Your PR agency says you’ve got no big news? Fire them (and hire us)

“We worked with our old PR agency for six months and they only got us 2 pieces of media coverage and wrote a couple of blog posts for us,” a new prospect told us last week. “Am I  crazy? I feel like we should have gotten more than that?” they explained (before we signed them and added them to our PR agency client roster).

They’re right. They should have gotten more. And the way to make that happen? PR agencies have to do more.

In 2026, 85% of companies are considering firing their media agencies. And the top complaint? That PR agencies are waiting for them to provide news. 

“If you’re working with PR pros, you don’t need to wait for a funding round, product launch, or an acquisition to start outreach,” we explained to our newly-minted client. 

Your PR agency can’t find story angles for your company? Move on. 

Here are some ideas we use with our PR clients every month to get them media coverage, even when they don’t have ‘big news.’  

Your business momentum? Seems like a big news story to us! 

Sometimes, your numbers can do most of the talking. If you’ve grown your business by 1,000 percent in just a few months, journalists want to hear about it. 

We worked with a cloud computing client who had started a business in his garage. In six months, he had scaled it to a $2 million a month startup and had this to say: “84% of organizations say ‘managing cloud spend’ is their number one technical challenge, and I’ve found a way to save them 50 percent on their costs, instantly, by getting rid of cloud waste.” 

That story landed immediately. Why? Journalists wanted to understand why cloud bills were exploding. Why were CFOs losing control? How was this one founder quietly saving companies millions, while other providers couldn’t?

Momentum isn’t just growth. It’s also evidence that the market loves your product. 

There’s a problem that the rest of the industry says can't be solved, but you've got the magic wand to fix it, so your product is selling like hotcakes? 

Journalists will want to know how you saw an opportunity that everyone else missed.

Hit a business milestone? That’s a big news story we can pitch

“This year, we’re hiring 120 new people. We grew revenue by 400% last year and we need to double our staff.” 

That’s what our SaaS client told us when we asked him about their growth. Tech layoffs were going on everywhere else (there were over 150,000 tech layoffs in 2025 across 549 companies). But they had 120 new tech roles that they needed to fill ASAP. 

We positioned them as a company that others could learn from, which found a way to stay profitable during a downturn. Journalists instantly see that as a sign that something interesting is happening. 

If you’re not hiring, maybe your user base is exploding? Lovable, the AI coding platform, made waves in November when it announced it had reached 8 million users. That’s especially impressive when it only had 2.3 million users just a few months back.

Or maybe you’ve just hit a revenue milestone? Legal tech startup Harvey was featured in CNBC when they announced they had reached $100 million in recurring revenue, a milestone they hit just three years after launch. 

Growth milestones don’t need to be massive IPOs or billion-dollar valuations. Revenue jumps, hiring sprees and customer demand are all news. And business milestones, especially when it defies the narrative, is exactly what reporters are looking for.

What’s your spicy hot take on what’s happening in your industry? It could be big news

Last year, we noticed that every company was talking about cutting ad spend on X, especially when X’s ad exec left abruptly. 

But our adtech client had a different story. He told us that most of his clients had increased their ad spend on X by 30 percent in the last quarter. We quickly drafted a pitch that added his hot take into the conversation, and it instantly got the attention of journalists eager to talk about what companies wouldn’t say aloud. 

Or take our executive recruitment client. MBA applications were exploding, but they thought it was the wrong move for execs looking for further education. They told us that execs with AI degrees have salaries up to 50% higher than execs with MBAs. Every journalist who read our pitch was surprised, and wanted to tell the story right away. 

We also worked with a startup advisor client when we hearing nonstop about the dangers of an AI bubble. Inside Silicon Valley, the conversation was the opposite, he told us. 

He had just finished raising money for a startup at a 80 times valuation. While everyone else talked about the bubble, money in the Valley was flowing into AI faster than ever. Investors were confident that they were backing the next OpenAI or Anthropic. 

These stories are specific, opinionated, and grounded in real experience. And they give journalists exactly what they need: a sharp perspective that moves the story forward. In fact, 63 percent of journalists state that the most valuable thing a PR professional can provide is expertise from clients. 

Those are the takes that we can include in our pitches and responses to journalists to get you news coverage, even when you don’t have a big announcement. Just let your expertise do the talking. 

Got a product or service launch that's truly unique? That’s could be some impressively big news

We worked with an adtech company who had seen the writing on the wall for cookies (Google’s tech for tracking users across different websites to help advertisers).  Around two thirds of users were now declining cookies, and browsers like FireFox and Safari were blocking them 100 percent of the time. That was a huge problem for our PR client’s competition in the adtech space.

Our client had a magical solution to fix this, that no one else had. “Our tech can boost ROI on ads by 3 times, without any privacy concerns. Everyone else in the industry is scrambling for something like this,” they told us in our initial meeting.  

We didn’t just pitch them as a reaction to a user trend. We positioned them as the experts that had solved the problem years before most users could define what a cookie was. 

Being first can be a powerful news story. 

Maybe you’re on the cutting edge of science, like CuspAI. It’s a startup that made news last year by launching the world’s first AI platform to analyze materials (even ones that don’t exist yet!). Their software can analyze material properties 10 times faster than traditional methods. New, and 10 times better? No wonder they made headlines! 

Another example is Bioptimis, which revealed its ‘world biology model’ in December. It’s a full model of the body that can predict how diseases will behave. They say that they’re doing to medicine what ChatGPT did to text. Just the news of their new product was enough to generate headlines.  

Journalists love firsts. First to spot a shift. First to build something. First to prove it works at scale. Being first allows you to say that you’re an expert, and have credibility, because you saw it coming. 

Want to work with an agency that comes up with ‘newsy’ story ideas, even when you don’t have a big announcement? Contact Mind Meld PR today.