Public Relations

Corey HainesCommunityCreated by Corey Haines

Skill
Workflow
Business and productivity
MIT
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From the author

When the user wants help with public relations, earned media, press coverage, journalist outreach, or media strategy (not pull requests). Also use when the user mentions 'PR,' 'press,' 'press release,' 'media outreach,' 'pitch a journalist,' 'get featured,' 'media list,' 'media kit,' 'press kit,' 'newsjacking,' 'news hijack,' 'HARO,' 'Qwoted,' 'Featured,' 'reporter request,' 'tech press,' 'TechCrunch,' 'thought leadership placement,' 'op-ed,' 'guest article,' 'press contacts,' 'podcast prep,' 'podcast guest,' 'prep me for this podcast,' 'how do I get press,' 'PR crisis,' 'crisis communications,' 'respond to backlash,' 'we got hacked,' 'data breach statement,' or 'holding statement.' Also covers crisis response when something goes wrong. For startup/SaaS/AI directory submissions, see directory-submissions. For product launches, see launch. For social-media engagement, see social. For cold-email outreach to prospects, see cold-email.

— the description by Corey Haines

AutoGineer summary

Written by AutoGineer from the skill’s own files, not by the author

This skill provides a structured approach to public relations for software products, focusing on earned media as a multiplier for distribution rather than a primary conversion driver. It covers the full lifecycle of PR, from proactive pitching and newsjacking to inbound media requests and crisis management. The skill emphasizes building authentic relationships with journalists, crafting data-driven stories, and maintaining a professional media presence through owned assets like press pages and media kits.

What it does

Guides users through proactive journalist pitching and media list building.
Provides frameworks for reactive PR, including newsjacking and responding to media inquiries.
Offers templates and playbooks for crisis communications and incident response.
Defines best practices for creating and maintaining a company press page and media kit.
Outlines strategies for podcast guest preparation and thought leadership placement.
Establishes a quality bar for pitches to ensure relevance and effectiveness.

When to use it

When you have a compelling story, such as proprietary data, a unique opinion, or a significant milestone.
When you need to respond to a PR crisis, data breach, or negative public feedback.
When you want to build long-term media relationships and brand authority.
When you are preparing for a podcast appearance or an op-ed submission.
When you need to set up foundational PR assets like a press page or media kit.

Advantages

Focuses on high-impact, sustainable PR strategies rather than vanity metrics.
Provides actionable templates for various PR scenarios, reducing drafting time.
Includes specific guidance for crisis management to minimize reputational damage.
Emphasizes the importance of journalist-centric pitching to increase response rates.
Integrates PR into the broader marketing and distribution strategy.

Usage examples

“I have a new data set about AI adoption in finance. How do I pitch this to a journalist?”: The agent will guide you to the data story template, help you identify relevant journalists who cover fintech, and advise on how to structure the pitch to highlight the most interesting patterns.
“We just had a minor service outage and users are complaining on social media. What should I do?”: The agent will help you assess the severity tier, draft a holding statement, and provide a checklist for the first 60 minutes of crisis response.
“How do I build a media list for my SaaS product?”: The agent will provide a discovery checklist, suggest methods for finding relevant journalists, and explain how to score them based on beat match and reach.
“I'm going to be a guest on a popular tech podcast next week. How should I prepare?”: The agent will walk you through researching the host and show, mapping your core stories to their recurring themes, and creating a brief to ensure your appearance is impactful.

Install

Download the skill as a ZIP:
https://autogineer.com/agent-skills/coreyhaines31/public-relations/download

Unzip it into the cross-client skills folder of your project:

mkdir -p .agents/skills && unzip public-relations.zip -d .agents/skills

Documentation by Corey Haines

Public Relations & Earned Media

You are an expert in earned media for software products. Your goal is to help the user get covered by journalists, podcasts, and newsletters — efficiently, with respect for the people on the other end of the pitch.

Before Starting

Check for product marketing context first: If .agents/product-marketing.md exists (or .claude/product-marketing.md, or the legacy product-marketing-context.md filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Core Philosophy

PR is not a substitute for distribution. It's a multiplier for it.

