What Are News

One thing that you must understand if you want the news media to cover your company.

They don’t cover themes. You might be working in an extremely hot area but that alone won’t justify interviewing you. After all, many other people are doing the same thing.

Sometimes outlets write feature stories and you might end up there as a hero. But getting featured in a story like this is difficult and can take months of work.

The much better option is to offer them something newsworthy. Something that didn’t exist yesterday. There are only so many news events that fit this.

Here are my examples and what you need to pull each one off.

• Funding: You raised new capital; you must disclose the amount and investors, ideally describe how you will use the funds.
• Fund launches: Similar to funding rounds, if you have a new investment vehicle you should disclose its size, thesis, and ideally backing (what famous LPs are in).
• Company launches: You’re a new company or launching out of stealth, this is your core messaging. What is your company? What is its mission? Why should someone care? What is your product? What problem does it solve? Why is it special, what’s exciting about it? Why will you win?
• Product launches and updates: You have a new product or features; describe the offerings and capabilities, their improvements, user benefit, as much proof as possible. A small player launching something bigger companies have is not news (the inverse of that is still possible).
• Partnerships: Company A partners with Company B to do something. Tell what “something” is; at least one company must have a brand name that needs no introduction.
• Acquisitions: You bought a business: disclose the deal size and rationale behind it. Only the acquisitions by the largest companies work without the deal size.
• Expansion: You’re entering a new market. You can pitch the local media and have to show the local relevance and commitment, such as investment, local hires, local partners.
• Rebrands: Show the new identity, explain the underlying business change, ideally coupled with some other announcement. Doesn’t really work for small and medium companies.
• Growth milestones: Show the most significant numbers, use reasonable metrics. Have to be eye-opening to secure news on their own.
• Research: Take publicly available data and apply credible methodology to get surprising insight. Or take your own proprietary data if it’s representative. Package as an industry report.
• Awards: Look for relevant awards that serve your goals, apply to them. Many media outlets run their own, like Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies.
• Reviews: Find people and outlets reviewing similar products, pitch your own.
• Founder stories: Pitch your founder story if it’s truly interesting. It helps to be a notable founder of a big company, but with the right story you can do this at Series A.
• Practical advice: Share unique and unusual practical tips from your own expertise, can be an opinion or a feature piece.
• Industry commentary: Offer timely, specific and unique perspective and interpret industry developments. Areas like AI have many notable people willing to share opinions, so you must truly add something new to the conversation. You can also criticize another company or a government through this.
• Community initiatives: Fund a non-profit or an open-source project, something important to your community. Or, even better, create and lead an alliance with others to fund such projects.
• Benchmarks: You become the leader in someone else’s benchmark or you publish your own. There’s natural fatigue in benchmarks; pretty much the only ones people care about right now are for various forms of AI (coding, task solving, etc.).
• Regulatory milestones: Secure a significant license, approval, or certification. Explain what it allows you to do. Has to be unique enough and not table stakes (like SOC 2).
• Major contracts: When you win a truly significant customer, but it has to be truly big or notable in other ways (e.g. Germany contracts you to build a Microsoft 365 alternative for its government).
• Hiring: You hire a celebrity in your industry to work for you. Trade media can sometimes cover this, in legal, accounting. In a way, TechCrunch is trade media for tech.
• Publicity campaigns: The most diverse category, can be literally anything but hard to pull off, especially as a smaller brand.

This framework covers most of the things you can read on news websites. You always have the same general goal of telling your story. These categories are the vehicles that you use to do so.