Pitch the wrong reporter or publication, and your story won’t see the light of day.
Before you start seeking press, you’ll need to look for reporters who have reach, respect and expertise when you choose who to talk to. You’ll also need to be prepared to accept the truth about your business, even if it hurts. It’s critical that you find a writer who’s a good fit for the business you’re building and the audience you’re seeking.
If you don’t use a strategic approach when reaching out to journalists, you’ll get few responses, fewer meetings, and articles that either misrepresent you, shortchange you, or blow up in your face. The goal isn’t just to secure positive coverage, because no one will believe it; startups are tough. There are challenges and setbacks and scary looming questions. But an honest article from a respected voice with a big enough audience can legitimize a business as it tries to turn vision into impact.
Here we’ll discuss how to find the publication and reporter who understands you and can tell the story that aligns with your objectives. In part one of this series, we detailed why you should (or shouldn’t) want press coverage and how to know what’s newsworthy enough to pitch.
In future ExtraCrunch posts, I’ll explore how to hire PR help, formulate a pitch, deliver it to reporters, prepare for interviews and conduct an announcement. If you have more questions or ideas for ExtraCrunch posts, feel free to reach out to me via Twitter or elsewhere.
Why should you believe me? I’m editor-at-large for TechCrunch, where I’ve written 4,000 articles about early-stage startups and tech giants. For 10 years, I’ve reviewed startup pitches via email and Twitter, at demo days for accelerators like Y Combinator and on stage as a judge of startup competitions. From warm introductions to cold calls, I’ve seen what gets reporters’ attention and why stories become enduring narratives supporting companies as they grow.
Deciding which publications to target
Which publications do you currently read and respect?
Starting here ensures that you’re approaching PR from a place of knowledge with personal context rather than going by what someone else tells you. But you also have to consider which publications appeal in that way to your target demographic. For example, if you’re aiming to reach teens, parents, or Chief Information Officers, you’ll have very different target publications.
If you appeal to a niche audience aligned with a specific publication, you can definitely score some leads and installs, priming the pump so when users hear about you again, they already have a positive association for your brand. You can score SEO to help your get discovered when people search for keywords related to your business, but if you’re looking for user growth or SEO, be sure to work with a publication that links to the websites and apps they write about, as many don’t. But if you’re hoping for ‘the servers are on fire we’ve got so much traffic’ attention, you need to first build network effects and viral loops directly into your product.
Once you identify a realistic objective for gaining press coverage, you can figure out which reporters and outlets will best help you achieve your goals.
Typically, you’ll aim to work with more prestigious publications and writers first, as they can inspire other outlets to write up follow-on coverage. It rarely works the other way around, since top publishers want to be seen as first to a story and forging trends rather than following them with late coverage. These outlets often have greater reach in terms of home page traffic, social following, SEO and shareability.
The exception to this strategy: if there’s a specific writer at a less-prestigious publisher who’s renowned as the expert in your space whose word has more weight, or if that publication better aligns with your overall goals. For example, you might want to work with a transportation expert like Kirsten Korosec if you’re an electric car company, or a publication focused on startups like TechCrunch if you’re trying to stoke fundraising. If you’re a more general mainstream consumer business or are seeking maximum growth, you might instead choose a popular national newspaper with a big circulation.
Who should tell your story?
After you’ve set goals and have an idea regarding the kind of publication or journalist you want to work with, it’s time to build a ranked list of specific reporters. Here, expertise is key.
Each writer concentrates on a specific beat, and they’re much more likely to cover a story in their wheelhouse than write about some industry where they’ll have to do a bunch of extra research first. And if they say a company has promise, or that a trend your startup is riding will grow, it can give you much more credibility than the good word of a generalist.
Thankfully, news curation site Techmeme has already made this quite easy. If you’re not familiar, Techmeme serves as the collective home page for tech news, aggregating important stories from major publications throughout the day. It uses automated systems to gather the stories and analyze them for links to each other that may indicate which publication got the scoop. Human editors then analyze the quality, earliness and number of inbound links of the stories, chooses one publication’s version as the best and ranks it by importance on the home page before it slips down and off the site.
In doing so, Techmeme generates scores and leaderboards for the top journalists both in general and regarding specific topics. It now sells lists of the top 200 journalists in each of over 40 categories like security, ecommerce, cloud computing and virtual reality. These lists are cheap at $100 each and will instantly give you a list of top reporters in your field. The lists link to reporters’ Twitter accounts, where they can often be reached via Direct Message, or where they list other contact information — though some loathe being hounded there, so don’t spam those who don’t respond.