Earned media doesn't drive direct conversions. A TechCrunch hit will not give you 1,000 paying customers. It will give you backlinks, brand legitimacy, AI-citation surface area, and ammo for sales conversations.
Pitch journalists like you'd pitch a customer: specific, useful, fast, and never about you.
The story is not your product. The story is the trend, the data, the conflict, or the human. Your product is the evidence. Every pitchable story bends toward one of three angles — Founding Story, David vs Goliath, or Have an Enemy (a broken system, never a competitor). See references/story-angles.md.
Chase press for the compound effect, not the traffic bump. The bump fades in a day; authority, journalist relationships, and AI-citation surface compound. Build media relationships before you need them, and run one core asset through the whole repurposing flywheel.
Speed beats polish on reactive PR. A B+ pitch in the first hour of a story beats an A+ pitch on day three.

When PR is worth it

You have a real story — proprietary data, a strong opinion, a milestone, a customer with a sharp before/after, or a fresh angle on a trending topic
You have founder/exec time — journalists want quotes from people with skin in the game, not from a PR rep
You have a destination — a press page, blog post, or product launch that converts attention into something useful

When to skip PR (for now)

Pre-launch with no story beyond "we exist"
No one on the team can sustain pitching for 4–6 weeks (PR is a momentum game)
You don't have a clear ICP — journalists ask "who reads my piece because of this?" and if you can't answer, neither can they

The PR Mix

Four modes. Most teams over-index on one. Run at least three.

Mode	What it is	Effort	Speed to coverage
Reactive (newsjacking)	Inject your POV into trending news	Low–medium	Hours to days
Proactive (pitching)	Build a media list, pitch original stories	High	2–8 weeks
Inbound (press requests)	Respond to journalist queries on HARO/Qwoted/Featured	Low	Days to weeks
Owned (press page + media kit)	Make it easy for journalists to find you	One-time setup	N/A

For the story angle taxonomy (Founding Story / David vs Goliath / Have an Enemy), data stories, media relationship-building, and the PR repurposing flywheel — see references/story-angles.md

For the reactive newsjacking workflow — see references/newsjacking.md

For proactive journalist pitching — see references/journalist-pitching.md

For inbound press-request platforms (HARO, Qwoted, etc.) — see references/press-platforms.md

For where to pitch (media outlets, podcasts, newsletters) — see references/media-outlets.md. For startup/SaaS/AI directories, use the separate directory-submissions skill — different intent, different list.

For prepping a podcast appearance you've landed — see references/podcast-guest-prep.md. Episodes get transcribed and cited by AI assistants, so a good appearance compounds in AI answers for years — prep is an AI-visibility play, not just interview polish.

When Something Goes Wrong

PR also has a reactive side: breaches, outages, viral complaints, executive controversies. The story is already running, so the goal shifts from earning coverage to responding fast and accurately.

Start by assigning a severity tier, then run the first-60-minutes checklist: confirm facts, designate one spokesperson, publish a holding statement, set the next update time. For a data breach, injury, lawsuit, or regulator, loop in legal counsel before admitting fault or publishing.

For severity tiers, channel order, and playbooks by crisis type — see references/crisis-communications.md

For holding, breach, outage, apology, billing-error, and postmortem templates — see references/statement-templates.md

Owned: Press Page + Media Kit

Set this up once. It's the cheapest PR investment with the highest ROI on every future story.

Press page (/press or /newsroom) should include:

One-paragraph company description (copy/paste ready)
Founder bios with headshots (high-res, downloadable)
Logo pack (SVG + PNG, light + dark, with usage guidelines)
Product screenshots (high-res)
Recent coverage list (social proof for the next journalist)
Founding date, employee count, funding (if disclosed)
Press contact email (not a form — journalists hate forms)
Recent press releases / announcements

One sentence at the top: "For interview requests or assets, email [email protected] — we respond within 24 hours."

Then actually respond within 24 hours.

Quick Reference: Pitch Quality Bar

Before sending any pitch, the answer to all of these should be yes:

[ ] Does this journalist cover this beat? (Check their last 5 articles.)
[ ] Is there a clear news hook — something that just happened or is about to?
[ ] Could this journalist write a complete story from this email alone? (Data, quotes, customer name, contact.)
[ ] Is the subject line specific enough to predict the article's headline?
[ ] Is the pitch under 150 words?
[ ] Did you avoid the words "revolutionary," "game-changing," "disruptive," and "synergy"?
[ ] Is the ask clear? (Interview? Embargo? Exclusive? Quote?)

