Coverage comes from specific human beings, not from outlets. Your list is 20 journalists who already write about your space, because the reporter who covered your competitor last quarter is a hundred times likelier to cover you than any editor at a famous masthead who never touches your beat.

Find them by reading what your buyers read and collecting bylines. Author pages list a writer’s recent work; a database like Muck Rack shows beats and contact preferences. For each name, record the outlet, the beat, the last three relevant stories, and how they like to be reached. Twenty rows, researched properly, beats two hundred rows scraped.

Journalists say yes to people they recognize, and recognition is built in small, unselfish moves: share their story with a comment that adds something, answer a question they pose publicly, send a useful data point with no ask attached. Two or three genuine touches per writer over a few weeks is enough to turn your name from stranger to familiar.

The discipline is patience. Pitch a stranger and you are spam; pitch a familiar name and you are a source. The founders who skip this chapter spend chapter three wondering why nobody replies.

A pitch is 120 to 150 words in the body of an email, and its subject line is the headline of the story you are proposing, not the name of your company. The first sentence names the takeaway for their readers. The middle explains why you, why now, in concrete terms. The close offers exactly what you can give: data, access, a customer to interview. No attachments, ever.

Then the follow up rule: one polite nudge after three to five business days, and stop. Most pitches receive silence, even good ones, and pestering converts silence into a blocklist. Your job is a steady pipeline of good pitches to warm names, not a crusade around one.

One structural note: a pitch built on a checkable fact travels farther. “Verified entrepreneur, registry linked, published feature, distributed announcement” hands the reporter their diligence on a plate, and the assets behind that sentence are exactly what the recognition package produces.

Every day, reporters post live requests for sources on platforms like Qwoted, Source of Sources, and Featured. This is coverage on the easy setting: the journalist already wants a source, today, and the competition is everyone else who replied.

Winning replies share three habits. They arrive fast, ideally within the hour, because deadlines are real. They answer the exact question asked, in quotable sentences, instead of pivoting to a company pitch. And they close with one line of confirmable credentials, because a reporter quoting a stranger checks that stranger first, and the founder who can be confirmed in thirty seconds beats the founder who needs an email exchange.

A placement you got once is an asset you use forever. Add it to your press page, your LinkedIn profile, your proposals, your speaker bio, your email signature. Reference it in the next pitch, because coverage compounds: journalists trust founders other journalists have already vetted.

This is also where owned assets multiply earned ones. A published feature and a distributed release give every placement a permanent home to point at, so the reporter checking you out lands on a record instead of a homepage. Round out the kit with a bio built to be believed and a proper entrepreneur media kit.