Nine months ago, we published a graph showing how journalist responses drive coverage outcomes. It became one of our most-discussed posts this year, largely because it used data to demonstrate why personalisation is the only media relations strategy that makes sense in 2024. We've updated the data since then, and what's emerged is striking - honestly, it changes how we think companies should approach media list building entirely.

Understanding the data

Each dot on our updated graph represents a company. There are now three variables being tracked:

• Coverage vs Opens (shown in purple)

• Responses vs Opens (shown in blue)

• Coverage vs Responses (shown in green)

The grey line cutting through the graph shows a 1:1 relationship - companies sitting on that line earn coverage every time a journalist opens or responds to a pitch.

What's changed in nine months

The "Announcement Effect" we observed earlier in the year has disappeared completely. Remember when journalists would publish stories without responding to pitches first? That behaviour is now rare, which means coverage without dialogue has become the exception rather than the rule.

Data we published in March 2025:

More significantly, the hard death of the PR "black book" is complete.

Open rates have almost no correlation with coverage outcomes anymore, which is wild when you think about the industry's historic obsession with maintaining journalist relationships.

Knowing journalists still gets emails opened - your existing relationships continue to matter at that initial touchpoint - but open rates no longer guarantee coverage will follow.

The 20% Response Barrier

What surprised us most was a curious pattern in the data that we're calling the "20% Response Barrier," and its implications are significant for how companies should be thinking about media list building.

Above a 20% response rate, the response-to-coverage ratio tightens dramatically, sitting just under 1:1. The higher the response rate climbs beyond this threshold, the closer the correlation becomes between journalist engagement and secured coverage. Below a 20% response rate, coverage outcomes scatter wildly - companies with similar response rates might earn 5% coverage, while others achieve 15%, with no clear pattern explaining the variance.

Data we published in December 2025:

One reading of this pattern: achieving a 20% response rate means you've achieved message-journalist fit. You've found true relevance with the journalists you're pitching, which makes outcomes forecastable rather than speculative. So if you're building media lists but you aren't tracking what the response rate of the list is to your pitches - you'll have no way of predicting and then improving how much coverage you're able to earn.

Companies stuck below 20% response rate despite maintaining decent open rates face a problem with audience accuracy and journalist relevance, not with their ability to reach journalists in the first place.

What this means for media list building

Response rate needs to be your company's north star when building and refining media lists. Once you cross the 20% response barrier, coverage outcomes become predictable enough to forecast with genuine confidence, which transforms PR from a speculative activity into a measurable, optimisable function. Essential given how much pressure comms departments are currently under to deliver results.

Data accumulated by our product - taken in November 2025 showing the average % pitch success rates our clients have earned when pitching individual journalists via MVPR's PR CRM. The penultimate column on the right shows % response rates for each journalist, the far right-hand column shows % coverage rate.

Anything lower than 20% suggests you're wasting time and gambling your efforts on unpredictable outcomes - the equivalent of cold-calling journalists who might cover your story, but probably won't, and you have no reliable way of knowing which category they fall into until after you've already invested the effort.

The implication for how companies should think about finding the right journalists: start with relevance, not reach. The days of building comprehensive media lists based on beat coverage or publication prestige are over, frankly. What matters now is identifying journalists who will engage with your specific message, which requires understanding not just what they cover, but how they cover it, what angles they prioritise, and which stories they've recently published that suggest they'd find your pitch genuinely relevant.

This shift demands a fundamentally different approach to media list building - one that prioritises quality of fit over quantity of contacts, that measures success through dialogue rather than distribution, and that accepts a smaller, more responsive list will consistently outperform a larger, less engaged one.