If any answer is no, don't send.

Measurement

What to track:

Metric	Why
Coverage count (placements / month)	Activity baseline
Domain rating of placements	Backlink value
Referral traffic from coverage	Did anyone actually click?
Brand search lift	Did people search you after reading?
AI citation rate (ChatGPT, Perplexity quote your brand?)	The new measurement that matters
Sales conversations citing the article	The only one that matters for revenue

What not to obsess over: AVE (advertising value equivalency) — it's a vanity metric PR firms invented.

Common Workflows

Go to newsjacking.md, run the scoring rubric, draft 2–3 angles, pick the best, draft the pitch.

"Find journalists who cover [beat]"

Go to journalist-pitching.md, use the discovery checklist + dev-browser to research recent articles, build a scored list.

"What's worth pitching this week?"

Combine: recent product milestones + active news cycles + any data you've collected. Score each potential story by the quality bar above.

"What's my story angle?" / "How do I get press with no news?"

Go to story-angles.md. Fit the situation to one of the three angles (Founding Story / David vs Goliath / Have an Enemy), or turn proprietary data into a data story. Remember: a milestone alone isn't a story — milestone with narrative is.

"Respond to this HARO query"

Go to press-platforms.md, use the response template, keep it under 200 words.

"I'm going on [podcast] next week — help me prep"

Go to podcast-guest-prep.md: research the show (RSS feed → site → Apple Podcasts → web), extract the recurring threads and host profiles, map the guest's stories onto them, deliver the brief.

"Build my press page"

Use the checklist above. Most companies do this in an afternoon and forget about it for a year — that's fine.

"Get us more backlinks"

PR earns the highest-ceiling links but takes the most effort. For reclamation, partner pages, best-X lists, and the rest of a link program, use the link-building skill and treat PR as one of its tactics.

Files

ATTRIBUTION.mdAdded by AutoGineer893 B
LICENSELicence file added by AutoGineer1.0 KiB
SKILL.md9.6 KiB
evals/evals.json3.7 KiB
references/crisis-communications.md8.4 KiB
references/journalist-pitching.md10.8 KiB
references/media-outlets.md9.1 KiB
references/newsjacking.md8.4 KiB
references/podcast-guest-prep.md5.5 KiB
references/press-platforms.md6.7 KiB
references/statement-templates.md5.5 KiB
references/story-angles.md6.4 KiB

references/story-angles.md

Story Angles — What Earns Press

Distilled from Corey Haines's Founding Marketing, ch. 5. Chase press for the compound effect — authority, journalist relationships, AI-citation surface — not the traffic bump. The bump fades in a day; the backlinks, the relationships, and the citable record don't.

The story is not your product. Journalists write about trends, data, conflict, and humans. Your product is the evidence, never the headline. If the pitch is "we built a thing," there's no story. If the pitch is "here's a shift happening and we're proof of it," there is.

The three story angles
Newsworthy moments (data stories)
Build media relationships before you need them
The PR flywheel (repurposing map)

The Three Story Angles

Every earned-media story worth pitching bends toward one of three shapes. Pick the one that fits your moment — don't force all three.

1. Founding Story

The origin, the build, the numbers-in-public. Works because people follow people, and a founder with skin in the game is quotable in a way a product never is.

When to use: you're early, you have a sharp personal reason you exist, and you're willing to build in public and share real revenue.
Exemplar: Pieter Levels' "12 startups in 12 months" — shipping in the open, posting MRR screenshots, letting the challenge itself be the story. The build was the coverage.
How to run it: share the arc (why you started, what you've learned, where the numbers are now), not the feature list. Revenue transparency is the hook most founders are too scared to use.

2. David vs Goliath

Own your size. Being small against an incumbent is an advantage in the story, not a liability — you're the underdog readers root for.

When to use: there's a giant in your category and you do one thing dramatically better than they do.
Exemplar: Superhuman vs Gmail — a tiny team reframing "we're small" into "we're the fast, obsessive alternative to the default everyone tolerates."
How to run it: name the Goliath, name the one thing you beat them at, and let the size gap do the emotional work. Don't hide that you're small — lead with it.

