Pitch Success Rate Tracker for Freelance Journalists — Acceptance Rate by Outlet and Editor
Most freelances have a feeling about which outlets say yes and which never reply, and the feeling is usually wrong because rejections are memorable and silence is not. Counting them is the only way to know where your pitching time is going.
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Pitch Success Rate Calculator
Track every pitch you send and its outcome to see your acceptance rate, response times, and which editors and angles work best. Data is saved in your browser only.
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How it works
- Each pitch is logged with subject/angle, outlet, outlet type, editor name, date sent and a status of pending, accepted, rejected, no response or commissioned. Entries are saved to browser localStorage under ukjh-pitch-tracker.
- Accepted and commissioned both count as successes. Anything other than pending counts as resolved. The headline rate is round(successes / resolved x 100), so pitches still waiting for an answer are excluded from the denominator rather than counted as failures.
- Average response time is the mean gap in days between date sent and response date across resolved pitches. The response date is stamped automatically with today when you move a pitch out of pending, and is cleared if you move it back.
- It also breaks the success rate down by outlet type, ranks the top five editors by success rate and then by volume, and lists the six most frequent words longer than three characters across the subject lines of your successful pitches.
When to use it
- After a quiet month, to see whether your acceptance rate actually moved or only your mood did.
- Deciding which outlet tier deserves more of your pitching time.
- Working out how long to wait before chasing, using your own average response time rather than a rule of thumb.
- Reviewing which editors have commissioned you before, ahead of a new round of pitching.
What it does not do
- The recurring words panel is a raw frequency count with nothing but a length filter — there is no stopword list, so ordinary words that happen to appear in your subject lines will surface alongside anything meaningful. It is a curiosity, not evidence about what sells.
- Response times depend entirely on you updating a status the day the reply lands. Change a status a fortnight late and the tool stamps today, inflating the average.
- Marking a silent pitch as no response converts it from excluded to a resolved failure, so your headline rate drops the moment you tidy up old entries. Be consistent about when you do that or the trend is meaningless.
- The editor ranking sorts by success rate first, so a single accepted pitch from one editor outranks four from another. With small numbers the ranking is noise.
- Browser-local and single-device, with no export. Clearing site data loses the log.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.