In this presentation, Dylan Tweney outlines how startups can secure media coverage by crafting authentic, news‑worthy stories and building genuine relationships with reporters. He begins by emphasizing the need for honesty and suggests a set of founder‑focused questions (motivation, early help, obstacles, defining moments, and the meaning of the venture beyond success) to surface an authentic narrative. Tweney then explains four operational definitions of "news" used in newsrooms: (1) information no one knows yet, (2) content not yet covered by the target outlet, (3) a story that is already trending, and (4) information someone wants to suppress. He notes how each definition can be leveraged when pitching. The speaker describes what reporters care about: a clear news hook, contextual relevance, audience impact, and minimal friction for the journalist. He advises against mass‑email blasts, recommending a disciplined approach to researching reporters—building a spreadsheet of contacts, following them on social platforms, and engaging authentically for 4‑6 weeks before pitching. When it comes to the pitch itself, Tweney stresses a concise subject line and opening sentence that state the news, a scannable format (short paragraphs, bullet points), offering exclusivity when possible, specifying timing, providing evidence of traction (user numbers, funding, revenue, buzz), and attaching supporting assets or a press release. The overall message is that a well‑targeted, authentic, and low‑friction pitch dramatically increases the chance of media coverage.
Chapters
Be authentic, because you shouldn't make stuff up. People really do not like dishonesty. These are questions that you should think about, like, why did you get started? What motivated you? These are actually questions that if you manage to score an interview with a reporter who's interested in covering your company, they will ask you questions like this, right? They will say, why did you start this company? What motivated you? What were you doing? Who helped you in the early days? Was it just you and your co-founder, or was there somebody who came in at just the right moment and gave you a crucial piece of advice that made all the difference? Is there something unusual about the founders? Biggest obstacle and how you overcame it. Again, don't downplay the obstacle part, because that's potentially the most interesting part of your story, the obstacle and how you overcame it. What moment was it that you realized this was not just like, I've got a startup, but holy crap, this is really good? If there was a moment like that, think about what brought you to that point. And then this last one, no reporter will ever ask you this, but I'm kind of thinking that it's a good thing to kind of get you out of the frame of, you know, this is going to be a billion-dollar startup in a couple years, right? If it fails, what's the story that you'll tell to people? How will you explain what you did after it's gone, assuming that it doesn't succeed? In other words, hopefully this gets at what is meaningful to you about this? Why is this important regardless of whether it succeeds or fails? What will you learn from it, or what will you say, like, at least we tried to do this or do that? Right. So I think that these questions can help you get at what makes a more authentic story. Okay, news. So reporters are not gonna ever tell you that they're interested in a good story. This is just like, again, this is how you hook people with emotion and bring them in, you know, bring the story home with facts and logic. For reporters, what they're really looking for is this. First of all, news. Unfortunately, there are at least 3 different definitions of what news is that are operational in newsrooms that I'm familiar with. One is something that nobody knows yet. There's actually a 4th definition. The 4th definition, this famous, this famous saying goes around in journalism a lot, which is news is something that somebody doesn't want you to know. which is, you know, basically like something gets out, like Donald Trump's campaign has maybe been talking to, you know, somebody, whatever, right? Talking to somebody from Russia, and the FBI's looking into it, and like the Trump administration really doesn't want people talking about that, right? So that's news because somebody's trying to suppress it. I don't think you need to worry about that category too much. You just need to know that that's one definition because you're trying to get news out there, right? So the first definition is something that nobody knows yet. I used to tell my team at VentureBeat that the way to think about this is like, look for something that has never been on the internet before. You're bringing it to light for the first time, right? Maybe it existed in a court filing, maybe somebody told it to you, but you're bringing it onto the internet for the first time. So that's the purest definition of news. The second definition is something that hasn't been covered by the competitors of whatever publication publication you're targeting. So say you're a blockchain startup and you've been covered in CoinDesk and Bitcoin Magazine, but now you want to see if you can get covered by the Wall Street Journal, right? Well, it's news to the Wall Street Journal because even though it's been in CoinDesk, the Journal hasn't covered it, the Times hasn't covered it, Washington Post hasn't covered it, whoever, Bloomberg hasn't covered it, right? So there's an opportunity there to kind of ladder up from more niche media to more mainstream media, because, or even into different niches, assuming that competitors haven't covered it. If competitors have covered it, you send a pitch to a guy at TechCrunch saying, oh, VentureBeat covered us last week, they're gonna be very unimpressed because it's not news to them anymore, 'cause somebody in their space already covered it. Okay, and then the third definition, unfortunately, is