"Who should we pitch?" is the wrong first question. The right one is "what is the story, exactly?" — because the answer determines everyone you should be talking to. Here is a method you can run for any announcement, in roughly an hour.
Define the story before the search
You cannot match a story to a journalist until you can state the story in one sentence. Vagueness here gets multiplied at every later step.
What's genuinely new here?
Strip the announcement down to the part a stranger would find new or surprising. A funding round is not a story; what the funding makes possible might be. A product launch is not a story; the problem it solves for a specific group of people might be. Write the one new thing down before you do anything else.
Who would care, and why now?
Name the audience that has a reason to care this week, and the reason. "Operations leaders at mid-size logistics firms, because rates just spiked" is a story with a built-in set of relevant beats. "Everyone interested in our company" is not.
Build a shortlist from recent work
With the angle defined, you are looking for writers whose recent output overlaps it — not whose title sounds related.
Read the last 30 days, not the masthead
A reporter's job title tells you what they were hired to cover. Their last month of bylines tells you what they are actually covering. Read the recent work. You are looking for someone circling your topic, your sector, or your specific angle — ideally all three.
Look for the follow-up pattern
Some writers cover a topic once and move on. Others return to the same thread repeatedly, building a beat over weeks. The second kind is far more valuable: if your story extends something they have already invested in, you are handing them their next installment rather than asking them to start cold.
Qualify before you pitch
A name on a shortlist is a hypothesis, not a target. Run two quick tests before you spend a pitch on it.
The relevance test
Can you point to a specific piece of their recent work and finish the sentence "this matters to them because…"? If the best you can do is "they cover the industry," the match is too loose. Keep it for later or cut it.
The reachability test
Is there a credible way to reach this person, and is now a sensible time? A reporter who just published a deep piece on your exact topic may be the perfect match or completely tapped out on it for a month. Judgment matters here; the signal is necessary but not sufficient.
Keep the list alive
The output of this process is not a permanent list — it is a list for this story. Beats move, so the right people for your next announcement will be partly different. Treat discovery as something you re-run, not something you file away. The companies that consistently land coverage are the ones who keep reading, every cycle, and let the shortlist change with the news.