PR & Media Outreach skill

PR & Media Outreach

Press Release Structure

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (or EMBARGOED UNTIL [date])

[Headline — Active Voice, <10 Words]
[Subhead — Expand with Key Detail]

[City, State] — [Date] — [Opening paragraph: Who, What, When, Where, Why]

[Body ¶1: Supporting details, data points, market context]

[Body ¶2: Quote from executive — make it sound human, not corporate]

[Body ¶3: Product/feature specifics, availability, pricing]

[Boilerplate: Company description, 2-3 sentences]

Media Contact:
[Name] | [Email] | [Phone]
###

Rules: Lead with news, not company. Include one hard data point. Keep under 500 words. Link to press kit.

Journalist Pitch Template

Subject: [Specific hook] — [why their audience cares]

Hi [First Name],

[1 sentence: Reference their recent article/beat to show you read their work.]

[2-3 sentences: The news — what's happening, why it matters NOW, one proof point.]

[1 sentence: The ask — exclusive, interview, demo, or just sharing for consideration.]

Happy to send more details or jump on a quick call.

[Your name]

Pitch rules: Under 150 words. No attachments on first email. Personalize or don't send. Follow up once at +3 days, once at +7, then stop.

Media List Building

Build a spreadsheet: Name, Outlet, Beat, Email, Twitter, Last Pitched, Notes. Keep under 50 targets per campaign — quality over quantity.

Source-Request Strategy (post-HARO)

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) was shut down by Cision in mid-2024; its short-lived Connectively rebrand was also discontinued. Modern replacements (this market churns — verify the tier/price before signing up, as of Jun 2026):

• Qwoted (qwoted.com) — closest HARO successor, freemium, strong B2B/finance/tech coverage
• Featured.com — pay-per-pitch / subscription; expert answers published with byline + backlink (note: contributed, not earned — see Earned vs. Paid vs. Contributed below)
• Help a B2B Writer (helpab2bwriter.com) — free, focused on SaaS/B2B journalists, email digests
• SourceBottle — international (US/UK/AU/NZ), free tier
• Terkel / Featured Q&A — expert Q&A, syndicated to partner sites
• JournoRequest / #journorequest on X and Bluesky — free, journalist-posted requests; many UK/EU reporters migrated here
• Press Hunt, Prowly's PR network, ResponseSource (UK) — paid alternatives worth a trial

Workflow:

1. Sign up to 2-3 platforms — Qwoted + Help a B2B Writer is a strong free default; add Featured if you want guaranteed contributed placements.
2. Filter by your categories — respond within 1-2 hours. Speed wins; most queries close fast and early responses get read first.
3. Format: [Subject line that exactly mirrors the query] → 2-3 short paragraphs of genuinely useful, specific expert insight. Lead with the answer, not your bio.
4. Include a one-line credential, headshot link, and outlet-ready bio. Don't hard-sell or attach files.
5. Track responses → ~5-10% conversion to placement is healthy; tag wins in your tracker by platform to see which pays off.
6. Read the rules: many of these placements are contributed/sponsored (you supply copy, often with a link). Disclose if required and don't conflate them with editorially earned coverage in your reporting.

Press Kit Essentials

• Company one-pager (mission, stats, founding story)
• Founder/exec bios + high-res headshots
• Product screenshots and logos (SVG + PNG, light/dark)
• Recent press coverage links
• Fact sheet (users, revenue if public, milestones)
• Brand guidelines (colors, logo usage)
• Host at /press or Notion page. Keep updated quarterly.

Embargo Management

• Set clear terms in writing: "Embargoed until [date/time/timezone]. By replying, you agree."
• Only embargo genuinely significant news
• Give 3-7 days lead time for complex stories
• Send lift confirmation morning-of
• If broken: document, flag to journalist, adjust future access

Product Launch PR Timeline

Crisis Communications Playbook

1. Detect — Set Google Alerts + social listening (Mention, Brandwatch) for brand, exec names, product, and "outage/breach/lawsuit/recall" terms. Route alerts to an on-call inbox/Slack channel, not one person's email.
2. Triage — Classify severity (matrix below), name an Incident Owner (drives the response) and a single Spokesperson (the only public voice). Open a war-room channel and a timestamped log.
3. Align — Draft a holding statement; route through the approval owners for that severity. Don't wait for full facts to acknowledge — acknowledge fast, commit to updates.
4. Respond — Acknowledge, show empathy, state what you know and what you're doing. Take responsibility only on facts confirmed with legal. Never assign blame publicly mid-incident.
5. Update — Hold a regular cadence until resolved (see matrix). Silence reads as guilt or incompetence.
6. Review — Blameless post-mortem within 1 week; capture root cause, timeline, comms gaps, and playbook fixes.

