What is media relations and press coverage?
Media relations is the core service on most PR retainers: an agency pitches your company to journalists until a reporter at an outlet like WSJ, TechCrunch, or Fortune chooses to write about you. You never pay the outlet. That earned, third-party credibility is the product, and it is why one placement persuades more than an ad saying the same thing. We send 7,000+ targeted pitches a year to 2,500+ reporters, and the volume exists because most pitches miss: in Cision's survey, three-quarters of journalists said they find value in a quarter or fewer of the pitches they get. Over years of that work, the result is 452 media placements and 11.1M media views to date. For a single company, realistic output is a handful of solid placements spread over months. No firm can put you in a specific outlet on demand, and a promise of a specific placement is a red flag.
What you are actually buying is judgment: which reporters cover your space, what each considers news, and which of your moments qualify. Reporters sort every pitch into a small set of story types, and a pitch that fits none of them dies unread, however good the product is.
| Story type | What makes it land |
|---|---|
| Funding round | Size matters; a $3-5M round alone rarely qualifies |
| Product launch or major update | The most reliable path for a startup |
| Metrics or milestone | Traction with a clear "so what?" for the reader |
| Partnership | A real, named partner that validates you |
| Founder story | Works only with a genuinely unusual person or path |
| Trend story | Ties to a real behavior shift, not a manufactured one |
Funding rounds and launches carry enough buying decisions to get their own pages in this handbook: see the funding and financial communications page and the product launches and announcements page.
One part of this is non-delegable. An agency can find the right reporter, but only you know which of your moments are real news, why a metric should matter to a reader, and whether a partnership is genuine enough to lean on. The best vetting test follows from that: a good firm pushes back on a weak news peg and builds toward your next real moment. A bad one pitches whatever you hand it and reports on its monthly activity whether or not any coverage results.
Media coverage retainers run $5,000/month for seed and Series A companies on our pricing page; across the industry, $5,000 to $15,000 a month is the going range for this service.