The Digital PR Newsletter #50

Revealed: The best time to pitch journalists

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Hello Digital PR gang, did you miss me?

I decided to take a 2 week break over Christmas with the newsletter which then inexplicably became 4 weeks. But I’m back now, and the good news is that I’ve got tons of stuff to share!
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Here’s what we’ve got this week
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• The best time to pitch journalists
• 2025 Content Benchmark Report — How do your results compare?
• 2025 Content Calendars
• An apology — my bad
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Let’s get to it!
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⏱️ The best time to pitch Journalists

This is something I get asked quite often, and now I finally have an answer (sort of), thanks to Rosie Taylor.

Rosie spoke to senior journalists at the top UK publications, and found out their schedule.

For example, the Daily Mail files their ‘list lines’ at 10am, The Mirror holds their morning conferences at 11am, so you’ll probably want to pitch them before then.

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I recommend checking out Rose’s post here for the full info.

If you want my 2 cents (pence?), these can be helpful as a guide, but you’ll probably find that different journalists at the same publication may have different ‘optimal’ times to contact them. Breaking news, sports writers, and lifestyle journalists likely all work to different schedules.
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📊 The 2025 Coverage Benchmark Report

Coveragebook have shared their 2025 coverage benchmark report, so you can compare how your campaigns are doing vs the rest of the industry.

There’s loads of key stats, including;

A Rise in High DA Placements: Coverage on sites with DA >90 grew tenfold since 2020, now making up 15% of news URLs.

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​Most Coverage Gets No Social Shares: 66% of coverage had zero social shares, with only 7% exceeding 100 shares.

You can check out the full report here

🗓️ Content Calendars for 2025

Just before Christmas I started sharing content calendars and every week more and more kept popping up, these can be really helpful for campaign planning.

I think I’ve got a round up of all of them now, so here they are.
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​The Digital PR Pop Culture Calendar by JBH (updated for 2025)​

​The 2025 Marketing Calendar by Distinctly​

​2025 Insight Calendar by Mail Metro Media​

This last one isn’t strictly a content calendar, but I love it.

​Veronica Fletcher from JournoFinder saved every campaign title from Thea Chippendale’s PR Insider Newsletter, to create this handy little graphic.
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It shows the relative popularity for each category throughout the year.

If you like 'em big (like ‘em chunky), you can download the larger version here.

An Apology

Oh and also, I have a small apology to make (which is why I buried it down the bottom of this newsletter). In the last issue I linked to a 60 day free trial of Buzzstream, but a few of you contacted me to let me know I got the link wrong. So HERE is the correct link.

Thanks all for this week, thanks for reading!
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All previous newsletters can be found below.

— Mark

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1. Book a 1 on 1 call​ - let’s chat :)

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