Relevance & Timing: The Secret to Getting Press
Founders spend enormous energy on what to say in a pitch: the perfect wording, the impressive stats, the polished story. Then they send it into silence and can't understand why. They had a great story. What went wrong?
Usually, nothing was wrong with the story. It arrived at the wrong moment. After 13 years and thousands of placements, I've come to believe the real secret to getting press isn't a better story but a collision of two things most brands treat separately: relevance and timing. The right story at the right moment gets covered. The same story a week too early or aimed at the wrong conversation disappears. Master that combination and press stops feeling like luck.
Why the best story still gets ignored
Here's what frustrates good brands: journalists don't cover stories because they're good. They cover them because they're relevant to what they need right now.
A journalist isn't sitting at their desk hoping to discover a great brand. They're working on specific stories, chasing specific angles, and racing specific deadlines. Your pitch succeeds or fails based on whether it fits what they're working on at the moment it lands and not on how impressive it is in the abstract. This is why a modest story that slots perfectly into a journalist's current need beats a genuinely remarkable one that doesn't connect to anything they're writing. The quality of your story sets the ceiling. Relevance and timing decide whether you ever reach it.
Relevance: being about something they already care about
Relevance means your story connects to a conversation the journalist and their audience are already having. It’s not the conversation you wish they were having about your brand but the one already in motion.
Most pitches fail the relevance test because they're about the brand: our launch, our milestone, our funding. Those matter to you. They don't connect to anything the journalist's readers are thinking about. Research found that 86% of journalists immediately reject pitches that aren't relevant to their beat, and lack of relevance is the single most common reason pitches get rejected, ahead of poor timing, weak newsworthiness, or anything else. A relevant pitch starts from what the audience already cares about and positions your brand inside it. If there's a national conversation about small businesses adopting AI, and you have data or a story about that, you're relevant. If you're pitching your product update in a vacuum, you're not. The test is simple: can the journalist see how this fits a story their readers already want? If yes, you've cleared the first half of the secret.
Timing: landing in the window when they care
Relevance without timing still fails. The same relevant story has a window or a period when journalists are actively writing about that topic and that window opens and closes fast.
Timing means getting your pitch in front of the journalist while the conversation is live, not after it's peaked. When a topic in your space is breaking, reporters need sources and perspectives within hours, not days. When an awareness moment or seasonal story is approaching, editors are planning that coverage weeks ahead. Both are timing windows and both close. The payoff when you hit one is enormous: when New York City schools banned ChatGPT, one team quickly surveyed educators and pitched the findings into a story the entire media was already covering, landing coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, USA Today, The Guardian, and more than 300 other sites. Same expertise, but offered in the window when every journalist needed exactly that angle. The brands that get covered are the ones ready to move the moment the window opens, with a relevant angle already prepared. The brands that miss out usually had the right story but brought it a week late, when the journalist had already filed and moved on.
How the two work together
Relevance and timing aren't separate skills but are two halves of one move, and neither works alone.
A relevant story with bad timing is a good idea nobody's ready for. Perfect timing with an irrelevant story is noise arriving quickly. But when a genuinely relevant angle lands in the exact window a journalist needs it, coverage becomes almost natural. You're not convincing anyone of anything, you're handing a reporter exactly what they needed at the moment they needed it. That's what the "secret" really is: not a magic pitch, but the deliberate alignment of a story a journalist cares about with the moment they care about it.
How to engineer it on purpose
The good news is that this collision can be manufactured. It isn't luck. It's a practice.
Start by monitoring the conversations in your space daily, so you see topics building before they peak. Keep a running list of the angles you can credibly speak to like your data, your expertise, your stories, so you're ready to match one to a moment on short notice. Build a calendar of the predictable timing windows: the awareness days, seasonal moments, and annual events your brand genuinely connects to, and pitch them weeks ahead when editors are planning. And when something breaks in your industry, move fast. A relevant, useful perspective offered within hours of a breaking story is one of the most reliable ways to earn coverage there is.
Do this consistently and you stop firing off great pitches into silence. You start placing relevant stories into open windows, which is what getting press has always actually required.
The real secret
There's no secret sentence, no magic subject line, no perfect pitch that unlocks the media on its own. The secret is quieter and more useful than that: say something a journalist already cares about, at the moment they care about it. Relevance gets you in the conversation. Timing gets you in while it's still happening.
Brands that internalize this stop asking "what can we say that's impressive?" and start asking "what's the conversation right now, and how do we fit it?" That single shift from what you want to say to what's relevant this moment is the difference between pitching into the void and becoming a brand the media actually turns to.
Ready to Get Your Timing Right?
Book a free strategy call with our team. We'll help you find the angles worth pitching and the moments worth pitching them so your story lands when it counts.
