About Throughline

Throughline is a small editorial outreach studio in Edinburgh. We earn coverage by being the kind of pitch editors are pleased to open — not the kind they filter to spam.

Why we started

Throughline grew out of a newsroom, not a link farm. Our founder, Mara Ellison, spent six years as a commissioning editor at a national lifestyle title before crossing the desk. She kept seeing the same thing from the other side: brilliant brands with real stories to tell, buried under outreach so generic that no editor would touch it. The fix wasn't more volume. It was better stories, sent to the right people, at the right time.

So in 2017 she built a studio around that principle. We stayed small on purpose. Every client is run by the people you email, and every pitch carries a name we're willing to attach our reputation to.

How we work

We treat outreach as a craft with standards, not a numbers game. That shapes a few things we won't compromise on:

• The story comes first. If a piece only exists to carry a link, an editor can smell it and so can a reader. We pitch ideas a publication would have wanted regardless.
• We're selective. We turn down work where we can't pitch honestly, and we walk away from sites that exist only to sell placements. A short list of real relationships is worth more than a long list of transactions.
• We protect the relationship. An editor's trust is the asset. We'd rather lose a campaign than burn a contact we'll want next year.
• Plain reporting. You see every pitch, every live URL and the context each link sits in. No padded metrics, no vanity dashboards.

The team

Around Mara is a compact group of former journalists, editors and researchers — people who have written to deadline and rejected a hundred bad pitches themselves. That shared instinct for what clears a desk is the whole point of the studio. We're part of an independent agency network, which gives us reach without turning us into a content mill.