Ever seen an ad on social media that made you wonder, “What on earth was that company thinking?” Or read an email from a charity that made you tear up—and make a donation—in the blink of an eye?
Almost every human on earth is bombarded with thousands of messages per day. Only a few get remembered. There’s an art, and a bit of science, to making yours stick.
A Better Way to Say That explores why some messages work and others don’t. Once a month we’ll dissect the trends, technologies, and Weird Tricks that shape how people are communicating with each other in 2024—and what that means for your organization.
The number of journalists in the US has shrunk by 75 percent since the turn of the century, so there are fewer people to pitch with your Exciting New Story. And the ones who remain are under increasing pressure to write about topics that are already proven—or at least believed by bosses—to produce revenue-generating traffic.
Even this kind of coverage is getting narrower. You’ve probably seen dozens, if not hundreds, of articles about AI this week—but the attention is tightly focused on a handful of companies like OpenAI and Nvidia, not the thousands of startups also working in the industry.
So what’s a press-hungry small or medium organization to do?
A giant company like OpenAI can generate an entire news cycle by releasing a shitty short form video app, simply because OpenAI is the one who released it. Meanwhile, a small tech company that found a viable way to drastically reduce AI’s energy consumption may find its pitches going unanswered due to lack of name recognition.
This is frustrating and unfair. It’s also not something that can be fixed with a cleverer pitch letter. Journalists know that a headline with “OpenAI” equals clicks, and if they want to keep their jobs, they need to keep people clicking.
So if you’re the small tech company, what do you do?
Instead of cursing the injustice of the attention economy (or perhaps in addition to cursing it), you need to find a way to connect your story to the one already being told. And in most cases, you need to be comfortable with playing the role of expert commentator, rather than being the star of the show.
To illustrate: “Small Tech Company Invents Energy-Saving Technology” is unlikely to persuade a journalist they should invest their time and energy in writing about your company. There are simply too many similar claims being made by too many similarly unknown actors (that may or may not be trustworthy).
A pitch along the lines of “OpenAI’s New App Is an Energy Hog” is a much more attractive proposition because:
If you’re a leader of Small Tech Company, the second pitch will likely be less flattering to your ego. But it’s also more likely to earn the media hit you desire.
Because the last word is rarely the end of the conversation.
Much like penguins, we enjoy bringing you little gifts to show we care:
The World Cube Organization is hiring an Executive Officer (fully remote, $80k-120k per year, lots of benefits), and even if you’re not looking for a new job we highly recommend reading the company description.
Think you can guess who a person voted for based on their demographic info and professed beliefs? Take the survey and prepare to be dumbfounded!
The Guardian’s Comedy Wildlife Awards 2025 do not disappoint, unless you’re philosophically opposed to waterskiing loons.
Here’s what one of us is currently reading:
“The quickest way to a man's heart is through the fourth and fifth ribs.”
People cannot live on thousand-page history tomes alone. We love them, but as the holidays close in and my “books I read this year” number looks more and more pathetic, I want to give a shout-out to another important genre:
The “fantasy romance,” or as my friends call it, fairy smut.
Specifically, I’ll direct you to the wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses series, or ACOTAR as it’s known on the internet. These five books check every box (magical powers…strange beasts…hot brooding guy…wait he’s also a bat? okay…plucky heroine…improbable names…historically chaotic setting…) The plot is impeccable, the modern-day lessons are pure, and there’s one book for each of the five “work days” between Christmas and New Years.
Consider this permission from your unboss to throw propriety and caution to the wind this season, and get really obsessed with some slutty fairies.
