The hardest part of getting into The Times is not the pitch. It is that the paper’s own readers are the reason your pitch fails.
The Times sells to a subscriber base that pays for judgment rather than volume, and its desks commission accordingly. A story runs because an editor believes a specific kind of reader, often someone senior in business, law, policy, or finance, will find it useful or revealing. That filter is narrower than most pitches assume, and it is not a prestige filter. Plenty of genuinely impressive companies are simply not relevant to it, and plenty of unglamorous ones are.
Once you understand that the question is relevance to a subscriber rather than importance in your sector, how to get featured in The Times UK becomes a tractable problem with a small number of real routes into it.
The Paid Route Does Not Exist, and That Is Useful Information
Start by eliminating the option most people spend money discovering.
Instant Press runs a catalog of 1,016 publications. It spans $150 to $200,000, covers genres from News through Crypto to Real Estate, reaches 270 US titles and 27 in the United Kingdom, and 96% of it is Google-indexed. The UK nationals are absent from it. So are the UK broadcasters. That is not a sourcing gap, it is a structural fact about that tier of the British press: editorial space is not inventory, and there is no price at which it becomes inventory.
This matters practically rather than philosophically. It means every hour you spend looking for a shortcut is wasted, and it means the people who do appear in The Times got there through one of the five routes below rather than through a budget you do not have. It also means the credential is worth something precisely because it cannot be bought, which is the whole reason you want it.
What budget does buy is the surrounding credibility that makes a Times journalist take an unfamiliar name seriously. A reporter vetting you will search your name. A result showing indexed coverage, a coherent professional identity, and a few substantive bylines reads very differently from a result showing a company website and nothing else. That is a genuine and purchasable advantage, and it is upstream of the pitch rather than a substitute for it.
Learn the Desk Structure Before You Write Anything
The Times is not one inbox, and treating it as one is the most common unforced error.
The paper runs distinct desks with distinct appetites: business, money, law, technology, politics, comment, and the Saturday and Sunday magazine operations, which commission on entirely different timelines. A pitch that would be declined by business can be commissioned by money, and the same pitch sent to both looks like a mass mailing to anyone who notices.
The practical move is to read six weeks of coverage in the one desk that fits your story and identify three journalists on it by name. Notice what they return to. Notice whether they write from data, from interviews, or from documents, because that tells you what a usable pitch to them contains. A reporter who builds every piece from filings wants a document. A reporter who builds from interviews wants access.
Timelines also differ sharply and nobody tells you this. Daily business coverage works on same-day and next-day cycles, so a pitch about something happening next month is premature. Magazine features commission eight to twelve weeks out, so a pitch tied to next week’s announcement is too late. Matching your news to the right clock is half of how to get featured in The Times UK, and it costs nothing to get right.
One more thing worth knowing: The Times and The Sunday Times operate with meaningful editorial independence from each other despite sharing a masthead and a building. A story declined by one is not automatically declined by the other, and pitching both simultaneously is poor form while pitching sequentially is normal.
Route One: Be the Data
The most reliable route in, and the one most companies are sitting on without noticing.
Times business and money desks run stories built on numbers, and they prefer numbers nobody else has. If your company processes transactions, matches buyers and sellers, employs people at scale, handles claims, moves goods, or sees any kind of market from the inside, you have a dataset that describes something about the British economy that no public source captures.
The pitch is not your company. It is the finding. What changed in your data in the last quarter, how it differs by region, what it says about a behaviour everyone is speculating about. Your company appears as the source, which is exactly where you want to be, because the source gets named in the first three paragraphs and gets called again next quarter.
Scale is less important than specificity here. A company with 400 customers that can describe something precise about how those customers behaved in a particular month is more useful to a reporter than a company with 40,000 customers offering a vague directional statement. Desks want a number they can put in a sentence with a source attached, and small clean numbers do that job perfectly.
Two conditions make this work. The data has to be genuinely yours rather than a survey you commissioned, because commissioned polling is heavily discounted by serious desks and frequently declined outright. And you have to be willing to share the methodology, including the limitations, because a Times journalist will ask and a refusal ends the conversation.
