Lesson: How to Get Press with Ari Dyckovsky & Catalin Voss

Step #3 Reporter Intros: Connect with reporters and journalists

Catalin: Yeah, I think it was the first but I think it was just something that was in the back of my head. So I think it's good to be aware of your network generally. It's good to be aware of where your friends are, who they know, who you've helped out, who would be likely to help you out, and then when you need it that awareness kicks in, and then you know who to go to.

Yeah, I got an introduction through Steve Capps, a good friend of mine. Somebody the guy had written about before, so it was somebody he had just interviewed two weeks ago, and I said, “Oh, you were in Wired. Can you put me in touch with the reporter?” He said, “Sure.” And then the reporter, of course, back channeled to him because he knew a lot about my biography, asking about me. 

Going through someone like Steve Capps, that's a natural way I would approach anyone if I can is through an introduction. I think that's the best way to get into PR because he was somebody that he had written about before so he was highly regarded by the reporter. To create the time pressure, it just seems like they want to tell news and in classical journalism one of the things that a lot of magazines even online publications are still run essentially like a newspaper. Many people don't realize that, so at 6:30 a.m. the story hit. Therefore, they were on the schedule and they had to get in to this day or that day and I was only getting published to his own section, so he needed some incentive to write about it.

Ari: So when I was in high school I worked on research in the field of quantum physics and with that research I went to a lot on science fairs and different competitions and due to some of my successes, first Caitlin Gibson reached out to me to write a story on one of the competitions that I did very well at. And with that, I got to know her and then later on at another competition, I started talking Cade Metz at Wired and he wrote an article on that.

Over time I’ve just maintained a relationship with both of them and so now with the company that I started, they've been very helpful with getting our first stories out. So for publicity the first person I approached was Caitlin Gibson. When we were about to launch our website I went and talked to her and just updated here with what I was doing with my life and about the company, and she offered to write an article and a story about it and with that, we basically went forward in interviews with her and that's where the first article came from in The Washington Post.

After that, I talked to Cade Metz at Wired and forwarded him the article from The Washington Post, and then he wanted to know more about the technology. Because the first article was more about us as people, and he took that and interviewed us and that's where the article in Wired came from.