If you’re looking for top reporters in a more specific industry or a category Techmeme doesn’t sell lists for, search the site for keywords. Search results show the writers whose stories are most often chosen by Techmeme. The journalists you’ll find on Techmeme are often well-known and read in their area of coverage and might make smart first choices for outreach. However, some of the best reporters who write less frequently are less linked to or may write across an array of topics that might not be accurately represented by the leaderboard lists.
If you expand the More or In Context button about any specific story on Techmeme, you’ll find other writers covering the topic. Try searching for your competitors, technologies you employ, countries where you operate, platforms you build on, investors who back similar companies and more. Beyond Techmeme, you can also run similar searches on Google News or specific publications’ sites to compile a list of additional writers you might want to reach out to after you secure a story with your top picks, if you want to coordinate a bunch of outlets to publish about your news at the same time, or you want to send a desperate Hail Mary blast.
Some other factors to consider when choosing a journalist to work with include:
Building a relationship: Coming in cold asking a journalist to write about you can feel transactional and desperate. Some prefer you or your PR team to have connected with them before. That can mean serving as a source for other stories, making connections to people they want to talk to, offering tips that turn into scoops, or just having prior social interaction that breeds trust. Especially if you have a major or especially complex story you’re asking them to write, developing a relationship increases the likelihood that your pitch converts into a story and that the writing is balanced and takes your perspective into account. There are some reporters (like me) who don’t mind a cold pitch as long as it’s great, though, and would rather not waste time chit-chatting unless it fuels a story.
Longevity: If you’re hoping to build a trusted relationship with a journalist and have them cover you as the years progress, you don’t want them leaving to suddenly become a PR agent, VC, or take a different job. Attrition rates can be high amongst journalists and many bloggers bail after just a few years. Working with someone who’s been a reporter for a while and seems to enjoy it (and works for a stable publication that’s unlikely to suddenly go out of business) can increase the odds of building a relationship with them later for a smoother or quicker path to future coverage. That said, you don’t really have a ton of control here, so you might not want to put all your eggs in one basket…lest that basket becomes a VP of marketing somewhere.
Social media reach and usage: Does the reporter have a big and/or loyal following on Twitter, a newsletter, Facebook, or elsewhere? Do they commonly share the stories they write there? This can add extra value to choosing that journalist, even if the outlet they write for is smaller. Conversely, some reporters rarely post on social media about their stories. It’s good to know this ahead of time.
Visuals: Some reporters largely stick to text. Some work with great photographers or illustrators that can add visual flare to stories. And some others have full video teams and studios for shooting interviews and demos. Depending on how visual in nature your product is, you might want to pick one of the latter. If you sell a stylish gadget, you probably want to get it in front of a publication equipped with cameras. If you sell enterprise software, visuals might be largely irrelevant compared to text.
Criticism: You might assume a non-critical reporter will ask easy questions and give you a glowing writeup, and if you’re trying to reach a mainstream audience, that might help. But if your goal is to drive fundraising and recruiting, a balanced story that explores your weaknesses or challenges and how you plan to deal with them can be more trustworthy and persuasive; few reporters get far writing puff pieces.
There are also publications and writers you may want to avoid who consistently sensationalize and publish snarky hit pieces. Likewise, if you don’t have convincing answers to potential tough questions, you might want to hold off on press outreach to legitimate reporters. But eventually — especially if you start raising big funding rounds — you’ll have investigative reporters contacting you unsolicited, and you’d better have strong explanations.
Paywalls: Publishers have different types of paywalls, ranging from expensive and stiff outlets that require readers to pay to open even a single article, outlets that allow a few free reads per month, sites where certain types of content sit behind the paywall, to completely open ones. Typically you want the maximum reach, but if your product only appeals to the rich and powerful, a pricey paywalled site makes sense. But either way, familiarize yourself with an outlet’s gating and ask the reporter whether they expect the story will be behind a paywall.
With these tips, you should be able to build a list of reporters you want to work with most. Still, your best laid plans may be quickly dashed if a reporter is swamped with other stories, unresponsive, or wants to pass the story to one of their colleagues. While you want to shoot for your ideal reporter within reason, part of running a startup is doing your best with what you’ve got. Figure out what sparks passion in the reporter and find where that intersects with your vision.
In future articles, we’ll explore how to decide between granting exclusives versus setting up an embargo, how to formulate your pitches to reporters, what makes for great visual materials in your press kit, and what questions to prepare for in interviews.