The journalists are disappearing.
That's not good news for businesses who want to be believed.
In February, the Washington Post cut one-third of its newsroom — eliminating its sports desk, several foreign bureaus, and hundreds of journalists in a single announcement. In March, CBS News closed its radio service, a near-100-year institution, and cut 6% of its remaining staff. This month, the BBC confirmed plans to eliminate up to 2,000 positions: nearly one in ten of its workforce. In Australia, Nine Entertainment, News Corp, and the ABC have all made significant cuts across the past two years. The pattern is the same everywhere. Newsrooms are smaller than they were five years ago, regional outlets have been hit hardest, and the journalists who remain are covering more beats, more stories, faster, and with less support than at any point in recent memory.
For some businesses, this reads as opportunity. Fewer gatekeepers, the thinking goes. More room to tell your own story. Less competition for attention.
It is the wrong read.
When newsrooms shrink, credibility becomes more concentrated. Fewer journalists means fewer slots, less patience for unfamiliar pitches, and less bandwidth for anything that doesn't make their job immediately easier. The bar for earned media doesn't drop in a contracting media environment. It rises.
The businesses that understand this are the ones that will earn coverage when it matters.
In 2025, I worked with icetana, a Perth-based AI company, on a campaign to announce a A$3.6 million partnership with Japan's SoftBank Robotics.
The challenge wasn't the story. The challenge was the timing. The announcement landed on one of the busiest news days of the year — the kind of day where editors are overwhelmed and inboxes are full. A straightforward press release would have disappeared.
The difference was in how we framed it. The story wasn't "company signs deal." The story was "an Australian AI company is entering one of the most sophisticated technology markets in the world." That framing — the global implications, the innovation angle, the investor consequence — is what journalists in business, technology, and defence media needed to quickly understand the value.
The campaign produced 181 media clips. Coverage included The Australian, SmartCompany, InnovationAus, ABC Perth Breakfast, and syndication to PR Times Japan. The share price rose by up to 169% following coverage. The advertising space rate equivalent came in at approximately $4.8 million.
Those numbers matter. But what produced them was not volume of distribution. It was clarity of story, precision of targeting, and the trust built with journalists over time that made them pick up the phone when we called.
There are three things I have seen consistently separate a pitch that lands from one that doesn't.
The real story is rarely the announcement. Most businesses pitch the announcement. The journalist needs the story behind it — the context, the consequence, the human detail that makes a reader or listener care. With icetana, the announcement was the deal. The story was what it meant for Australian innovation on the global stage. Finding that frame requires asking why it matters, not just what happened. That is journalism thinking. It is not how most businesses are trained to communicate.
A pitch should make a journalist's job easier, not longer. A time-poor journalist receives dozens of pitches each week. The ones that get through are clear, specific, and immediately legible — within thirty seconds, the journalist can see whether this is worth pursuing. That is not about a template. It is about understanding what a journalist actually needs, and most businesses have never been on that side of that conversation.
Trust is built before the story exists. The most reliable path to earned media is a relationship with a journalist that precedes the pitch. Not a transactional one — a genuine one, grounded in the understanding that their credibility is at stake every time they run a story. When that relationship exists, a pitch lands differently.
There is an ethical dimension to this that I want to be direct about.
Stitch does not work with every business that approaches us. That is not about size or budget. It is about whether the story is genuine, whether the business deserves the coverage it is seeking, and whether the communications serves the reader as much as it serves the client.
Journalists have long memories. A source who consistently delivers real stories, pitched honestly, becomes a trusted source. A source who tries to push product dressed up as news does not get a second chance. In a newsroom under pressure, the threshold for trust is even higher.
The media landscape is getting harder. Regional newsrooms in particular are under real strain. That is not a reason to lower the standard of what gets pitched into them.
It is a reason to raise it.
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If you're preparing for an announcement and want to think through what the real story is before you go anywhere near a journalist, that's exactly what The Breakthrough Brief is designed for.
We’d love to hear from you.
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