You’ve spent weeks preparing a press release which went through legal review, executive approval and brand checks. The copy was polished, great images were attached, and the final version was sent to a carefully assembled list of 100 media contacts.
Three days later, nothing. No coverage. No interview requests. Not even a reply.
When this happens, organisations often blame the media. They assume journalists are no longer interested in corporate stories, that publications prefer bigger brands, or that earned media simply doesn’t work without a large PR budget.
But there are other possibilities that are much closer to the truth.
The Problem Could Be Your Narrative
The first is that the press release or pitch may have been built around what the organisation wanted to say, rather than what the journalist’s audience needs to know. This narrative gap is the heart of one of the biggest problems in modern media relations.
Most organisations naturally look at their news from the inside. A new product has been launched. A new executive has been appointed. The company has won an award. A partnership has been signed. A new programme has been introduced. From inside the organisation, these are important developments. So the press release is usually written around them.
The journalist, however, is looking at the same announcement from the outside. Their question is not necessarily, “What has this organisation achieved?” It is more likely to be: “Why should my audience care?”
A journalist has an audience to serve, an editorial calendar to manage and limited time to decide which stories deserve attention. An announcement that is important only to the organisation behind it has a difficult journey into the newsroom. This is why some press releases can be perfectly written and still fail to generate coverage.
So, the problem isn’t always the quality of the writing. Sometimes the problem is the story itself—or, more accurately, the way the story has been framed.
Do You Have the Right Angle?
Getting the right angle is very important to getting the attention of journalists. This is where many organisations get their media outreach wrong. They pitch their wins only instead of pitching the story from a public-interest angle. Consider an organisation launching a new logistics platform. The announcement might be framed as:
“Organisation X Launches New Enterprise Logistics Platform.”
This framing tells the journalist what the organisation has done but it doesn’t necessarily tell them why their audience should care. Now consider a different angle:
“Organisation X Introduces New Logistics Infrastructure That Could Reduce Cross-Border Trade Costs.”
The organisation is still part of the story and its platform may even be the reason the journalist became aware of the development. However, the focus has changed. The story is now connected to a larger issue: trade, infrastructure, business costs and the movement of goods across markets. This angle gives the journalist something solid to work with.
There is a huge difference between an organisational announcement and an editorial angle. The first says, *“Look at what we have done.” *The second says, *“Here is something happening in the market that your audience may want to understand.” *The distinction sounds simple, but it changes everything about how a pitch should be developed and how it is received by the media.
Now, Let’s Talk Distribution
In the last section, we talked about framing your story around an angle that provides useful information for the media and its audiences. However, even the strongest stories can struggle to gain traction if they are sent to the wrong people. For years, organisations have relied on spreadsheets and media contact lists to manage journalist outreach. While these tools can be useful, the fast-evolving media landscape has created a fundamental challenge that can make them increasingly unreliable and inefficient.
Journalists change publications. They change beats. Reporters become editors. Editors move into different roles. Some leave journalism altogether. A contact who was the perfect person for your technology story six months ago may now cover something completely different.
Then there is the problem of relevance. A story about financial technology might be highly useful to a fintech reporter and completely irrelevant to a lifestyle journalist. A new energy policy may be important to an energy correspondent but have little relevance to a reporter covering entertainment.
Yet some organisations still routinely send the same announcement to large lists in the hope that someone will find it interesting. That isn’t media strategy; it’s called spray and pray, a well-used method that has become particularly inefficient, especially when the audience is made up of journalists who receive hundreds of pitches every week.
Interesting Enough, Journalists Are Not Running Away From Your Corporate Stories. They Need Your Information.
The irony here is that while organisations are trying to get journalists to pay attention to their stories, journalists are also spending their own time looking for stories, experts and sources. A business reporter may need a company affected by a new policy. At the same time, a technology journalist may be looking for a founder who can explain a shift in the market, while a reporter investigating an industry trend may need data from organisations operating within that sector. A journalist covering a local economy may be looking for businesses experiencing a change before it becomes widely reported, and so on.
In other words, organisations have information that journalists need, while journalists have the audiences that organisations want to reach. But two things may be preventing both sides from connecting: overtly commercial narratives and the lack of a unified platform where organisations and journalists can connect in real time.
Paid Media is Not Answer When Looking to Build Brand Credibility
The temptation to buy visibility can be intense when repeated pitching produces little result. You’d naturally want to resort to paying for sponsored articles, advertorials or paid placements.
Although, there is nothing inherently wrong with paid media. It serves a legitimate purpose, particularly when an organisation needs guaranteed visibility or wants control over its message, it should not be confused with earned media which requires independent editorial decision. When a publication decides that an organisation’s story, expertise or development is worth covering, the resulting attention carries a different kind of credibility weight. The organisation did not simply pay for the audience’s attention but gave a newsroom a reason to pay attention to its story. Earned media remains crucial to organisations trying to build reputation and authority for this reason.
The real challenge then is making earned media more accessible and more systematic.
A More Structured Way to Connect Both Sides of the Story
Predge gives organisations a direct way to share stories and media opportunities with relevant, verified journalists. Instead of sending the same announcement to a long list and hoping someone responds, organisations can connect with journalists based on the sectors, beats and markets they cover. At the same time, journalists can discover stories from organisations that are relevant to their work and identify potential sources when they need them.
The idea is simple: make the relationship more relevant on both sides.
For organisations, that means moving away from mass outreach and towards more targeted media relations.
With Predge, organisations can:
- Reach relevant journalists based on sector, beat and context.
- Share stories and announcements through a structured media relations platform.
- Discover media opportunities where journalists are actively looking for sources or expertise.
- Track engagement with their media outreach.
- Chat/pitch directly with relevant journalists and build strong media relationships over time.
The goal isn’t to make organisations send more press releases or pitches but to make the connection between a story and the right journalist more fluid. Of course, the media landscape does not need more press releases filling journalists’ inboxes. What it needs are better stories reaching the right people. Therefore, organisations need to think less like advertisers trying to promote an announcement and more like storytellers trying to understand why that announcement matters beyond themselves.
Ultimately, getting coverage isn’t about sending the most emails. It’s about giving the right journalist a story worth telling. And that is a very different way to create a better chance of getting your story into the headlines.
Your Story Is Ready. So Are Journalists on Predge?
Discover a smarter way to connect with the right journalists who are looking for stories like yours and create more opportunities for earned media.
Create your organisation account: www.getpredge.com/register
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