Your announcement matters enormously to you and not at all to a journalist with an inbox full of pitches. The new plant, the appointment, the product that took three years to develop: inside the company, each one is the news of the year. In a reporter’s inbox it is one subject line among dozens, judged in seconds on whether it tells their readers something new. Most press releases fail at that moment, because they were written for the board, not for the reader.
We plan and run PR and media relations for companies that want to be understood by the trade and business press, as part of the same work as their corporate communications. Our co-founder Karuna Waghmare leads corporate communication at Quiamo, so the press release, the annual report, the leadership interview and the employee announcement all start from one agreed story.
What PR can and cannot promise
No agency can guarantee coverage. Editors decide what they publish, and any firm that promises a set number of articles is either paying for them or hoping you will not check. We do not pay for editorial, and we do not offer placements as a product.
What we can do is make your story easier to say yes to: a clear angle, the right reporter, facts that hold up, images ready to use, a spokesperson who answers the question asked. That raises the odds. It does not remove the editor’s judgement, and we would not want it to.
Where you want guaranteed placement, that is advertising or sponsored content, and it is planned and bought as such. Sponsored content is always labelled as sponsored. Our media planning and buying team handles it on a flat fee, separately from the earned media work, so the two are never confused in front of a journalist or in your reporting.
Finding the story angle
An announcement is something you want to say. A story is something a reader wants to know. The work is finding where the two meet. A new production line becomes a story about local supply for an industry that has relied on imports. An appointment becomes a story about where the company is heading. A product launch becomes a story about a problem engineers in that sector have complained about for years.
- Trade press wants technical substance: specifications, applications, what changes for the people who design, buy or maintain the product.
- Business press wants consequence: investment, jobs, markets, competition and what the decision says about the sector.
- Regional and language media want local relevance, written by native-speaking colleagues and specialists rather than translated after the fact.
We test each angle against one question: would a reporter who has never heard of you find this worth a phone call? If the honest answer is no, we tell you, and suggest whether the news belongs on your own channels instead, through our content and editorial team.
Press releases, press kits and newsrooms
A good press release puts the news in the first sentence, the reason it matters in the second and the evidence below. It names a real person to contact, carries a quote that says something a fact could not, and avoids the adjectives every other release uses. It is accurate to the last figure, because a reporter who finds one wrong number stops trusting the rest.
Around the release, a journalist needs material they can use without asking:
- A fact sheet and company backgrounder, with numbers your finance and legal teams have approved.
- Leadership biographies and photographs in print and web resolution.
- Product images, diagrams and, where useful, short film clips with clear usage terms.
- Logos in the right formats and a named contact who answers.
All of this belongs in an online newsroom on your own site, with past releases archived and dated. A newsroom also helps search: when someone looks up your company after an announcement, they should find your version first. Our website team builds it, and our film and photography Studio supplies images and clips that reproduce well at any size.
Media lists built for each announcement
We do not keep a list of friendly journalists to ring for favours, and we do not send the same release to thousands of addresses. Each announcement gets its own list, built from who actually covers the subject: the reporter who wrote about your sector last month, the editor of the trade title your buyers read, the correspondent covering investment in your region. We respect data protection rules in the countries concerned, and a journalist who asks to be removed is removed.
Smaller and better targeted is almost always more effective. Ten reporters who cover your field will read a relevant pitch. A thousand who do not will mark you as spam, and remember.
Would a reporter who has never heard of you open your next release?
Send us the announcementSpokesperson preparation
Coverage often depends on twenty minutes on the phone with someone who has never been interviewed before. A brilliant engineer or a careful finance director can lose the story by answering a different question, by saying too much about a customer, or by going quiet when asked about a competitor. We prepare spokespeople properly, working with our leadership communications team:
Briefing note
Who the reporter is, what they have written before and what their readers care about.
Key messages
Three points the spokesperson should make, each with a fact or example to back it up.
Hard questions
The questions you hope will not be asked, with honest, approved answers.
Rehearsal
A practice interview over video, recorded and reviewed, until the answers sound like the person.
Follow-up
Facts, images and corrections sent promptly after the interview.
Our working rule for every spokesperson is simple: assume everything is on the record.
Planning the announcement
The order in which people hear news matters as much as the words. Employees should not learn about a restructuring from a newspaper. A key customer should not read about a price change before their account manager calls. Investors, regulators, partners and staff often need to hear first, and listed companies have disclosure obligations that set the sequence for them.
We build an announcement plan that lists every audience, the channel, the timing, the owner and the prepared lines for questions. Embargoes are agreed and respected. Holding statements are written in advance for the questions you can see coming. Where the news involves organisational change, our change communications work makes sure the internal and external versions say the same thing. Where the announcement happens at a trade show, our exhibitions and events team plans the stand, the press materials and the follow-up together.
Measuring PR without advertising value equivalency
Advertising value equivalency takes the size of an article and prices it as if it were an advert. It is easy to calculate and tells you nothing about whether the coverage changed anything. AMEC, the international association for communication measurement, rejects it in its Barcelona Principles, and we do not report it.
We agree what success means before the announcement goes out:
- Relevance: coverage in the titles your buyers, investors or recruits actually read, rather than a total count.
- Message pull-through: whether the coverage carried the point you wanted to make, and quoted your spokesperson accurately.
- Share of voice: how often you appear in your sector’s coverage compared with the competitors you name.
- Outcomes: branded search, newsroom visits, enquiries and recruitment interest in the period after the news.
You can read our wider approach in how we measure. Fees are a flat fee for the agreed scope; see how we charge.
The case notes below come from our team’s experience in earlier in-house and programme roles. They show how a story is explained to several audiences, kept consistent through a period of change and carried from an exhibition stand to the follow-up.
