How does your startup help journalists?

It's rare that you just message a journalist and say "hey I made this app please cover it" and they excitedly agree. However, being a journalist is hard today: * AI written articles. * High demands for hyper niche SEO friendly content. * Lots of competition, especially at higher levels. * Etc. So when you can do their job for them or give them a really good starting point, it makes them very receptive to running your article. ## What do you have that a journalist wants? Look at your data and decide what might make a good high traffic article. Sometimes it's easy, such as you had commissioned a study and it came back with interesting results. Sometimes you need to be creative: I once was working on a project that evaluated Overwatch footage, so during Overwatch League's big championship I asked the engineers if we could point the analysis tools at the live game footage and evaluate the biggest plays. Our tool evaluated the plays, pulled the footage, and then we could send a list of journalists who cover Overwatch 10 Biggest Plays of OWL Week One or 10 Dumbest Team Kills, etc. We created a list (I'll explain below) and gave each one a slightly modified unique list that that can run. Actually, in Overwatch anther example is we noticed that one map wasn't in the rotation for a competitive season. As we were collecting live data from members on each match they play we could identify "yes, this map was removed from rotation" so we sent some journalists our finding along with our guesses as to why it was pulled. We just used the data we already had and packaged it up. Whatever your startup is, I'm sure we can find something interesting that can be shared. Bonus points for timely content. ## Compile a list of journalists I'm a pretty avid news reader as it is so this comes easy for me. Any time you see a news article that deals with your niche look up who wrote that article. Create a spreadsheet or put them in your CRM, note the last time you messaged them, maybe a rating about how good their writing is / news sites they have access to, and number of articles they have published for you. Reach out whenever you can find something relevant to them, ask them if there's anything they are looking for, and cultivate that relationship. ## tl;dr You've likely got unique access to some kind of data. Spend a little time evaluating what articles could make use of that data. Find journalists and send them that data. One time I sent a Newsroom a pizza and had the pizza company write something funny on the inside of the box like "no one knows about my cool product so I'm stuck resorting to making friends with pizza" and someone gave us a shout for it. Though, there aren't many actual newsrooms left you can be creative.