A San Diego PR agency that earns you local press and national coverage

We build an index or a study, we pitch it to the media as a new idea backed by data, and a share of the reporters cover it if they think it's good.

Local press now does a second job: researchers found in 2025 that AI search engines cite earned media far more often than a brand's own pages (reference 3).

City studies have been our way into local press for years. Joe's call on where to start: "It makes sense to have city ranking reports as the leader. I think those are just going to do the best for landing coverage, and then balance it out with the state ones." The big idea is to tailor it for the outlets that have proven or shown that they're linking to city studies. Tech companies have an extra door. Publications that cover startup ecosystems and are more like supporting their local or country level are open to positive news about their region.

1. Pick the claim and the map. One of our bread and butter formats is geographically based ranking studies, so top 25 cities for software engineers or fastest growing states. We can't be everything to everyone, so we stay focused on what local news covers: city rankings, real estate, urban policy and trends like remote work.
2. Put a place in the story. We like a geographical component, because we pitch bloggers and media in different states and areas and show them how the story is localized for them. Anytime there's a question, it should be density, a percentage, and rarely the raw number, because cities are all different sizes.
3. Test it before anyone sees it. Anything that does not vary between cities isn't helpful or interesting. If the price of a beer is pretty stable, that tells us nothing. Spoon feed them the key insights, make it visual and make it quick and easy to grab the data they need, because our primary audience is reporters that can quickly get the idea and write their own story.
4. Pitch at home and away together. It has always been a blend: local news and news stations make up anywhere from a quarter to nearly a third of who we pitch. The bulk of what we land consistently, most of it, is local news or local-news types of outlets.
5. Reach the person who decides. A lot of the pitching is showing them we did our research on what they cover, who they are and what they care about. Reporters are humans too: whatever is in front of them and easy to grab, they go for, and if something is harder to find or older, they may miss it. We use Apollo and LinkedIn together to double check who the current person is, and at a station the digital director is usually the best contact.

We won't promise a Union-Tribune feature or a TV segment, and we don't sell paid placements dressed up as news.

California publications get hit up all the time, so they ignore a lot of pitches. The Sunbelt states, Texas, Florida and Arizona, are usually more growth oriented, and its press likes the growth story. Florida and Texas really want to be the largest states or the best states in the US, so they're gunning for it. So we never plan a San Diego company's year around San Diego press alone. States really do care most about what's happening in their own state, whether it's state-level media or metro regional media. Some states are very receptive and some don't care, so we go with the reality of the situation and serve the demand.