By Disrupt PR | Named #1 Boutique PR Agency in the Nation, 2025 Bulldog PR Awards
Before I ran a PR agency, I was a journalist. Emmy-nominated broadcast reporter at Fox40 Sacramento. NBC4 LA’s I-Team. CBS Newspath. And in a single week on any of those desks, I received somewhere between 200 and 400 press pitches.
I opened maybe 20 of them. I responded to fewer than five. I covered one, sometimes zero.
That math is the reason most founders trying to get press coverage never do. It’s not that your story isn’t good. It’s that you’re pitching it the way an agency template said to pitch it, and journalists learned to filter out those pitches years ago.
This is what actually works — from someone who spent years on the other side of the desk.
The short version
If you only read this far, remember four things:
- Journalists don’t want your announcement. They want a story that will get read, watched, or clicked by their audience.
- Personalization beats polish. A rough email that clearly knows the reporter’s beat beats a beautifully written pitch sent to a hundred people.
- Timing is a weapon. The best pitch, sent at the wrong moment, dies. A mediocre pitch tied to breaking news often lands.
- Being findable before you pitch matters more than the pitch itself.
Now let’s get into it.
What journalists actually want (from the other side of the desk)
Every pitch that made it through my inbox filter had the same three qualities. Every pitch that didn’t was missing at least one.
A story, not an announcement. “We raised $12M in Series A funding” is not a story. It’s a data point. A story is what that funding unlocks — the surgical tool now going into rural hospitals, the family that can finally afford care, the industry problem this money is going to solve. Reporters don’t cover companies. They cover the change companies create. Rewrite every pitch until the headline is about the change, not the company.
A reason to care right now. Journalists are trained to answer one question before they read past the subject line: why does this matter today? Not next week. Not “generally.” Today. If your story doesn’t have a hook that ties to something in the news cycle, a data point that just dropped, a policy change, a seasonal moment, a trend the reporter has been writing about — it goes into the pile marked “maybe later.” That pile is where stories go to die.
Access to someone specific. The reporter doesn’t want to interview “the company.” They want a named human being, with a title, a photo, and a phone number, who will pick up when they call at 4:47 PM on a deadline. If you don’t make clear who the interview subject is and how fast they can be reached, the story stalls.
The five mistakes 90% of founders make in their pitches
Mistake one: opening with your company. Every pitch I ever deleted opened with the founder’s name and title, or “I’m reaching out on behalf of [Company X].” Reporters don’t care yet. Open with the story. Introduce yourself after they’re already interested.
Mistake two: burying the news. If the actual news of your pitch is in paragraph three, no one will ever get there. Journalist eyes scan the first 15 words of a subject line and the first sentence of the email. If the story isn’t there, you’re done.
Mistake three: attaching a press release. Attachments trigger spam filters, take extra clicks to open, and signal that this is a mass-blast. Paste the release into the body of the email if it needs to be there at all. Better: send a two-paragraph pitch and offer to send the full release if they want it.
Mistake four: pitching everyone at once. Journalists talk to each other. If your pitch shows up in ten inboxes at the same publication — or worse, at competing publications, all as an “exclusive” — everyone knows immediately. Kills trust. Kills the story.
Mistake five: no follow-through. Reporters get busy. A pitch that goes unanswered isn’t rejected — it’s usually just buried. A single, brief, well-timed follow-up 48 hours later has landed more stories than the original pitch ever did.
The pitch structure that actually works
Here’s the five-part structure I still use, and the one my team uses on behalf of clients. It’s built for how journalists actually read email — which is fast, on their phone, between meetings, half-distracted.
Subject line. Twelve words maximum. Lead with the story angle, not the company. “New study: [surprising finding]” outperforms “[Company X] announces new study.” Numbers in the subject line boost open rates noticeably. Questions in subject lines slightly decrease open rates, contrary to what LinkedIn will tell you.
Opening line. One sentence. The story hook, told the way you’d tell it to a friend at a bar. No corporate language. No “We are thrilled to announce.”
The context. Two to three sentences. Why does this matter right now? What’s the broader trend, the news moment, the data point that makes this urgent? This is where you show you understand the reporter’s beat.
