Not too long ago, a client asked us to stand down on our attempts to score them an interview with their hometown newspaper. “Hey,” they told me, “it’s ok. Sometimes you don’t get the girl.”
That’s true, I said, “But we don’t stop until she slaps us in the face.”
Ouch!
In our view, that’s the way it needs to be when trying to earn media coverage on behalf of clients. It’s not like we haven’t placed stories in any given journalist’s media outlet before. The reality, the journalist’s reality, is there are so many distractions coming at them that even our well-thought-out pitch that merits coverage is not going to get the hearing it deserves.
The numbers tell the story. In 2017, there were 77,000 journalists in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That bottomed out at 43,000 in 2023, and now sits at 67,000. Simple division shows each remaining journalist or producer has less bandwidth to pay attention to what we are trying to sell them. Fewer journalists, more incoming means more persistence is required, full stop.
If you are looking for media coverage, this is why you need someone who has an aggressive orientation going into the project. No one likes rejection, but sometimes, if you keep asking, you get a smile instead of a slap.
