Reporters’ Brains Are Nearly Overflowing – Try Helping vs. Hurting

It’s hard to think of better work advice than be a good human. To that end, we recently set out to create an intensely unscientific look at what fills the mind of a tech journalist in 2022. We hope that this construct will help tech PR practitioners how to conduct media outreach effectively – with the bonus of bringing some relief to the overstuffed minds of reporters. 

Informed by many conversations with tech reporters, this graphic highlights just how little headspace most journalists have “open” for you to fill with story ideas or news. 

If you hope to snag some of the white space, here are two absolutely critical tips:

• Start with that human thing – focus on relationship building over pitching and always be polite and personable. 
• Watch your timing. We very intentionally organized this graphic as a calendar year, in recognition of the fact that reporters’ open time varies greatly based on the time of year. No 12 months are exactly the same, but we see a similar pattern emerge each year. That’s because, like a tide chart, there are some predictable undulations to the tech news cycle. 

Please mouse over the layers on the interactive graphic below and let us know what we got right and what we got wrong. We do feel confident we got one thing right for sure – starting with being a good human will get you far!

And thanks to the FleishmanHillard creative team based in London, Ensemble Studio, who provided the graphic.