The proof. One to two sentences of concrete evidence. Numbers, named customers, real outcomes. Not marketing language. If your company has been placed in Forbes, TechCrunch, TIME, or wherever your target reporter reads — say so. Social proof does actual work here.
The ask. One sentence. Specific. “Would you be interested in a 15-minute call this week with our founder?” Not “Let me know if you’d like more information.” Never end with “Looking forward to hearing from you.”
Total email length: under 150 words. If you can’t say it in 150, you don’t know what the story is yet.
What to do before you pitch — the part most people skip
The best-kept secret in getting press coverage is that most successful pitches don’t feel like pitches at all. They feel like a reporter reaching back out to a source they already know.
Here’s how sources get built:
Be findable. When a reporter Googles your name or your company at 11 PM on deadline, what shows up? If the answer is “not much,” you’re not going to be quoted. Fix your LinkedIn. Fix your bio pages. Make sure your name plus your area of expertise pulls up a clean, credible result.
Be quotable. Reporters cite sources who have a point of view, not sources who hedge. If you’re building in health tech, you should have a take on what’s broken in health tech. Publish it — on LinkedIn, on your blog, in guest columns — until reporters start seeing your name attached to that take.
Be responsive. The founders who get quoted in Bloomberg and Forbes aren’t necessarily the most successful founders. They’re the ones who answer their phone at 4:47 PM on deadline. Beat everyone else on speed. Reporters will remember.
Be findable through the right channels. Journalists source stories through Qwoted, Source of Sources (formerly HARO), Muck Rack, and increasingly through LinkedIn DMs. If you’re not on those platforms with a clean profile and clear expertise, you’re invisible to the people looking to quote you.
Where AI search fits into this (2026 update)
There’s a new layer to media strategy that didn’t exist eighteen months ago: getting cited by AI models.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews about your industry, the models cite sources. Those citations skew heavily toward earned media — tier-one publications, credentialed expert commentary, and structured content from authoritative sources. Which means press coverage in 2026 isn’t just about brand awareness anymore. It’s about being the source AI models turn to when someone asks a question you should be the answer to.
The implication: every piece of press coverage you earn is now doing double duty. It builds credibility with humans, and it feeds the models that increasingly mediate how buyers discover companies. Skipping press coverage now costs you visibility in two ecosystems, not one.
When to do this yourself vs. hire a PR agency
Some of this you can do on your own. If you’re pre-launch, pre-revenue, or genuinely just trying to get a single story about a milestone — write the pitch yourself, follow the structure above, and you’ll get further than most.
But if you’re a growth-stage company trying to build sustained media presence across months and quarters, doing it yourself gets expensive fast — not in dollars, but in the far more finite currency of founder time. Every hour you spend crafting pitches and following up with reporters is an hour you’re not spending on product, sales, or fundraising. The math almost never favors DIY at that stage.
The right agency also gives you something you literally can’t build alone: relationships. A pitch from a founder is a pitch. A pitch from someone the reporter has already trusted with three good stories is a text message that gets answered. That relationship layer takes years to build, and it’s the actual product a good PR agency sells.
The honest bottom line
Getting press coverage isn’t about writing better press releases. It’s about understanding that on the other side of every pitch is a human being who is tired, overworked, on deadline, and drowning in bad emails from people who never bothered to read their byline.
Be the person who did. Lead with the story, not the company. Show up in the news moment. Make yourself easy to interview. Follow up once. And when the coverage starts landing, do it again — because press coverage compounds. The tenth story is easier to land than the first.
If you’ve read this far, you probably already know whether you’re the founder who’s going to grind through this on your own, or the one who’s going to hire someone who spent years on the other side of the desk. Either way, the framework is the same.
Just tell the story.
Disrupt PR is the 2025 Bulldog PR Awards Gold Winner for Best Boutique Agency, the only PR awards program judged exclusively by working journalists. Founded by a former Emmy-nominated broadcast journalist, our team specializes in earning press coverage in top-tier outlets including The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNN, BBC, and Good Morning America for growth-stage companies across healthcare, tech, and finance. Book a discovery call to talk through your story.