completely contradictory to the other two. other 2 or 3 definitions. In this case, the news is something that everybody is talking about, which is, okay, everybody knows it. It's not really news, but editors are gonna be yelling at their reporters to cover it because it's blowing up on Product Hunt, or there's this huge thread on Reddit, or it's been on all the major tech blogs except ours. Why the hell aren't we covering this thing that everybody is talking about? So if you get to the point where that's the case, congratulations, you've just won the news. But I just want you to know that like if it really is blowing up, then people, sometimes it'll be easy to cover even though it's not technically, easy to get coverage even though it's technically not news. Okay, other things reporters are looking for, page views, even if they're not ostensibly counting page views, some publications don't let their, don't worry too much about that. Reporters know, they really wanna know. They want people to read their stories. They want context, they don't just want a tidbit of news, they wanna know why it matters, and you can help provide that. They wanna know who it matters to. Again, you can help provide that. And remember, going back to that point I had earlier about reporters being incredibly overworked, they want a minimum of hassle. So if you can strip out all the BS, Give them exactly what they need. Make it very easy and very clean and very smooth for them to figure out what it is you're pitching. And make sure that if they do wanna write it, they have everything they need to write a story. That's great, 'cause then you just become the reporter's friend. Okay, don't blast out emails to everybody. Don't make a list of 100 reporters in tech and then just blast out the same email to all of them. That's— it never works. It's a terrible strategy and it will just get you on blacklists and make people upset at you. Instead, what you need to do is figure out who actually covers you, make a list like a spreadsheet or something where you can keep notes on these people and have links to their Twitter profiles and links to their recent stories and stuff like that, and just follow these people for a little while. Follow them on Twitter, follow— connect with them on LinkedIn if they'll accept that, follow them on Facebook. When they tweet stuff that you're interested in, you can reply to them or retweet their stuff. Don't be a kiss-ass about it, but just be like you're engaging with somebody who's saying something interesting, right? And don't try to always be promoting your own stuff, like, oh, interesting story about VR goggles. We also have one that you should know about. Don't be like that. Just engage with them like a human being, right? Follow them, get to know them, and spend, I would say spend 4 to 6 weeks at least getting to know these reporters and what they cover and kind of refining your knowledge of them before you pitch them. And then when you pitch them, write an email to them. Don't craft a pitch and edit it and make it all perfect. I mean, you're gonna do that actually, but make it seem like a genuine email to them, right? This is what you're looking for. Is one-on-one communication. You want it to be tailored to that person and to what they're actually interested in. Elements of a kick-ass pitch. Okay, says what the news is. A lot of people are really coy about this. They feel like they need to provide a paragraph or two of background about how big the opportunity is and so-and-so covered this and whatever. Don't do that. Just say, on April 2nd, We're gonna be announcing a new product that revolutionizes the AI assistant field, or whatever, right? Just say it, like, right at the start. Subject line, first line of the email should just get right to the point, what the news is. Should be easy to scan, so write short paragraphs. You can use bullet points if you want, but keep it really scannable because the first thing is— The first barrier is they may only read the subject line. They may not even open the email. If they open the email, they may only read the first line or 2, the first paragraph or 2. If they read the first paragraph or 2, they're probably doing it quickly, and then they're gonna skim down to see if there's anything else interesting. So when you're pitching reporters, you wanna make it super easy to scan. The best pitch says, hey, I would like to give you an exclusive on our launch, or I'd like to give you an exclusive on our funding. And that means nobody else is gonna cover it except you if you accept this pitch. You can't always do that, but sometimes you wanna make sure that you reserve the right to pitch other people, but definitely attention-getting if you promise an exclusive. You should say exactly when the news will come out. You should offer some background data, size of the market, evidence of traction is really important, and by that what I mean is things like How many users do you have? How much funding have you raised? I mean, that's not really market traction, but it's sort of evidence that somebody believes in you. Revenue figures, if you can talk about that, if you have any paying customers at all, that's evidence of traction. If there's a huge amount of buzz about you on Hacker News, that can potentially be evidence of traction. You're looking for outside sources that validate what you're doing. And finally, you should make it easy to get more information and assets. You want the top of your email to be really short and scannable, but in my opinion, it's okay to put more material further down. You can say, if you want more information, we've included, you know, a detailed description of our product and some screenshots are attached at the bottom. That's totally fine. Or, we've attached our press release. And actually, at this point, you know, somebody decides they want to read or they want to write a story about you, a press release can sometimes be useful. Okay.
