Day 17: Write a Press Release or Media Pitch That Gets Coverage

The Concept

Founders consistently misjudge what makes a story newsworthy. They believe that launching a product, hitting a revenue milestone, or signing a notable customer is inherently interesting to journalists. But a journalist's job is not to help your business — it is to serve their readers with something surprising, useful, or revelatory. The question is never "Is this big news for us?" but "Why would a reader who has never heard of us care about this today?"

The angle-first approach starts from the journalist's perspective rather than the founder's. Journalists cover trends, tensions, and surprising data. They cover stories that confirm or challenge what their readers already believe. Your product launch is not a story; the problem your product solves — and the scale of the market that suffers from it — might be. "We launched a tool to help remote teams communicate better" is not a headline. "Research shows remote workers spend 22% of their week recovering from miscommunication — and it is getting worse" is a headline. The product becomes the solution to a story, not the story itself, and that reframe changes everything about how your pitch lands.

Finding the right journalist matters as much as having the right angle. A pitch sent to a generalist reporter when your story belongs on a vertical tech beat will be deleted unread. Muck Rack lets you search by beat, outlet, and recent coverage so you can identify exactly who has written about your topic in the last 90 days. Prowly gives you a media database and tracks whether your pitch was opened, so you know who to follow up with. ResponseSource allows journalists to post requests for sources, which means you can respond to reporters already looking for your expertise rather than pitching cold into an inbox.

The pitch email that gets a response is almost always short — five sentences at most. It leads with the story angle, not the company name. It answers the journalist's implicit question: "Why now? Why is this interesting to my readers today?" Your subject line should read like a headline, not an email subject. The press release itself follows the inverted pyramid structure: the most important information first, supporting detail in the middle, company background last — because editors cut from the bottom up and readers stop reading when it gets dull.

AI can generate the full media package in one pass: a press release, a pitch email, three alternative angles for different publication types, and a follow-up sequence for non-responders. What AI cannot do is personalise the first line of each pitch to reference the journalist's actual recent work — that personalisation is the step that separates an ignored email from a reply. Spend five minutes per journalist reading their last two articles before you send anything.