The best advice I can offer is target your reporters and be persistent.
My experience was very different because I rode a wave of interest around something and put myself in front of that wave.
What I found to be effective was actually reaching out to various reporters/bloggers who have written on that subject or similar subjects in the past.
I wrote fairly specific emails to both an LA times and Wired journalist and after being published on both sites, from there it snowballed with many journalists (TV/radio/newspapers) soon contacting me afterwards.
Also, one thing I did do (which was a little naughty at the time) was create news that I thought was unbelievable at the time, but pushed it to as many gossip columnists and bloggers as I could find (mostly disreputable folk) and through various network effects (and many many hours of typing emails) the same news ended up on the front page of Yahoo.co.uk for about 16 hours.
Screenshot below - the rickrolled again story in #1 spot on Yahoo's UK homepage... was a result of my imagination.
This same story was also on Cnet's homepage too, but I never got a screenshot of that sorry.
Really the best thing I would do is set up a whole lot of Google Alerts around a subject that your startup is targeting and whenever a story pops up online, contact that writer with your perspective.
I did this approach during October last year, this is the traffic that was generated for the entirety of the blog's short lifespan (that month essentially).
My experience was very different because I rode a wave of interest around something and put myself in front of that wave.
What I found to be effective was actually reaching out to various reporters/bloggers who have written on that subject or similar subjects in the past.
I wrote fairly specific emails to both an LA times and Wired journalist and after being published on both sites, from there it snowballed with many journalists (TV/radio/newspapers) soon contacting me afterwards.
Also, one thing I did do (which was a little naughty at the time) was create news that I thought was unbelievable at the time, but pushed it to as many gossip columnists and bloggers as I could find (mostly disreputable folk) and through various network effects (and many many hours of typing emails) the same news ended up on the front page of Yahoo.co.uk for about 16 hours.
Screenshot below - the rickrolled again story in #1 spot on Yahoo's UK homepage... was a result of my imagination.
http://files.marklancaster.org/images/yahoo-page.jpg
This same story was also on Cnet's homepage too, but I never got a screenshot of that sorry.
Really the best thing I would do is set up a whole lot of Google Alerts around a subject that your startup is targeting and whenever a story pops up online, contact that writer with your perspective.
I did this approach during October last year, this is the traffic that was generated for the entirety of the blog's short lifespan (that month essentially).
http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...
These journalist's incomes depend on putting content out there, help them out, they don't bite.