Severity & Escalation Matrix

Mandatory review gates (do not skip for SEV-1/2):

• Legal — confirms admissions of fault, liability language, and what facts can be stated; reviews anything touching active litigation, contracts, or financial guidance (public companies: loop in IR + check Reg FD/MAR before any market-moving disclosure).
• Security/CISO — for any breach/incident, comms must not reveal exploitable detail or contradict the forensic timeline. Coordinate disclosure sequencing with the technical response.
• Customer & regulator notification — breaches of personal data carry hard legal deadlines independent of press strategy: e.g. GDPR ≈ 72 hours to the supervisory authority, US state laws "without unreasonable delay" (some with fixed caps), and sector rules (HIPAA, PCI DSS, financial regulators). Notify affected customers/users directly — don't let them learn from the press. Confirm exact obligations with counsel for every jurisdiction you operate in.

Holding-statement templates (issue fast, fill specifics, never speculate):

[Outage]  "We're aware of an issue affecting [service] beginning at
[time/TZ]. Our team is actively investigating and we'll post the next
update by [time]. Status: [status-page URL]."

[Incident under investigation]  "We're aware of reports regarding
[topic]. We take this seriously and are looking into it. We don't want
to speculate ahead of the facts; we'll share verified information as
soon as we can. Contact: [media email]."

[Confirmed, fault on us]  "We've confirmed [what happened]. This should
not have happened, and we're sorry. Here's what we're doing: [1-2-3].
Affected customers will be contacted directly by [time]. Updates: [URL]."

Golden rules: Acknowledge fast, even before you have all the facts. Never say "no comment" (offer "we're investigating and will update by [time]" instead). Don't speculate or admit fault without legal sign-off. Show empathy and speak as a human. Be faster than the news cycle. Keep one channel of truth (a status page) and point everyone to it.

Earned vs. Paid vs. Contributed Media (know the difference)

Treat these as three separate buckets — they carry different credibility, cost, and disclosure obligations. Don't report paid/contributed placements as if they were earned coverage.

Forbes Councils, Entrepreneur Leadership Network, Newsweek Expert Forum, Fast Company Executive Board are paid membership programs (a recurring fee buys publishing access) — useful for byline volume and SEO, but they are contributed/paid, not earned editorial. Don't present them as "featured in Forbes." Most tier-one newsrooms (e.g. TechCrunch, NYT, WSJ, The Verge) do not run unsolicited promotional guest posts; earn those through real news pitches.

Thought Leadership / Byline Placement

• Earned bylines first: pitch genuine op-eds/analysis to outlets with open contributor programs (e.g. industry trades, VentureBeat-style guest sections, sector newsletters, Substacks). Lead with a sharp, non-promotional argument.
• Pitch the idea, not a finished piece: send editors a 2-sentence thesis + 3-bullet outline + why you're credible to write it. Match their style and word count.
• Write about the trend/problem, not your product. Establish expertise; mention your company once, in the bio.
• Contributed networks (paid) as a supplement: Council-style memberships can build a body of bylines and backlinks fast — just budget for them and label them honestly internally and externally.
• Repurpose: turn each byline into a LinkedIn article, company-blog post, newsletter section, and 3-5 social pull-quotes.

Podcast Guesting

• Use Listennotes.com or Podchaser to find shows by topic
• Pitch: "Here's a story I can tell your audience" (not "let me promote my thing")
• Prepare 3 talking points + 1 memorable anecdote
• Send host a follow-up thank you + share episode with your audience

PR Measurement

Brand Visibility in AI Search (entity authority, not "training")

LLM answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) and Google AI Overviews increasingly sit between your news and the reader. They surface brands via retrieval and entity authority — what authoritative sources currently say about a clearly-defined entity — not because a model "trained on your press release." Optimize for retrievability and consistency, not for gaming a training pipeline:

