Four articles in, the press stopped working
The first article moved a deal. The second, a hiring spike. The third, nothing. By the fourth, you were planning the company around press cycles.
How many of your last six months of decisions were shaped by whether they'd make a good story? Keep the number in mind. It's the cleanest test of whether you've started working for the press instead of the other way around.
The first big article did 3 things at once. It pushed a stalled deal across the line, pulled in a senior hire who'd been sitting on the fence, and gave the company a credibility bump that carried through months of fundraising talks. The founder drew the obvious lesson. Press works. So they invested in more of it.
The second article, a year later, did a smaller version of the same. A little recruiting lift, a few fundraising mentions, some inbound curiosity. The third moved almost nothing you could measure. The fourth produced a short social flurry and no business at all. By then the founder was building the company's calendar around press-ready moments. Product announcements timed to publication windows. Executive interviews slotted to line up with content calendars. Real decisions filtered through whether they'd make a clean story.
The company was now tuned for coverage instead of outcomes. No single trade looked bad. Each press decision was small on its own. In aggregate, meaningful work kept getting bumped for announcement-ready work, and the press had stopped delivering the returns it threw off in year two. Early success had trained the founder to keep feeding a channel whose payoff was already collapsing.
The decay is predictable, and almost nobody plans for it. The first major feature in a publication is genuine news. Everything after is an increment on a story that outlet has already told. Readers and buyers calibrate to your category coverage. The third piece doesn't surprise them. The fourth is wallpaper.
The time math is worse than it looks. A single feature can eat a founder's week in pieces: interviews, fact-checks, a photo shoot, the follow-on content. Stack a quarter of that and you've spent real senior-leadership time that never got costed against what those hours could have produced in customer calls or hiring. It's the same blind spot behind marketing spend with no attribution and the conference booth that produced one deal: effort that's loud internally and silent on the outcomes.
The cleaner frame is press as a byproduct, not a driver. Companies doing real work, shipping things customers want, hiring well, closing meaningful deals, throw off press-worthy moments on their own. In that version the coverage is downstream of the company, not the target it aims at.
So make press reactive on purpose. Do the operational work. When a genuine moment shows up, respond to the inbound interest it creates. Don't go hunting coverage on your own schedule. The press is downstream of the company you build. Build the company.