Public relations has changed dramatically over the past few years. The old playbook—pitching journalists, waiting for coverage, and measuring success by headlines alone—is no longer enough. Today, I write about why credibility is built across multiple touchpoints, from social media and newsletters to podcasts, and executive thought leadership.

There's a phrase that makes every communications person flinch: "Can we just get some press on this?"

The ask sounds reasonable. It's also built on a picture of the media world that stopped existing years ago — one where PR was a vending machine: insert press release, receive coverage. What frustrates the people doing this work isn't the request. It's that the requester has no idea what the machine actually looks like now.

Here's the short version: coverage didn't get harder because PR people got worse. It got harder because earned media became downstream of everything else — your social presence, your data, your owned channels, your executives' visibility. The companies still winning coverage aren't the ones with the best pitches. They're the ones who built the machine before they needed the press.

Start with who you're actually pitching. The journalist of a decade ago was a byline at an outlet. The journalist of today is often a media brand unto themselves — running a newsletter, hosting a podcast, carrying a social following that can be bigger than the publication they write for. In ad tech especially, the reporters who matter are individually known quantities; people follow them, not just their mastheads.

That changes the game in two ways. First, people follow people applies to media exactly as it applies to brands — a journalist's personal distribution is now part of what a placement is worth. Second, pitching someone who is themselves a creator means the generic blast is worse than useless. They can see, instantly, whether you know their work, their angle, and their audience. A pitch that could have gone to fifty reporters signals that it did.

Now flip the lens. Before a reporter takes your pitch seriously, they do exactly what your buyers do: they look you up. Your founder's LinkedIn. Your company's feed. Whether anyone at your company has said anything interesting in public, ever.

If the answer is a product-announcement graveyard and a four-month gap since the last post, you've already been evaluated — and the evaluation is why would my audience care about a company that doesn't seem to care about having an audience? Journalists are drowning in pitches and starving for credible voices. A visible, opinionated presence is the difference between "who is this?" and "oh, I've seen their stuff." Your feed is your press kit now. Silence reads as stagnation to a reporter for the same reason it reads that way to a buyer — which is exactly why a consistent social presence is baseline credibility, not a nice-to-have.

Here's the operational reality on the other side of the pitch: newsrooms have shrunk while output expectations have exploded. The reporters you want are filing multiple stories a day while running their own newsletter and feed. They don't have time to do your homework for you.

Which means the anecdotal pitch — "our CEO has thoughts on the future of CTV" — is dead. What earns coverage is the same thing that earns buyer trust: teach first. Bring original data the reporter can't get elsewhere. Bring a trend you can actually demonstrate, with numbers. Bring the chart, the quote, the visual, the expert who'll pick up the phone — a package a time-starved journalist can run with, not a premise they'd have to build a story around. Companies that publish proprietary data on a recurring basis stop pitching entirely at some point; the reporters start calling them. A claim without proof is a slogan. A claim with a dataset is a story.

The old mental model was linear: press release → coverage → clip it for the website. The real path of a modern story looks nothing like that. It starts as a founder's LinkedIn post with a sharp take. The post travels, a trade reporter picks it up, the coverage becomes a podcast invitation, the podcast clip goes back into the feed, and three weeks later a mainstream outlet calls because "you keep coming up."

That's not a PR campaign. That's an Awareness Loop with press woven into it — earned media as one node in a system of owned and social channels that feed each other. Which is why "just get us some press" is unanswerable as stated: the coverage isn't a faucet you turn on. It's the output of a presence that was built continuously, in public, long before the ask. Momentum is built before the announcement, and press is no exception — reporters, like audiences, respond to something that already feels like it's moving.

So what does the modern version actually require? Less than a rebrand, more than a press release:

An executive with a public voice. Not a ghost-written thought-leadership program — a real person posting real perspective on a sustainable cadence. This is the single highest-leverage PR asset a B2B company can build, because it compounds into everything else: reporters find you, podcasts book you, and every eventual story has a credible human at the center of it.

An owned channel that proves the audience exists. A newsletter or podcast with real engagement tells a journalist your point of view already has a market. It's also your insurance policy: when coverage lands, owned channels are where you convert the attention into something you keep.

A data asset you can return to. One proprietary dataset, index, or recurring analysis your company can publish on a schedule. It's the difference between asking for coverage and being a source.

Relationships before requests. Engage with reporters' work when you want nothing. Share it, add to it, be useful in their comments. The pitch that gets opened is the one from a name they recognize — and recognition is built in the months when you're not asking.

Coverage is no longer something you request; it's something your presence, your proof, and your owned channels make inevitable — or impossible. The companies that get written about aren't the ones with the loudest announcements. They're the ones a reporter was already half-following before the pitch ever arrived.

So the next time someone in your building says "can we just get some press on this," the honest answer is a question: have we built anything a journalist would find when they look us up? If the answer is no, that's the project. The press comes after.

If you're looking for guidance on building the presence, content, and owned channels that make earned media work, you can contact me here.“Visibility is not vanity. It's the prerequisite for everything else."