Journalists Don't Care About You: A Magazine Editor's Field Guide to Getting Press

Jason Feifer has spent decades in media at Men's Health, Fast Company and now Entrepreneur, and he says it remains a badly misunderstood tool for businesspeople. He receives somewhere between 30 and 50 pitches in the time it takes to record a podcast, and most are irrelevant press releases blasted to countless people. Only around 20 to 25 percent come directly from founders; the rest come from PR professionals, many of whom simply play a numbers game with automated lists.

The payoff from coverage varies wildly. Some entrepreneurs tell Feifer a single Entrepreneur story drove more downloads or sales in a month than all their paid marketing, while others saw nothing, or only a single useful partner conversation. His conclusion is that press is a great add-on but far too unpredictable to bank on as a growth plan.

His rule of thumb is to treat press like raising money: do it when you know what it is for. Valid purposes include launching a product, showing investors that the market takes you seriously, or positioning your company differently. "I deserve this" is not a tactical reason, and neither is chasing the wrong outlet, like a Washington hot dog vendor courting a national magazine when the local food section would actually sell hot dogs.

Feifer breaks the process into three steps: prep, figuring out who to pitch, and the pitch itself. Before any of that, he says, you must understand how media people think. Many founders email him as if ordering a hamburger from "Entrepreneur Hamburgers", treating him as a service provider, when in fact writers and editors care about their own reader, listener or viewer.

Each publication has its own mission, and that decides what gets in. Under Bob Safian, Fast Company was about where business is going, so stories needed to reveal the evolution of an industry. Feifer describes Entrepreneur as less a business magazine than a magazine about thinking, so he looks for counterintuitive decisions that solved a business problem and that other founders can learn from.

His example is a woman who makes a hinged butter dish. The product itself was a fit for a cooking magazine, but what hooked him was how she avoided a $10,000 market-research bill by surveying bored travelers at airport gates. It ran because entrepreneurs love that kind of ingenuity, even though the story had nothing to do with her sales pitch.

There is no published "about" page for this internal logic, so you have to infer it. Start from who the publication is trying to reach, then read several stories and ask what they have in common. Large outlets like the New York Times are really a collection of desks with different missions, so you have to parse the specific section.

After defining the goal, Feifer says you should look for what is interesting about your business, which is often not what you expect. The story you would tell Entrepreneur differs from the one you would tell Cosmopolitan: one wants what the founder did, the other might include the product in a roundup. Break your journey into pieces and match each piece to a different outlet.

The common mistake is working in reverse, deciding on the narrative you want out in the world and then trying to sell it to anyone. Feifer cites a pitch about a company hiring a new president, which is meaningless to his audience, though a restaurant trade publication might care. Stories in Entrepreneur, he says, are really about the audience, told through the people he writes about.

Goals can be broader than conversions. Companies want awareness, growth in a new market, or repositioning, as when large corporations seek Entrepreneur coverage to appear relevant to small business owners. Others want to establish a CEO as an authority, win conference invitations, or get in front of investors and partners. All of these are valid as long as you know which one you are after.

Feifer admits that all this is a lot of work and that people do succeed through dumb luck, but hiring PR can remove much of it. The trade-offs are cost and quality: he says plainly that many PR people are bad at their jobs, and he has told PR conference audiences so to nods all round. Lazy practice relies on email blasts and an outdated idea of getting the word out.

He singles out the traditional press release as a warning sign. Agencies may charge to write one and distribute it on the wire, then send a report showing it appeared on sites like Yahoo Finance, where nobody reads it. Posting a release on a big website, he stresses, is not the same as success.

What you want is a PR person who trades in active relationships with writers and editors, and who will push back when your story does not suit a publication. Anyone who guarantees coverage should be avoided because writers do what they want. Feifer praises specialists such as John Beer of Jack Taylor PR in wellness, Hannah Lee in hospitality, the Max Borges Agency in consumer products, and Greg Delman of G3 Media in tech.

On which publications to target, Feifer says it depends on your goal. Business titles like Inc and Fast Company reach people in a creating mindset, not a buying one, so a consumer startup may be better served by something like Men's Health. A smart shortcut is to see where your competitors have been featured and what audiences those outlets reach.

He also warns that a story on a site with millions of monthly visitors may reach only five to ten thousand people. That can still be fine, because the real value may be the social cachet. Companies turn articles into ads by promoting the tweet to the audience they want to impress, or add "as seen in" to their website without anyone reading the piece.

Feifer's own example is Money News Network, the podcast company he advises with Nicole Lapin. A Variety article brought nothing directly, but every outreach email to advertisers and partners now links to it, and he is sure it makes recipients pay more attention. The same logic probably explains funding announcements in TechCrunch, and Lenny adds that the benefits may arrive weeks or years later.

Many people email Feifer simply because he is the most visible name at Entrepreneur, but as editor-in-chief he is not the right target; his job is to refine ideas that his editors develop. Instead, find the people writing about your subject by browsing the site or Googling. Some outlets have formal beats, and elsewhere you can see which editor clearly likes food or tech.

He walks through a peanut butter founder whose buyers are millennial moms. Searching Cosmopolitan for snacks showed seasonal roundups rather than features, so the realistic goal was a spot in one, and the byline of those articles revealed who to pitch. The same method of starting from the publication and then looking at how it covers competitors works anywhere.

Feifer's wife, the freelancer Jen Miller, is the key example for a different tactic. Freelancers are independent contractors who have to hustle for assignments, so they hunger for stories and receive far fewer pitches than a staff editor. A relevant email to a freelancer is close to certain to be read, and you can tell who is a freelancer by their bio or their portfolio site.

