Sentinel InsightsWhat is media relations?A plain guide for founders and marketers.

Media relations is the work of building and keeping useful relationships with journalists, editors, producers and podcast hosts, so that when you have something worth reporting, the right people hear about it and trust what you send. It covers who you contact, what you pitch, how fast you answer and how you behave when a story doesn’t go your way.

For a founder or marketing lead, the short version is this: media relations decides whether your news reaches a reporter’s inbox as a welcome tip or as noise. Good media relations earns coverage you couldn’t buy. Poor media relations burns contacts you’ll need next quarter.

What is media relations?

Media relations is one part of public relations, focused on the press. The goal is coverage that a journalist chooses to write: a news story, a quote in a feature, a product in a roundup or a guest spot on a show. That coverage is earned media, and our guide to what earned media is explains why readers trust it more than an ad.

The work sits on three things. You need something newsworthy to say. You need to know which journalists cover that subject for an audience you care about. And you need a reputation, with those journalists, for being accurate, quick and easy to work with.

Media relations vs public relations

People use the two terms as if they mean the same thing. They overlap, but public relations is the wider job. PR covers every way an organisation talks to the people who matter to it, including staff, investors, local communities, customers and regulators. Media relations is the slice of that job aimed at the press.

The last row is the one to keep in mind. In media relations you never control the outcome. You can make a story easy to say yes to, and that’s all.

What media relations work looks like week to week

From the outside it can look like sending press releases. Most of the real work happens before anything is sent. A typical week for a team running media relations for a growing brand includes:

• Reading coverage. Tracking what target journalists have written lately, so pitches fit their beat and their recent stories.
• Building short lists. Ten well-chosen reporters for a story beat a thousand names pulled from a database.
• Writing pitches. Short, specific emails that explain why this story matters to that outlet’s readers now.
• Preparing spokespeople. Briefing founders and experts on likely questions, facts they can share and topics to avoid.
• Answering requests. Replying fast when a journalist needs a comment, a figure or a photo before deadline.
• Logging results. Recording each piece of coverage, the outlet, the audience and whether it names or links to you.

None of these tasks is hard on its own. The difficulty is doing them consistently for months, which is why media relations rewards patience more than bursts of activity.

How journalists want to be pitched

You don’t have to guess what reporters want. Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 surveyed nearly 900 journalists, and The PR Net’s summary of the report gives a clear picture. Journalists prefer one-to-one email pitches, and 88% say they delete pitches that miss their beat. The same summary says 78% judge a pitch relevant when it affects their audience or community, beyond simply matching their coverage area.

In practice, a pitch that gets read tends to follow a few habits:

1. It’s under 200 words, which the report summary also recommends, and it gets to the news in the first two lines.
2. It names a reason to run the story now, such as new data, a trend the journalist has written about, or a local angle.
3. It offers something concrete: a spokesperson available this week, original figures or usable images.
4. It’s sent to one person, by name, with a subject line that reads like a headline.
5. It gets one polite follow-up at most, a few days later, with something new to add.

A pitch is a favour you’re asking of a busy stranger. Make it quick to read and easy to say yes to.

Building media relationships that last

The word relationships does a lot of work in media relations. The aim is simple: be the source journalists remember as reliable.

That reputation comes from small, repeated behaviour. Reply within the hour when a reporter asks for a comment. Say no when a story isn’t a fit for them, even if it costs you coverage. Never send a figure you can’t back up. Don’t ask to approve a journalist’s copy, and don’t complain when a quote is trimmed. Over a year, those habits add up to a handful of reporters who open your emails first.

Founders and executives are often the best media assets a company has, because journalists want to talk to the person who made the decision. Our Founder and Executive PR service is built around getting leaders ready for that, from media training to bylines and podcast appearances.

How to measure media relations

Counting press clippings is the oldest measure in PR and one of the least useful. Ten mentions in sites nobody in your market reads are worth less than one interview in the trade title your buyers trust. A more useful scorecard looks at:

• Relevance. Did the coverage reach the audience you wanted, in the outlets they read?
• Message. Did the story describe your company the way you’d want a buyer to hear it?
• Quality of mention. A quoted spokesperson or a named product beats a passing reference.
• Follow-on effects. Referral visits, branded search, inbound requests from other journalists, and whether AI assistants now cite the coverage when people ask about your category.
• Relationship health. How many journalists replied, asked for more, or came back to you with a request.

At Sentinel we keep every result in one live coverage log, with each item labelled earned, placed or paid, and we review it with clients monthly. You can read more about that in how we work.

When to bring in help

Plenty of companies run media relations in-house, and if you have a founder who enjoys talking to the press and a story worth telling, you can start today with the steps above. It gets harder when you need to reach journalists in a new market, when news comes in faster than you can pitch it, or when nobody has time to read coverage every week.

An outside team brings existing knowledge of who covers what, a process for pitching, and the time to do it properly. It shouldn’t bring promises of guaranteed coverage. Editors decide what they publish, and anyone who says otherwise is selling paid placements under another name. Our Digital PR work and media relations sit together for that reason: the story and the outreach are planned as one campaign.

If you’d like a team to handle journalists, podcast hosts and creators for you, see our Strategic Outreach service.