The Burned-Out Blogger's Guide to PR

For four years as a reporter at TechCrunch, hordes of brown-nosed PR people drove me nuts.

I'd like to put a few of them out of a job.

Thought-Leading Learnings

Off the Record!

Learn how to use key journalistic terms — and why no one is really sure what they mean.

Embargoes!

A promise reporters make to write about you when you ask them to. Until everything goes to shit...

Angles!

You, too, can be part of a story you're not really part of.

Angst!

Someone needs a hug.

Why Do I Care About Press?

Some founders have the idea that getting covered in a major publication is a golden ticket to fame and fortune. Others think that press is nice validation and is good for filling bare office walls, but is mostly a distraction. Neither are right, but between the two, I’d bet on the latter.

You’ve probably heard of Words With Friends. The online Scrabble-esque game has since seen its heyday, but in 2010 it was a mega-hit that led its maker, Newtoy, to an acquisition by Zynga for $53 million.

What you may not know is that the company behind Words struggled in relative obscurity for years. In 2008 I wrote a post on TechCrunch about their first game, aptly called Chess With Friends, which included innovative social mechanics that set it apart from the pack. But the app’s download numbers were modest; maybe my post helped a little, but nowhere near enough to sustain the company, which had to take on external projects to pay the bills.

Newtoy’s followup, Words With Friends, launched in July 2009 and received coverage in several blogs including the iOS gaming site Touch Arcade, where it scored a coveted 5-star review. Despite this, the game’s performance was middling. With a month of runway left, Newtoy’s founders found their company on the brink of failure. So much for good press.

Then John Mayer happened.

Choose a chapter

  • Why Do I Care About Press?

  • The News Cycle

  • Embargoes

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Michael Arrington — Founder of TechCrunch

Michael Arrington — Founder of TechCrunch

It has something for everyone, and it's smart. It's also laugh-out-loud funny... It's indispensable for startup founders, and they'll love it. Bloggers and reporters will cry over how perfectly it describes their frustrating lives. And PR people will groan and say it's all nonsense.

Alexia Tsotsis — TechCrunch Co-Editor

Alexia Tsotsis — TechCrunch Co-Editor

Absolutely a must-read. If you're a startup founder trying to figure out the press landscape, Jason's book is mandatory reading. Also, poetic, funny.

About the author

Jason Kincaid was a writer for TechCrunch for four years, where he wrote over three thousand articles, met with countless entrepreneurs, co-created and hosted the shows TC Cribs and OMG/JK, and interviewed key figures including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Google VP (and now Yahoo CEO) Marissa Mayer, Senator Al Franken, and many others.

Since leaving TechCrunch he has consulted for firms across Silicon Valley, emceed the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, and recently appeared as himself on the hit Emmy-nominated HBO show Silicon Valley — which makes this sentence fittingly repetitive.

Questions? Insults? Contact me..