Thread by @laurahelmuth

What should you do if you sent an email you really need a response to, and you’re not getting a response? A thread.

Short answer: email again. Long answer with specific suggestions is below.

Whenever I talk to a group of early career or freelance journalists, somebody asks what they should do when they send a pitch and an editor doesn’t respond. This question is usually asked in some anguish.

It’s a problem everybody faces, not just freelance journalists, and it's especially difficult when we’re trying to get attention from someone in a position of relative power.

When people ask about this, they often say, “I don’t want to be a pest.” NB: If you are worried about being a pest, you’re probably not a pest. (If you have never worried about being a pest … maybe you are being a pest.)

Almost always the reason you didn’t get a response is the person didn’t see or open the message or meant to but forgot it or didn’t realize it was important. It’s not personal or intentionally rude.

It's just the avalanche of emails and a shrinking signal-to-noise ratio in everybody’s inbox.

Email again saying something like: "Sorry to bother you, but I’m sending this again just in case it got lost in all the chaos of the past few days/weeks." Something non-judgmental and kind, attributing the lost thread to busyness or information-overload rather than bad intent.

Make sure the original message is included in the follow-up – don’t make the person go looking for the original.

If your subject line was ambiguous, use a new subject line. If the message is time-sensitive, put “time-sensitive” in the subject line. If it’s a pitch, say “pitch.”

If you need an answer by a certain time, put that in the new greeting at the top of the follow-up. If your original message was really long, give a quick summary with a specific request.

The main point is: Give them another chance to respond.
And pay it forward by replying as reliably as you can to people with less power than you.