Feifer reminds founders that "the media" is not a unified entity but a set of publishing companies made of individuals making subjective decisions. Nothing gets covered until one person is excited enough to convince someone else. Your job is to find your way in with that single person.

Feifer advises against phone calls and is lukewarm on social DMs, though some media people do not mind them; email remains the most traditional channel. The pitch should be the distilled product of your earlier work on your story, the publication and the individual writer. Like talking to investors, you should not give ten of them an identical spiel but customize your approach honestly.

There is no magic subject line, he says, but picture an editor glancing at 40 new emails and wanting to delete them all. The subject and preview text must show immediately that the message is targeted at him, for example by referencing something he wrote. Don't fake fandom, because it is obvious, and keep the email to a maximum of three paragraphs.

Then tell the version of your story that the editor will care about. The butter-dish woman spent a little time on the product and quickly moved to the clever market-testing story, which came across as an interesting human with an interesting entrepreneurial tale. Feifer says that was a pure cold email that simply showed up one day.

Feifer keeps folders of good and bad pitches in his inbox and reads one good one aloud. Landscape painter Meg O'Hara emailed that the border closure during Covid had shut ski resorts, which had been her clients, so she pivoted to selling artwork of favorite ski views to affluent skiers stuck at home. She even listed problems and solutions in bullets, matching the structure of his Problem Solvers podcast.

He liked that it showed she understood his work down to its format, and that it was an easy yes because he could imagine telling it to his audience. Lenny notes that she led with a story rather than a value proposition, and went straight to the lessons. Feifer adds that a simple tale of one person with paint and canvas can carry lessons that are relevant to a broad audience.

The make-or-break moment is the phone call, where Feifer expects openness about challenges. "I hate success stories. I love problem solving stories," he says, because readers learn from how others got through obstacles they share. If a founder pretends there was no real problem, he loses interest and may kill the piece.

Asked how many outlets to approach and how much time to spend, Feifer says that is one reason people hire PR, since a firm can reach many people quickly. A cheaper tactic is to follow writers and editors on social media and engage casually, so that your name is familiar when your email arrives. He knows people who do this strategically, and he still likes it as a good-faith filter.

Even with an agency, understanding how journalists think is valuable, because eventually you will be on the phone with one. The writer is not there to serve you and is asking questions on behalf of their audience. Lenny adds that doing it yourself helps you manage your PR people better.

Some companies are simply hard to write about, especially niche B2B services. In that case, Feifer suggests trying to position yourself as an expert by offering quotes to reporters when news breaks, or by pitching bylined articles yourself. A quote still lets you say "as featured in", and realistic expectations will save you heartache.

On exclusives, Feifer's number one rule is not to make journalists feel they are being played; he would walk away rather than do a funny dance. His favorite arrangement was a founder who offered Entrepreneur the first story with a three-hour embargo window before talking to the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg. Another option is to release the news widely but give one outlet the exclusive interview, as a company backed by Mark Cuban did.

Asked how to tell whether a reporter will write something positive or negative, Feifer says it depends partly on the publication: Entrepreneur and Fast Company don't run takedowns because they don't serve the audience. You can also review the writer's past work, and PR firms often compile dossiers. If something about you is controversial and you act cagey, a reporter will probably dig harder.

Ultimately everything is out of your control: whether someone pays attention, what they write, and when. Feifer says this is another reason not to make press your primary growth strategy. The more you try to control the process, the more annoyed the reporter gets, so you must accept being vulnerable, since that is the price of reaching their audience.

Feifer tells how Fred Ruckel pitched the Ripple Rug cat toy, which was not a fit. Ruckel replied that if Feifer wanted to hear about a scam on Amazon and eBay that had caught him up, he should get in touch. The scam was arbitrage, in which sellers list his product on eBay at a higher price and then buy it from Amazon to ship, so customers feel ripped off and return the item.

Feifer reported a 3,000 to 4,000 word piece contacting the platforms and the arbitrage software makers, with Ruckel as the main character because he was the way to understand the problem. The lesson is that sometimes you are not the story, but you can be part of it. His wife wrote a similar trend piece on death-preparation startups, giving prominent billing to the company that reached out.

Another route is creating context that others cover. Barbara Corcoran started as an ordinary New York realtor and compiled her own sales data into the Corcoran Report, which outlets treated as authoritative and which made her an authority. Today, remote-work consultancies commission surveys, and Zapier annually pitches a list of the fastest-growing business apps drawn from its own data.

Asked for a final thought, Feifer says to be human. Press releases fail because they are not human, and he dislikes interviewing people who stick to talking points. Media is a barely data-driven industry where a subjective decision is made to serve human readers, so write a human email to another human and then be natural when the conversation begins.

He guesses the Fast Company reporter liked Lenny because he came across as a normal, nice guy, and that a defensive or self-framing manner would have produced a very different story. In the lightning round he adds a favorite interview technique, which is to throw a theory at the interviewee, connecting things they said earlier, to make even much-interviewed people think in real time.

Feifer closes with an idea he credits for his career. Opportunity set A is everything others ask of you, such as a boss's expectations, while opportunity set B is what is available to you even though nobody asks, like a hobby, a new team or starting a podcast. If you only focus on A, you are only qualified to do what you already do.

When he became editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur, nobody told him to hit the speaking circuit, learn podcast interviews or write a book, yet all were available. Pursuing them changed how he sees himself, as an entrepreneur who helps entrepreneurs. He points listeners to his book Build for Tomorrow, which has a chapter on the idea, and his newsletter One Thing Better.