Most businesses go about getting press coverage completely backwards. They write a press release about something that is not actually newsworthy, blast it to a list of journalists they have never interacted with, and then wonder why nobody covers them. The truth is that getting real press coverage is not about shouting louder. It is about understanding what journalists need and making yourself useful to them.
We have placed clients in publications ranging from local newspapers to national outlets. Here is everything we have learned about what works, starting with the single most effective strategy we have found.
The Journalist Newsletter Strategy
This is the approach we recommend to every client, and it is the one that consistently produces the best results over time. Build an email newsletter list of journalists who cover your industry.
Here is how it works. Identify 20 to 50 journalists who regularly write about your industry, your market, or topics related to your business. Read their work. Understand what they cover and what angles interest them. Subscribe to their newsletters if they have them. Follow them on social media. Get to know their beat. Tools like Muck Rack and Cision maintain searchable databases of journalists organized by beat, outlet, and recent article history.
Then start a simple email newsletter. Not a company newsletter full of product updates and self-congratulation. A newsletter where you share genuinely useful insights about your industry. Original data. Contrarian takes. Expert analysis of trends they are likely covering. Things a journalist would find valuable when they are researching their next story.
When your business or industry is in the news, drop a note to your journalist list with a quote and a take. Not a pitch. Not an ask for coverage. Just value. Something like "I saw the news about [industry development]. Here is our take on what it means for [relevant stakeholders]. If you are interested in more, hit reply." That is it.
Lead with value. Always lead with value. The journalists who find your insights useful will start to see you as a source. They will reply. They will ask for quotes on future stories. They will reach out when they are working on something in your space. This is how real media relationships are built, and real media relationships are what produce real press coverage. This approach is consistent with guidance published in Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter, both of which consistently note that journalists prioritize sources who demonstrate sustained subject-matter expertise over cold outreach.
Example from our practice. One of our small-business clients, a Philadelphia-area commercial contractor, started a twice-monthly newsletter with commentary on zoning, permits, and local development trends. Nine months in, a reporter at a regional business journal who had been quietly reading the newsletter reached out for a quote on a zoning change. That one quote turned into a full profile. The profile turned into inbound calls from five more reporters over the next year. We did not pitch anyone. The client wrote useful material and the relationships built themselves.
We have seen this strategy turn business owners who had zero media presence into go-to sources for reporters in their industry within six to twelve months. It is not instant, but the coverage it produces is genuine, editorial, and far more valuable than anything you could buy.
What Actually Makes News
Before you pitch anyone, you need to understand what journalists consider newsworthy. This is where most businesses fail. Your new product launch is not news. Your company anniversary is not news. Your hire of a new VP is not news. At least, not by themselves.
What makes news is relevance to a broader story. If your new product solves a problem that is currently in the public conversation, that is an angle. If your company data reveals a trend that affects an industry or consumer group, that is a story. If your expertise can explain something complicated that is happening in the news right now, that is valuable. Pew Research Center\'s newspaper industry fact sheet documents that U.S. newsroom employment fell 26% between 2008 and 2020, and the trend has continued. Fewer reporters covering more beats means journalists are more dependent than ever on external sources for expertise and data, which is good news for businesses willing to provide it.
Journalists are looking for stories that their readers care about. Your job is not to convince them to care about your company. It is to show them how your company, your data, or your expertise connects to something their readers already care about.
How to Pitch Effectively
When you do pitch a journalist, keep it short. Three to four sentences maximum for the initial email. The subject line should communicate the story angle, not your company name. The body should explain why this story matters to their audience, what is new or different about it, and what you can offer them (data, an interview, access to something they cannot get elsewhere).
Personalize every pitch. Reference something the journalist has recently written. Show that you read their work and that your pitch is relevant to what they cover. A generic pitch sent to 200 journalists will be ignored by 200 journalists. A personalized pitch sent to 10 journalists who actually cover your space will get responses. Cision\'s annual State of the Media survey has repeatedly found that relevance to the reporter\'s beat is the single most important factor in determining whether a pitch gets any engagement at all. Academic research backs this up: a 2016 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly study on source selection found that journalists weight topical relevance and established expertise far more heavily than novelty or press release polish.
Time your pitches around news cycles. If something relevant is happening in your industry right now, that is the time to reach out. Journalists working on a breaking story are actively looking for sources and angles. If you can be useful to them in that moment, you are far more likely to get coverage than if you pitch on a random Tuesday about something that has no news hook.
Using HARO, Connectively, and Response Platforms
If you do not yet have relationships with journalists in your space, responsive platforms like Connectively (formerly HARO) and Qwoted are the fastest way to get quoted. Journalists post queries looking for sources; you respond with a concise, on-topic quote and your credentials. The response rate is low (under 5% for most senders) but the queries are real and the quotes that get picked up appear in national outlets.
The discipline to make these work: respond only to queries directly relevant to your expertise. Keep responses under 200 words. Lead with the quote itself, not a company pitch. Include a one-line credential. Include a working cell phone number if the journalist needs to verify on deadline. Most responses are ignored because people pitch their company instead of answering the question the journalist actually asked.
Why Pay-to-Play Is Usually a Waste
There is an entire industry built around selling "press coverage" that is really just paid placement. Sponsored posts, contributed articles on sites that will publish anyone who pays, and press release distribution services that put your announcement on hundreds of websites that no one actually reads.
