There are roughly 47,100 news analysts, reporters and journalists working in the United States, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that number will decline 6 percent between 2025 and 2035.
Those people are the entire audience for every pitch your company will ever send. The arithmetic behind how to get press coverage is unforgiving: a shrinking number of reporters, each covering more ground than their predecessors did, are the gatekeepers for a growing number of businesses who would like to be written about.
Most advice on this subject skips straight to tactics: subject lines, follow-up cadence, media databases. That advice is not wrong. It is just aimed at the wrong problem.
The reason most pitches go unanswered is not that they were written badly. It is that they were not about anything. The short answer is that press coverage follows a story rather than an announcement: find the thing about your organization that a stranger would find surprising, pitch it in under 150 words to the specific reporter who covers that beat, name a person who is available to talk, and have the photographs, data and interview window ready before anyone asks. This piece is about how to find that story first, and what to send once you have.
Why Most Pitches Never Get a Reply
The newsroom you are pitching is smaller than the one that existed when your company was founded. Pew Research Center found that employment in U.S. newspaper newsrooms fell from 71,640 in 2004 to 30,820 in 2020 — a decline of roughly 57 percent over sixteen years.
The BLS projection above says the contraction has not stopped. About 3,400 openings a year are expected across the whole occupation through 2035, and most of those replace people leaving rather than expand coverage.
What this means in practice is simple. The reporter reading your email is covering a beat that two or three people used to cover. They are not withholding coverage from you. They are looking for a story, and you have sent them an announcement.
Those are different things:
- An announcement says something happened at your company. A hire, a funding round, a product update, an anniversary.
- A story says something changed that a reader outside your company would care about. It has a person in it, a stake, and a reason to run this week rather than next month.
Almost every business that struggles to get earned media coverage is sending the first and hoping it will be received as the second. The gap between them is not a writing problem. It is a sourcing problem, and it is solved before you open your email client.
How to Get Media Coverage for Your Business Without a PR Agency
There is nothing an agency can do for you in week one that you cannot do yourself, because week one is not outreach. It is deciding what you actually have.
Agencies earn their fee later, on relationships, volume and judgment about which outlet wants which angle. But the raw material has to come from inside your organization, and no agency can invent it. This is the part companies skip, and it is the part that determines whether anything else works.
If you would rather see the result before you commit to a retainer, it is possible to get press coverage before you pay an agency anything — that is the whole premise of Strategic Pete’s First Placement Program.
So the honest answer to how to get media coverage for your business is that you start by auditing what is already true about it.
Start with the Story You Already Have
Strategic Pete’s documentary storytelling work for associations and essential industries begins by mapping “the perception gap” — the distance between what an organization does and what outsiders believe it does. That gap is where stories live, because a story is only news if it corrects something the reader assumed.
Run the search internally before you run it externally. Ask three questions of your own operation:
- Who here does something a stranger would find surprising? Not impressive. Surprising. Impressive is a press release. Surprising is a story.
- What has changed in our sector in the last ninety days that we can speak to with authority nobody else has? Reporters need sources more often than they need subjects.
- What are we doing that we assume is boring because we see it every day? Routine inside a company is frequently novel outside it.
The answers are rarely the things marketing wants to promote. They are more often a person, a process, or a number that nobody thought to mention. The method Strategic Pete uses on film applies equally to a pitch: “No actors. No scripts that sand down the truth.”
What a Press Release Is Actually For — and Where It Fails
A press release is a distribution format, not a story. It exists so that a reporter who has already decided to cover you can confirm names, dates, figures and quotes without a phone call.
Used that way it is genuinely useful. It is the asset kit that turns interest into a published piece quickly.
Used as the pitch itself, it fails almost every time. A release opens with the company, buries the human interest, and reads like a document written by a committee, which it usually is. No reporter reads one and thinks “there is a story here.” They read one to check facts about a story they already have.
The practical rule: pitch in the body of the email, in your own voice, in under 150 words. Attach or link the release underneath for the reporter who wants it. Reverse that order and you have sent a document nobody asked for.
How to Pitch a Story to a Journalist
Once you have something real, the mechanics matter, and they are more constrained than most people expect. How to pitch a story to a journalist is largely set by what a journalist is professionally obliged to do, because those obligations decide what they can accept from you.
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics instructs journalists to “Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it,” and to “Identify sources clearly.” It also tells them to “Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment” and to “Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to news.”