• One consistent entity: use the exact same legal name, founders, founding year, HQ, category, and one-line description everywhere (press page, About page, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Wikipedia/Wikidata if notable). Contradictory facts confuse entity resolution.
• Authoritative third-party coverage: earned articles, analyst/wiki mentions, and reputable directories are what answer engines retrieve and cite. This is the real PR payoff — pursue genuine coverage, not link-stuffed contributed posts.
• Structured data: mark up Organization, Person (execs), Product, and Article/NewsArticle with schema.org JSON-LD; add sameAs links tying your profiles together so engines connect the entity.
• A clean press/newsroom page: crawlable HTML (not a JS-only widget), dated releases, a boilerplate, exec bios, and high-res assets give retrievers clean, quotable facts.
• Monitor citations/mentions: periodically ask the major assistants about your brand/category and check which sources they cite. Track mention sentiment and factual accuracy; correct errors at the source (your site, Wikidata, the cited article) rather than expecting the model to relearn.
• Avoid: fabricated stats, inconsistent claims, or pay-to-publish bylines as an "AI ranking" hack — these erode the authority signal you're trying to build.

Inline Templates & Trackers

Pitch examples (good vs. weak)

SUBJECT: Stripe data: SaaS refunds up 23% in Q1 — exclusive for your fintech beat

Hi Jordan,

Your piece last week on SMB churn got me — we're seeing the flip side in
payments data.

We pulled refund + chargeback rates across 4,000 SaaS accounts: refunds
jumped 23% QoQ in Q1, concentrated in sub-$50 MRR plans. Full dataset +
methodology attached if useful, and our head of payments can walk you
through it on a call.

Happy to give you this exclusively through Thursday.

— Alex, [Company]  |  press@company.com  |  press kit: company.com/press

WEAK (don't send): "Hi, we're excited to announce our revolutionary new
platform that's disrupting the industry. Please cover our launch! See
attached 2 MB PDF + logo pack."
Why it fails: no hook, no relevance to the reporter, hype with no data,
unsolicited attachments, asks for coverage instead of offering a story.

SUBJECT: 30-sec follow-up — that SaaS refund data

Hi Jordan — circling back once in case this got buried. Still happy to
share the dataset exclusively. If it's not a fit, no worries and I'll stop
here. — Alex

Media-list fields (build this spreadsheet/CRM)

Name | Outlet | Beat/Topics | Tier (1/2/3) | Email | X/Bluesky/LinkedIn | Preferred contact & best time | Recent relevant article (link) | Pitch angle for them | Status (new/pitched/replied/placed/pass) | Last contacted | Follow-up count | Embargo OK? (y/n) | Opt-out/Do-not-contact | Notes

• Research preferences before pitching: check the reporter's bio/Muck Rack for "pitch me about…", read their last 3 articles, note if they say "no PDFs" or "DMs open." Pitch the beat they actually cover.
• CRM tags: tier-1, covered-us, covered-competitor, embargo-trusted, do-not-contact, plus campaign tag. Tools: Muck Rack, Prowly, Notion, or a simple sheet.
• Compliance / opt-out: honor any "remove me" / "do not contact" immediately and permanently flag it. Cold B2B press outreach to a journalist's work address is generally fine, but if you run bulk outreach via an ESP, include an unsubscribe and respect CAN-SPAM / GDPR/PECR (EU/UK) lawful-basis and opt-out rules.
• Keep each campaign under ~50 targets — quality over volume.

Outreach tracker — follow-up discipline

Hard rule: max 2 follow-ups, then move on. No reply = no, for this story. Never re-send the same pitch; never CC their editor to pressure them.

Embargo acceptance language

Put terms in the pitch and require explicit agreement:

"I'd like to offer this under embargo until [Mon DD, YYYY, 9:00 AM ET]. Replying with the materials request constitutes agreement to the embargo. If that doesn't work for you, let me know and I'll share post-lift." Send a lift confirmation the morning of, and only share the full kit after the reporter agrees.

Press release examples (filled headlines + quote)

Strong headline:  "Acme Raises $12M to Cut SMB Payment Fraud by Half"
Weak headline:    "Acme Announces Exciting New Funding Milestone"

Human quote (good):
"We kept hearing the same thing from small merchants: fraud tools were
built for enterprises and priced for them too. We built Acme to flip that."
— Sam Rivera, CEO, Acme

Corporate quote (avoid):
"We are thrilled to leverage synergies to deliver best-in-class value to
our stakeholders across the ecosystem." — CEO