Almost 3 per cent of replies to media enquiries on our Journalist Enquiry Service in November 2017 were not sent because they were after the deadline or too large.

Recently we covered the benefits of responding to enquiries with short deadlines and some of the reasons to respond to an enquiry quickly.

It’s great to prioritise enquiries so you respond to the most relevant first, but there are consequences when you leave it too late.

If you wait too long a journalist may no longer be working on that story – it might be out to print or already published.

To prevent this happening we set up a temporary email address for each enquiry that is sent through our Journalist Enquiry Service.

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Responding to enquiries with a short deadline

27 Nov 2017

If you respond to an enquiry after a deadline has passed your email will not be received by the journalist.

It’s a shame to see that PRs are missing out on providing journalists with valuable material and missing out on the media coverage that could have been gained as a result.

On top of deadlines passing, journalists sometimes contact us to get enquiries closed early. This usually happens when they have received hundreds of responses in a short amount of time and are confident they have what they need for their story.

When you get a great enquiry into your inbox, take note of the deadline so you can reply in good time, but don’t forget that if you leave it until the last minute it can still be too late.

If you know you can’t reply to the enquiry by the deadline, save yourself some time and effort and find another suitable enquiry instead.