We are not going to tell you this stuff is always worthless. There are situations where a strategically placed contributed article can provide value. But you should understand what you are buying. Paid placements do not carry the same weight as earned media. They do not help with Wikipedia notability (because they are not independent sources per Wikipedia\'s reliable source guidelines). They do not build real relationships with journalists. And increasingly, search engines and AI systems are getting better at distinguishing earned coverage from paid content. Google\'s Search Quality Rater Guidelines specifically flag \"sites that exist primarily to publish sponsored or low-quality content\" as signals of reduced trustworthiness.
If you are going to spend money on press coverage, spend it on building the relationships and creating the stories that lead to real editorial coverage. That is what provides lasting value. Real editorial coverage also feeds your AI search visibility and helps you rank in Google — multiple benefits from a single investment.
The Long Game
Getting meaningful press coverage is not a one-time activity. It is a sustained effort that compounds over time. Each piece of genuine coverage makes the next one easier. Journalists who have quoted you once are more likely to come back. Publications that have covered you develop familiarity with your story. And the backlog of real coverage you build becomes an asset that supports everything else you do, from SEO to investor relations to Wikipedia page creation.
Example from our practice. Another client, an early-stage SaaS founder, spent six months answering two or three Connectively queries a week with short, genuinely useful quotes. The first three months produced nothing. Months four through six generated fourteen placements in outlets including a national trade publication and two Tier 1 business sites. By month nine, three reporters had her on speed dial. The compounding effect of editorial coverage is real, and it shows up late.
We have clients who started with zero press coverage and now get inbound requests from journalists multiple times a month. That did not happen because of a single brilliant pitch. It happened because they committed to being useful to the media over time and built real relationships with the people who cover their industry.
Getting Started
If you are starting from zero, here is what to do this week. Make a list of 20 journalists who cover your industry. Read their last five articles each. Set up a simple spreadsheet with their names, outlets, beats, and contact information. Then start thinking about what you know that they would find useful.
If you want professional help building a press coverage strategy, our press placement service covers everything from journalist identification and relationship building to pitch development and ongoing media outreach. You may also find our guides on writing a press release and press release distribution useful as you develop your approach.
Related Resources
- How to write a press release — Create compelling press materials journalists will cover
- Startup PR strategy — DIY press approach for early-stage companies
- Press release distribution — Get your announcements to the right outlets
- Wikipedia notability — Press coverage builds your credibility foundation
By the Numbers: What the Data Says About Press Coverage Today
The structural reality facing journalists makes your timing as a potential source better than it has been in decades. According to the Pew Research Center journalism portal, total U.S. newsroom employment dropped by roughly 57% between 2008 and 2020, falling from about 114,000 jobs to around 49,000. Fewer reporters are now responsible for more beats, more platforms, and faster publication cycles than at any point in journalism history. That compression means a reporter covering commercial real estate in 2024 is also expected to post on social, file for the website, and appear on a podcast. They don't have time to find expert sources from scratch. If you've already built a relationship and demonstrated expertise, you're filling a gap they genuinely need filled.
The Muck Rack State of Journalism report found that 68% of journalists say they prefer to be contacted by email, and that personalized pitches referencing specific past work are rated significantly more effective than mass-distributed press releases. The same report found that the average journalist receives more than 50 pitches per week and responds to fewer than 10% of them. That's not a discouraging number. It's a targeting problem. Businesses that have spent six months building a relationship through a useful newsletter aren't pitching into a cold inbox. They're sending a note to someone who already reads their work. The response rate in that context is completely different. The Cision State of the Media Report corroborates this, noting that 76% of journalists say the most important thing a PR contact or source can do is understand their beat and tailor outreach accordingly. Generic doesn't work. Relevant does.
Beyond volume and targeting, credibility signals matter more than most business owners expect. The Poynter Institute's reporting and editing resources emphasize that journalists are trained to verify sources before quoting them, and that a findable, consistent digital footprint significantly lowers the friction of that verification. A business owner whose name appears in previous articles, whose LinkedIn profile is current, and whose website contains genuine thought leadership on their industry will be quoted faster and more often than a source a reporter can't easily confirm. That's why press coverage compounds. Each placement makes the next one easier to get, because it adds to a verifiable public record that journalists can point to when an editor asks why they used you as a source.
All of this data points to the same conclusion for your situation. Getting press coverage in today's media environment isn't about having a bigger budget or a better press release template. It's about being the most useful, most credible, most accessible expert in your space when a reporter needs one. The businesses that build that position systematically, over six to twelve months, consistently outperform those that treat media relations as a one-off campaign. The numbers back that up, and so does the experience of the reporters themselves.
Another Client Situation: Austin, Texas. Residential Solar Installer. 11 Months.
A mid-sized residential solar installation company in Austin came to us with no media presence and a frustration that larger competitors with bigger marketing budgets were getting all the local and regional press. The owner had deep knowledge of Texas energy policy, the ERCOT grid, and the practical realities of solar permitting in Central Texas, but had never framed that knowledge as something journalists would want. We helped him launch a plain-text email newsletter sent to 34 journalists covering energy, real estate, and local business across three Austin-area and two statewide outlets. The newsletter went out twice a month and covered things like permit backlog data, utility interconnection timelines, and what grid events like Winter Storm Uri had actually changed about residential solar demand. No product promotions. No calls to action. Just data-backed commentary from someone who installed hundreds of systems a year and saw the numbers firsthand. At month seven, a reporter at the Austin American-Statesman reached out for background on a story about homeowner confusion over solar incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. The owner provided detailed, accurate context, was quoted prominently, and was identified as a local industry expert. Over the next four months, two more regional outlets and one national trade publication contacted him independently. None of those placements were pitched. By month eleven, inbound leads attributed to press coverage had increased enough that the company paused its paid search spend to manage capacity.