Route Two: Be the Expert on a Running Story
Slower to set up, far more repeatable once established.
Times reporters cover beats continuously, which means they need informed comment on developing stories at short notice. Becoming a person they call is a positioning exercise rather than a pitching exercise. It requires a narrow, defensible specialism, a visible track record of commenting on it accurately, and reachability.
The mechanics are unglamorous. Identify the two or three Times journalists whose beat overlaps your specialism. Read them properly for a month. When they publish something in your territory, send two sentences of genuinely useful context with no ask attached, and include your mobile number. Do this four or five times across a quarter without requesting anything, and you will have moved from a cold contact to a known source. That transition is the entire game, and nearly nobody completes it because the first four messages feel like they are producing nothing.
Route Three: Be a Comment Piece
The route with the lowest barrier and the most competition.
The Times runs opinion from outside contributors, and the bar is a genuine argument rather than a profile. A comment piece needs a position that a reasonable person could disagree with, evidence that is specific, and a reason it is being made this week rather than last year. Sector advocacy fails. “Business leaders must adapt” fails. A named policy with a named consequence, argued from direct experience, is commissionable.
Two things kill comment pitches that otherwise have a decent argument inside them. The first is hedging, because a piece that concludes the truth is somewhere in the middle has no reason to exist. The second is self-interest that is not disclosed, because an argument for a policy that would obviously benefit your company reads as lobbying unless you name the interest yourself in the first paragraph, at which point it reads as candour.
Keep the pitch to three sentences: the argument, the evidence, why now. Attach nothing. If you have not written for a national before, a short writing sample on a credible platform helps, because an editor commissioning an unknown writer is taking a risk on whether you can actually construct an 800-word argument.
Route Four: Be Part of Someone Else’s Story
The most overlooked route, and the one with the highest success rate for small companies.
Journalists at The Times are frequently working on a piece that needs an example, a case study, a counterpoint, or someone willing to be quoted saying the inconvenient thing. They are rarely working on a piece about you. Offering yourself as a component of a story someone is already writing converts at a much higher rate than proposing a new one.
Finding those stories takes attention rather than access. Reporters signal what they are working on, and the ones covering your sector publish pieces that visibly need more voices. Reading a piece and offering the specific thing it was missing, within a day of publication, is a far better use of an email than a cold pitch about your own news.
The etiquette is worth getting right, because it is easy to overstep. Offer the specific thing, in two sentences, and say plainly that you are available if useful. Do not suggest what the piece should have said, do not critique the reporting, and do not follow up twice. Reporters remember a useful unsolicited offer warmly and an unsolicited edit permanently.
The trade here is that you get a mention rather than a feature. A mention in The Times is worth considerably more than a feature in an outlet nobody reads, and it is how most people’s first national appearance actually happens.
Route Five: Be Where the Journalists Already Are
The structural route, and the one that compounds over years.
Times journalists find sources through other journalists, through trade press, through industry events they attend, and through people who have already been quoted elsewhere credibly. Appearing consistently in the serious trade press in your sector is the single most reliable way to become visible to a national reporter, because when they need someone in your field, the trade press is where they look.
This is the honest answer to how to get featured in The Times UK for most people, and it is the one nobody wants: do the tier below it properly and consistently, and the national coverage arrives as a consequence rather than as a campaign. The companies that appear in The Times out of nowhere are almost always companies that spent two years appearing somewhere less glamorous first.
The practical version is a sequence rather than a leap. Build a documented specialism. Get published consistently in indexed trade and sector publications so that your name returns something substantial when searched. Produce one genuine dataset a year. Make yourself reachable, with a mobile number in your signature and a willingness to answer at inconvenient times. Then pick whichever of the five routes fits what you actually have this quarter.
Done in that order, the first national piece tends to arrive in year two rather than month two, and once it does the second and third come considerably faster, because by then you are a name a reporter has seen somewhere before.