

The follow-up call adds nothing of value.

Within twenty-four hours of sending a press release, most PR agencies follow up by phone or email to ask whether she received it and whether she is interested in covering it. She finds this, in her words, the most reliable indicator of an agency that does not understand how journalism works.

If the story is interesting, she will pursue it. If it is not interesting, the follow-up call does not make it interesting. What the follow-up call does is consume her time, confirm that the agency has no genuine understanding of her editorial agenda, and reduce the probability that she will engage positively with the next approach, because the credibility required for a journalist to take an agency seriously has been eroded by the one that demonstrated it has none.

The pitch that is not for her.

Every journalist has a beat — the specific area of coverage they own, the stories relevant to their readers, the territory they have spent years developing expertise in, and the relationships to cover well. The approaches she values most are those that demonstrate genuine familiarity with her beat — that are pitched to her specifically because the story is relevant to what she covers, not because her name is on a distribution list.

The approaches she ignores are the ones that could have been sent to any journalist at any publication — generic pitches that demonstrate no knowledge of her work, her publication, or her readers. These approaches do not simply fail.

They actively damage the relationship between the agency and the journalist, because they signal that the agency's interest in the journalist is not editorial but administrative.

What actually works.

When we asked her what approaches she responds to positively, her answer was precise.

Relationships built over time — agencies and PRs who have invested in understanding her work, who send her stories that are genuinely relevant, and who respect her time by not sending her things that are not.

Exclusive access — the story or the interview specifically offered to her rather than distributed simultaneously to every publication in the media landscape. And honesty — the PR who calls not with a pitch but with a genuine question about what she is working on and whether there is a story in their client's world that intersects with it.

The last point, she said, happens rarely. When it does, she remembers it. And the agency that demonstrated enough intelligence and confidence to ask the question rather than make the pitch is the one she calls when she needs a source, an expert, or a perspective that her own reporting has not yet surfaced.

What This Means for PR in Romania

The conversation confirmed what we already knew but rarely say as directly as the situation warrants.

Most PR activity directed at Romanian journalists is not building relationships. It is consuming them — depleting the goodwill that genuine engagement would build, one irrelevant press release and one unnecessary follow-up call at a time.

The agencies that build genuine media relationships in Romania are those that invest in understanding the journalists they work with — their beats, their agendas, their readers, and the specific kinds of stories that serve all three.

They are the agencies that send less and land more. That pitch is specific rather than distributed broadly. That treats the journalist relationship as a long-term professional asset rather than a short-term distribution mechanism.

The journalist we spoke to receives between forty and eighty press releases a day. She responds positively to perhaps two or three a week. The gap between those numbers is the gap between PR activity and PR value — and it is a gap that most agencies in Romania are on the wrong side of.

The journalist is not a distribution channel. She is a professional with standards, a beat, and a very accurate sense of who is wasting her time. Act accordingly.

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About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.