Read those as a specification for your pitch. Everything a reporter needs in order to verify quickly, you supply. Everything that looks like an inducement, you never offer.
The Subject Line and the First Two Sentences
A reporter decides whether to keep reading in about the time it takes to read a headline, because that is functionally what your subject line is competing against.
- Write the subject line as the headline of the story they would publish, not as a description of your email. “Kansas zoo births endangered pygmy hippo” beats “Media inquiry from Tanganyika Wildlife Park.”
- Put the news in sentence one and the stake in sentence two. What happened, and why a reader should care.
- Name the person available to talk, with their title, in the first paragraph. Access is often the deciding factor.
- Say what you can supply and how fast — photographs, footage, data, an interview window. Reporters work to deadlines that are shorter than your approval process.
Then stop. A pitch that runs past 150 words is asking a busy person to do editorial work on your behalf. For a worked example of all four points landing at once, see this case study in how to get media coverage for your business inside 48 hours.
What Never to Ask For
Three requests end a relationship with a reporter, and businesses make all three without realizing what they are asking:
- Copy approval. Asking to review the piece before publication asks a journalist to break the independence their code requires. Offer to fact-check a specific figure instead.
- Payment, gifts or “advertising support” in exchange for coverage. Beyond the ethical problem, the Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on native advertising is explicit that an ad “shouldn’t suggest or imply to consumers that it’s anything other than an ad,” and that the more closely sponsored content resembles a publisher’s editorial material, the more likely a disclosure is required. Paid placement is a legitimate product. It is not press coverage, and presenting it as though it were creates a disclosure problem for both parties.
- Guaranteed timing. You can ask when a piece might run. You cannot ask for a date, and pressing for one signals you have not worked with reporters before.
If you would rather see proof than a proposal, Strategic Pete’s First Placement Program gets you quoted in a real publication before you decide whether we are worth hiring — one media placement, four weeks to deliver, and a $100 deposit returned in full if we do not.
Press Coverage That Came from a Real Story: Two Examples
Two engagements show what the difference between an announcement and a story looks like in practice. Peter’s own coverage shows the method in practice: a Business Insider feature, Peter on the remote-work dress code and how we landed 42 podcast interviews. Podcasts are a channel of their own, covered in how to market a podcast.
A Rare Birth, Ready to Be Covered
A male pygmy hippopotamus was born at Tanganyika Wildlife Park in Goddard, Kansas on 26 June 2025. Fewer than 3,000 pygmy hippos remain in the wild, which made the birth a conservation event rather than a zoo update.
The press release went out on 9 July 2025. National coverage followed on 10 and 11 July — inside 48 hours.
Four major stories were placed, and the outlets named in the case study are USA TODAY, Good Morning America, Mongabay, KWCH (CBS Wichita) and KSN (NBC Wichita). USA TODAY’s TikTok of the story recorded 1.9 million-plus views.
What made it move that fast was preparation, not persuasion. The park had an asset kit ready — fast facts, expert quotes, high-resolution photographs, vertical B-roll cut for social, and pre-arranged interview windows. It also launched a public naming vote tied to conservation donations, which turned readers into participants and gave the story a second day.
Every element of that list is something a reporter would otherwise have to chase. The story was real; the readiness is what made it cheap to cover.
The Story That Outlived Its Press Coverage
The second example is slower and larger. Strategic Pete produced People Worth Caring About, a documentary series filmed across seven Nebraska communities and funded by the non-profit arm of the Nebraska Health Care Association.
This one earned its coverage quickly, and then kept working long after the coverage stopped. State senators began quoting scenes from the film during legislative discussions about funding and workforce shortages, and a long-term care association used the documentary as part of the advocacy work behind a Medicaid funding effort.
As Tracy Lichti, Board Member of the Nebraska Health Care Association, put it: “This docuseries has been a game-changer for our association… Donors have been inspired at our fundraisers, and it has fundamentally elevated our facility’s and the industry’s image.”
That is a different order of asset from a placement. It is also a reminder that the strongest earned media usually attaches to something an organization built for its own reasons first. The full Nebraska long-term care documentary case study sets out how the series was funded and deployed.
How to Get Press Coverage Locally and for an Event
The advice above assumes a national or trade target. Local press operates on different economics, and for most businesses it is the more realistic starting point.
