Notes from the team building ShowSources — product, journalism, and the craft of pitching.
Media relations didn't evolve in a straight line. It went through three discrete eras, each a reaction to the broken assumptions of the last. Knowing which era you're working in is the difference between getting covered and being ignored.
HARO connected reporters with sources for nearly two decades. When Cision quietly shut it down, the PR industry lost more than a directory — it lost a habit. Here's what's broken now, and what has to replace it.
We spent a day shadowing a senior tech reporter at a national outlet. Here is what their inbox looks like, how they triage 287 pitches, and the five moments where a pitch lives or dies.
Every template here came from a real pitch that got a real reporter to reply. We grouped them by framework, annotated what made each one work, and noted where they break. Steal them — but read the annotations first.
Press releases were designed for a media landscape that no longer exists. Here are the eight pitch formats that have replaced them — what each is for, who they're for, and what makes them work.
A practical breakdown of what reporters actually respond to — drawn from the patterns we see across thousands of pitches on ShowSources.