How to get press coverage
Journalists cover stories, not companies. This is how to find yours, pitch it properly, and turn one placement into a run of them.
Lead the pitch with the finding rather than with your company, send eight considered emails rather than a hundred identical ones, and have the data, a named quote and usable images ready before the first pitch goes out. If there is no story yet, creating one is the work.
Is it a fit?
News
There is something a journalist can report, not something you would like said.
Fit
The outlet reaches people who could buy, not the largest possible number of people.
Landing
The coverage points somewhere that converts, or it is applause with no invoice.
Start here. You get back what one inquiry is worth, which is how coverage gets judged on something.
What an inquiry is worthThe plan
Do these six, in order
A time against each one and a way to tell it is finished.
Write the one thing only you know
The part a reporter cannot get anywhere else.
2 hours · Done when it survives being read aloud to an outsider
Build a list of twenty
Reporters who covered this beat in the last six months.
half a day · Done when each row links to something they wrote
Lead with what their readers get
Two sentences, before the company name appears.
1 hour · Done when the pitch works without your name in the first line
Have the material ready before you pitch
Data, a quote, images, and a named contact.
half a day · Done when one link holds all of it
Put every placement back on your own site
A page that lists them, linked from the footer.
1 hour · Done when the page exists and is linked
Run the same story on owned channels
The day it runs, not a week later.
2 hours · Done when both versions are live
Journalists are not gatekeepers to be persuaded. They are people with a deadline, an editor, and an audience who will stop reading if the piece is dull. Every pitch that fails, fails because it made their job harder rather than easier.
Coverage follows from having something worth reporting and making it easy to report.
01.Find the story only you can tell
Find the thing only you can say. Proprietary data from your own operations, a contrarian position you can defend, a customer outcome with numbers attached, a shift you are seeing before the market has named it.
A funding round, a hire or a product update is an announcement, not a story.
02.Build a list of twenty, not two hundred
Twenty journalists who cover your area beats two hundred contacts scraped from a database. Read what each of them has published in the last three months, note the angles they favor, and note who has already covered this space.
Being on a large list is what gets a sender marked as spam and quietly filtered forever.
03.Pitch the reader, not yourself
Write the pitch as though you were the reader, not the subject. Why would someone who has never heard of your company care about this paragraph, and what would they tell a colleague about it afterwards.
Lead with the finding or the tension, not with your company name.
Twenty minutes with a practitioner from our team, and you leave with a plan for your specific situation.
Talk to an expert04.Make the journalist's job easy
Give them everything they need to file without asking follow-up questions: the data behind the claim, a quotable line from a named person, images at usable resolution, and a short factual paragraph about the company.
Then be available.
05.Compound every placement
A placement is an asset, not an event. Reference it on the site, send it to the client list, use it in proposals, and give the sales team the line. Most coverage delivers a single day of traffic and then gets forgotten by the company that earned it.
Coverage also compounds into more coverage.
06.Blend earned, owned, and paid
Earned coverage buys credibility you cannot purchase. Owned channels give you control and repetition. Paid gives you reach on demand. Each does something the other two cannot, and running only one is why most communications programs feel stuck.
The practical version for a small company is a steady owned channel, a small carefully worked press list.
Press releases about being excited; deleted on sight.
Mass-blasting a list; it burns the outlets you will want later.
Stopping after one round; the second wave is where coverage compounds.
Questions we get
The ones that come up on almost every call.
Do we need an agency?
Not to start.
What if we have no news?
Then the story is in your data or your opinion.
How long before coverage happens?
Weeks to months, and the first one is by far the hardest.
Is a press release still worth writing?
Rarely as a pitch, occasionally as a reference document.
What counts as press coverage?
Anything written or broadcast about you by somebody who does not work for you and was not paid to say it. A trade publication naming you in an industry piece counts. An analyst note counts. A podcast interview counts. A paid placement and a syndicated release do not, whatever the invoice calls them, because the whole value of coverage is the third party judgment attached to it, and there is none in something you bought.
Most of this is doable in house.
Your results so far
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By Shaheer Shaikh, technology and operations consultant · Updated October 3, 2026
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Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built
Coverage is worth what it converts to, and it is the hardest channel to attribute, which makes knowing the value of one inquiry more useful here than anywhere else. The inquiry value calculator gives you that number before you commit a budget to something you will struggle to measure.