Local newsrooms are the ones that have thinned most severely, which cuts both ways. There are fewer reporters to reach, and those reporters have more space to fill and fewer sources feeding them. A well-prepared local pitch has a materially higher hit rate than the same pitch sent to a national desk.
There is no mystery to how to get local press coverage. Three habits carry almost all of it:
- Lead with the local hook, not the company. Jobs, a building, a community effect, a person from the area. The outlet’s readership is a geography, not an industry.
- Offer the reporter something visual. Local television and local digital both need images, and a business that supplies them is easier to schedule.
- Pitch the beat, not the outlet. Find the specific person who covers business, health or your sector at that publication.
The question of how to get media coverage for an event is really a question about calendar rather than content:
- Send the advisory seven to ten days out, with a second note the day before.
- State the time, the address, the parking and the person on site. Logistics decide attendance more often than subject matter does.
- Assume nobody comes, and prepare the coverage they could run instead : a photo set, a short interview clip, a two-paragraph summary sent the same afternoon.
Small businesses in particular should treat this as a recurring practice rather than a campaign. In practice, how to get press coverage for your small business comes down to being reachable, prepared and repeatedly useful to two or three reporters, rather than to one successful blast.
How to Measure Press Coverage Once You Have It
Placements are easy to count and easy to overvalue. The question worth asking is whether coverage changed anything downstream.
There is no single formula for how to measure media coverage, but three measures are worth keeping and one is not:
- Volume, honestly stated. Strategic Pete’s own record on this is “39 Podcasts. 99 PR Quotes. Zero ad spend.” — a count, presented as a count. One podcast programme produced 42 bookings in six months, reaching 500,000 listeners, and the resulting appearances are collected on the page listing the podcasts and publications Strategic Pete has been featured in.
- Search and citation effects. As Peter, CEO of Strategic Pete, puts it: “AI search models and journalists have one thing in common: they only recommend people who are already being talked about. If your insights aren’t published on credible websites, you are essentially invisible to the people and the algorithms searching for you.”
- Sales conversations that start differently. The clearest signal that positive press coverage is working is a prospect who arrives already believing something you used to have to argue.
The measure not worth keeping is advertising value equivalency, the practice of pricing a placement as though you had bought the same space. It flatters the report and tells you nothing about whether anyone acted.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do You Get Free Press Coverage?
All editorial press coverage is free in the sense that you do not pay for the placement. The honest answer to how to get media coverage without paying for it is preparation: a genuine story, an available spokesperson, and assets a reporter can use without chasing you. If a service offers guaranteed placement for a fee, that is advertising, and the FTC expects it to be disclosed as such.
How Do You Get Local Press Coverage?
Identify the individual reporter who covers your sector at each outlet in your market, and pitch a local hook — employment, a community effect, a named person — rather than a company milestone. Supply photographs. Then do it again in three months, whether or not the first one ran.
Will the News Pay You for a Story?
Almost never, and you should be wary if the offer is made. Journalistic ethics codes explicitly direct reporters not to pay for access to news. Occasional exceptions exist for licensed footage or images, which is a media-rights transaction rather than payment for an interview.
How Do I Contact an Investigative Reporter?
Through the outlet’s published contact page or the reporter’s own byline page, and with specifics. Investigative desks receive a high volume of vague tips; what earns a reply is documentation, a clear account of what you can substantiate, and honesty about what you cannot. Expect a slow response and no commitment.
How Long Does It Take to Get Media Coverage?
For a story with genuine news value and a prepared asset kit, 48 hours to two weeks is realistic — the pygmy hippo story ran within 48 hours of the release. For sustained coverage built on an owned asset such as a documentary, the honest timeline is months, and the return arrives as advocacy and recruitment rather than as clippings.
Conclusion
The question of how to get press coverage has a less satisfying answer than most guides suggest, and a more useful one. Technique is real but secondary. The determining factor is whether you brought a story or an announcement.
That is good news for organizations doing genuinely interesting work and bad news for those hoping to manufacture interest they have not earned. A shrinking press corps has less time than ever for the second, and more appetite than you would expect for the first.
The companies that get press coverage repeatedly are not the ones with the best subject lines. They are the ones who noticed what was already true about their own operation, made it easy to verify, and made themselves available on a reporter’s timeline rather than their own.
Start there, and the tactics take care of themselves.
Not sure which of your stories is the one worth pitching? Book your FREE audit — it takes just 60 seconds to fill in your details, and you can book time directly on Pete’s calendar.
