You can reach out to 100 news reporters and not hear back from anyone.
Why?
Because your product and your story aren’t newsworthy enough. I hate to break it to you, but the media operates in a story-driven attention economy.
You have to make things compelling for the reporters or writers that you’re pitching. That’s why sensational, controversial, and rage-inducing stories perform so well. (Also why Amazon PMs write a press release before they actually build a product.)
For us, our product Next Keyboard wasn’t particularly controversial by default. We also didn’t plan on going down the gimmick-y, sensational, route.
However, we did have some other ways of developing our story. For example, we’d raised funds on Kickstarter and were the most funded app for a short while.
The general principle is for you to look into any milestone you’ve reached that would make someone go, “Cool.” Talk about it with your friends, and see what catches their attention.
Prove that you already have traction or interest, and the story becomes more newsworthy.
Share some of your processes, which might be unusual and newsworthy. For us, we developed our app with tight feedback loops and heavy involvement from our Kickstarter community and from communities on Reddit, Designer News, and Product Hunt.
Source: The Press Release Is Dead. Here Are Its Replacements | by Robleh Jama | The Startup | Medium