My quest to find out why my inbox was getting flooded with PR spam

I can’t remember now which email it was that made me click on the ‘Report Spam’ and ‘Unsubscribe’ links for the messages I received through Mynewsdesk, a service that companies can use to contact journalists with press releases. But I know I was shocked when, after opting out of the email in question, I was routed to a page that showed I had been unknowingly signed up for 46 separate email distribution lists.

My job as a journalist wouldn’t be possible without public relations professionals at companies that broker connections and arrange interviews with people in their organizations. Without services like U.K.-based ResponseSource, which distributes requests for case studies and experts for reporters’ stories, my job would be considerably more difficult. (ResponseSource has a U.S. equivalent, called Help A Reporter Out.) And despite my public grousing about PR professionals on X (née Twitter), I recognize that ours is a symbiotic relationship.

But the 46 distribution lists, many of which are for companies I’ve never written about and never would, surprised me. Indeed, it’s a problem many can relate to, including those outside journalism: Spam made up just under half of all email last year.

Because I’m based in Europe, and because I was angry, I took advantage of data protection laws here and on September 6 made a subject access request to Mynewsdesk, which requires organizations to hand over all the information they hold on an individual. I also asked that they remove me from all the lists in question. On September 18, I received a spreadsheet containing what the company knew about me.

The data highlights how broken the modern-day PR world is.

Mynewsdesk holds 27 separate fields of data on journalists in its database, which it offers to those who sign me up to their distribution lists (as a reminder: I never signed up for any of these). They start with minute details of when my record was created within a company—the earliest was a week before Christmas 2013, near the start of my journalism career—and when it was last updated. A handful of companies updated their records of me on Mynewsdesk on September 13, 2023, a week after I had asked to be removed. And they include information like my phone number (some of which are correct, some of which are wrong), location (many incorrectly say I’m based in San Francisco, where I’ve never been), and other contact details.

Besides holding sometimes incorrect information about my location, occupation and contact details, the most insightful data is in four fields at the end of Mynewsdesk’s list. It shows the number of emails I’d received through their services, the engagement rate, click rate, and open rate of emails sent.

It’s here that the futility of using tools like Mynewsdesk made itself really clear. PRs representing those 46 companies and organizations had tried to email me 301 times using the Mynewsdesk service. One company alone sent me 45 separate emails. I opened 51% of the emails sent to me through the service, according to Mynewsdesk’s data, which tracks how I interact with the messages.

That may be seen as a successful metric. But the number of times I clicked through from the email to a link provided within it is far lower—just 0.7%—and the “engagement” score, which based on my own analysis of emails in my inbox through the service, is zero.

The reason for those low engagement metrics is that the messages aren’t well-suited to a lot of the coverage I write. Announcing a “partnership to democratize small-business financing” isn’t the sort of story I would write about for Fast Company or elsewhere. I care even less about the press release from a company declaring they had signed a memorandum of understanding with another business.

And this is just one slice of the junk that fills my inbox—and many others, not just journalists. Days ago, alongside the entire staff of another tech publication, my email was leaked to more than 20 others by a PR representative trying to pitch me on what they claimed was “the world’s first flavored Brazil nut” (something Google, and common sense, shows is false).

A day later the same PR rep emailed me basically the same thing, about the same “first flavored Brazil nut,” to a separate group of people. At least this time they managed to BCC, rather than CC, in everyone.

The concept is called “spray and pray” in the PR industry. Companies know their chance of a journalist responding positively and writing a story from an impersonal, mass-mailed message is tiny, but services like Mynewsdesk and others make outreach easy enough that the odds are worth it. Meanwhile journalists’ inboxes are straining under the weight of pointless emails, making it harder to sift out the meaningful ones.

It’s a conversation that is constantly happening. Just last month, I responded to one PR rep who seemed frustrated that a journalist had replied to a peer saying they would like to be removed from a distribution list, or would report the sender as a spammer. “If we get replies, then we stop sending follow-ups, simples,” they wrote. But if I took the time to reply to the hundreds of emails I receive every day, there’d be no time to write stories.

Some PR reps may use tools like Mynewsdesk, but it’s often begrudgingly. And they recognize the issues inherent in it. “As consumers, we wouldn’t accept cold calls or spam marketing emails from companies and we shouldn’t expect journalists to do so either,” says Nina Sawetz, managing director at U.K. PR agency Future PR. “I’ve come across several platforms that have clearly not received consent from the journalist to hold or promote their contact details and this is hugely disappointing. Neither party is usually aware that this is the case and this only serves to increase the frustration that journalists have towards PRs.”

Sawetz suggests shunning spray and pray tactics and spending time building connections. “Done well, PR is about relationships and building a trusted rapport with a journalist is key to effective and successful comms,” she says. “This involves a clear understanding of what the journalist covers, what stories they are preparing and what angle they need.” she says.

It’s a sentiment I’d agree with wholeheartedly.