3. Have an Enemy

Give the reader something to be against. The enemy is a broken system, not a competitor. Attacking a rival looks petty; attacking a genuinely broken status quo looks principled — and journalists cover principled fights.

When to use: there's a systemic wrong in your space you can credibly stand against, and you're willing to take a real position.
Exemplar: HEY vs Apple's App Store (2020) — the fight wasn't "Basecamp vs Apple the company," it was against App Store rules founders saw as broken. It became a press cycle and a policy conversation.
How to run it: define the broken system precisely, stake a clear position, and make sure you're actually willing to be quoted taking that stance. A half-hearted enemy reads as a marketing stunt.

Guardrail: the enemy must be a system or a norm — never a named competitor. "Company X is bad" is a smear; "this way of doing things is broken" is a movement.

Newsworthy Moments: Data Stories

Beyond the three angles, the most reliably pitchable moment is a data story — proprietary numbers no one else has, packaged as an industry benchmark. Journalists can build a whole piece around a stat; you get the citation.

Exemplars: Stripe's State of New User / annual data reports; Intercom's benchmark reports. Each turns internal data into an annual, citable, must-cover event.
Why it works: it's original, it's quotable, and it positions you as the source-of-record for your category's numbers. It also compounds in AI answers — benchmark stats get lifted and re-cited for years.
How to run it: find the one number in your data that surprises, wrap it in methodology, and package it as a standalone one-pager (not your homepage). See journalist-pitching.md → the "Data story" template.

Milestone reminder: a milestone alone ("we hit $1M ARR") isn't a story — milestone with narrative is. Attach the number to a shift, a lesson, or a David-vs-Goliath frame.

Build Media Relationships Before You Need Them

Cold-pitching a journalist the day you have news is the hard way. The founders who get covered built the relationship months earlier. It's a ladder — climb it before you need the favor.

Follow their beat. Read their last 5 articles. Know what they cover and what they're tired of covering. (See the discovery checklist in journalist-pitching.md.)
Add value with no ask. Reply to their work with a genuinely useful data point or correction. Share their pieces. Answer a question they post on X. Give before you take.
Be a reliable source. When they need a quote fast, be the person who responds in 20 minutes with a clean, quotable line — even when there's nothing in it for you. Reliability is what turns a contact into a relationship.

Do this for a handful of journalists on your beat and, when you finally have a real story, you're pitching a relationship, not a stranger.

The PR Flywheel (Repurposing Map)

One core asset feeds every other channel. Don't create five things — create one exceptional thing and reformat it five ways. Each format extends the reach of the same idea and gives journalists more of a public trail to find.

Core asset (data report / strong POV / founding story)
    │
    ├─→ Thread (X / LinkedIn) — the hook, teased publicly
    ├─→ Article (your blog) — the full argument, the destination
    ├─→ Guest post (someone else's audience) — borrow reach
    ├─→ Podcast appearance — the spoken, citable version
    └─→ Video — the durable, AI-crawled version

Sequence matters less than coverage. Publish the article as the owned home base, tease it as a thread, pitch the guest post and podcast off the same idea, cut the video from the recording.
Every format strengthens the next pitch. A journalist who can find your thread, article, and podcast on a topic sees a voice in the space — not an opportunist. This is the public trail that makes newsjacking land (see newsjacking.md → The Public Trail).
The asset is the flywheel's fuel. One strong data story or POV can run this loop for weeks. Weak assets stall it immediately.

Requirements and compatibility

Works with: Claude Code, Claude apps, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Kiro, OpenCode, Goose, Amp, Roo Code, JetBrains Junie, Factory Droid, Devin (ex-Windsurf), Mistral Vibe, OpenHands, Letta

“Works with” means the tool reads the open Agent Skills format; a skill written for one tool may use features others lack.

Security

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Attribution and licence

Created by

Corey Haines

Publisher

Corey Haines (Community)

Source

coreyhaines31/marketingskills · skills/public-relations · commit 96798cf

Licence

MIT License (redistribution allowed)

LICENSE (added by AutoGineer from LICENSE)
ATTRIBUTION.md (written by AutoGineer)

Synced

2026-11-09

AutoGineer is not affiliated with or endorsed by Corey Haines or Corey Haines.

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The ZIP holds the skill’s files, its licence files and an ATTRIBUTION.md. Download public-relations.zip