What a Yes Actually Turns Into

Across nine years of records we can show you nine pitches traced end to end — the reporter replied, and a piece ran. The median gap between a reply and publication is five days. The fastest was one day, the slowest eighty-five. That spread is the honest answer to "how long does this take", and almost nobody publishes it.

Every other page on this site shows that reporters answer: 63% of graded replies a yes between December 2025 and August 2026 — 110 of the 175 we could grade. None of it answers the question you actually have, which is whether any of that becomes coverage. This page is that answer, including the parts that do not flatter us.

On this page

• How long a reply takes
• How long publication takes after that
• What this is not
• Why the number is smaller than the one you will be quoted
• What an embargo actually buys
• What to ask an agency about this

How long a reply takes

From 37 reporters where we hold both a send and a reply we can trust, timed from the email that actually reached them:

The shape is not a curve, it is two groups. Eighteen of the thirty-seven answered inside eight days, most of those inside two. The other nineteen answered after more than two weeks, several after two months, one after 111 days. Almost nothing lands in between.

That changes the advice, and it is the opposite of what we used to say here. A reporter who has gone quiet for a week has not declined — half of everything we get back arrives later than that. Keep the follow-up sequence short and stop treating silence at day seven as an answer.

Two things about how this is measured, because they change the number materially. The gap is counted from the last email that reached the reporter, not the first one we sent — one reporter here shows 137 days from first contact and eight hours from the follow-up they actually replied to, and counting the former would be dishonest. And it is 37 unique reporters, not 37 pitches: the outreach tool records a reply against every send in a sequence, so counting rows rather than people would triple some of them.

The tool is also not the whole record. A good deal of our pitching happens by hand and never touches it, so this is what we can measure, not everything that happened.

None of this says much about when to send — that is a different question, and we have measured it separately across 1,931 pitches. Nor does it tell you which tactics are worth the effort in the first place.

How long publication takes after that

These are the pitches we can follow all the way through: a reporter replied, and we can point at the piece they then wrote.

Median five days. Six of the nine ran inside a fortnight. The three that took longer were not going wrong — two were analysts writing a considered piece rather than news, and one was a reporter who took the material and used it when the story came round.

We have not named the journalists. The outlets with real newsrooms are named because that identifies nobody; the two independents are described rather than named for the same reason in reverse.

What this is not

Nine chains is nine chains. It is not a conversion rate and we are not going to present it as one, because the records will not support that and the arithmetic would be dishonest in our favour.

Three reasons the real number is unknowable from what we hold. Coverage gets tracked by outlet and date, and the author field is only filled in consistently for some clients — so a piece can exist without us being able to tie it to the reply that caused it. Plenty of work starts with a hand sent email that never touched the outreach tool at all. And a reply is frequently not the cause of anything: it is a decline, a note about timing, or a request for something we then send.

So: nine we can prove, on the record, with dates. Any agency quoting you a clean percentage for this is either measuring something narrower than they are implying, or has not checked.

Why the number is smaller than the one you will be quoted

We hold 2,917 pieces of coverage across nine years and eleven clients. Before that number meant anything, we had to take two things out of it.

Wire and aggregator pickup. A release goes out and reappears on MSN, Yahoo Finance, MarketScreener, TradingView, a dozen Chinese finance portals. That is distribution working, not journalism happening.

The same story in many places. Where one headline appears across five or more outlets in a few days, it is one story travelling — usually a broadcast release picked up by local affiliates. That alone removed 1,080 rows.

Between them those two filters took roughly half of everything the trackers contain. What is left is 2,917 pieces where someone made an editorial decision. If an agency reports a placement count without telling you how it treats syndication, the number is roughly double what it should be. Ask.

What an embargo actually buys

Two embargoed launches in the record, and they behave differently.

A product embargo sent on 23 December produced its first piece four days later, on the lift. A broadcast embargo sent on 8 June produced pieces the same day it lifted.

That is the point of an embargo and the reason it is worth the administrative pain: it converts a scatter of publication dates into a single day. It does not create coverage that would not otherwise happen — it concentrates coverage that would.

What to ask an agency about this

• How do you count syndication? If a wire pickup counts as a placement, halve every number they show you.
• Show me a reply and the piece it produced. Not a case study — the actual email and the actual article, with both dates.
• What is your median time from reply to publication? If they have never measured it, that is an answer too. Our own measurement page covers what else is worth asking for.
• What share of positive replies produce nothing? Anyone claiming a high number here is counting something other than published articles.

If you want a programme measured this way — Salient PR is a technology PR agency, and every figure on this page came out of our own records with the denominator attached. See how we work or start a conversation.

Sources

• Salient PR outreach database, December 2025 – August 2026; 37 reporters with a send and reply pair we can trust, timed from the last email before the reply
• Salient PR coverage trackers, 2,917 organic placements, May 2017 – July 2026, syndication excluded
• Nine reply-to-publication chains traced individually