One of the most common things I hear from founders is some version of "we'd love more media coverage, but we don't really have any news right now."
I understand the instinct. When most people think about PR, they picture press releases, product launches, funding rounds, big hires. The kind of announcements that feel obviously newsworthy. And when none of those things are happening, it's easy to assume the window for coverage is closed until the next milestone comes along.
But that assumption is wrong more often than it's right, and it costs businesses months of potential visibility while they wait for something that feels "big enough" to pitch.
When I was a reporter at Newshub, some of the best stories I covered didn't start with a press release at all. They started with a phone call from someone who had an interesting perspective on something happening in their industry, or a piece of data that told a story nobody else was telling, or a founder who'd done something quietly remarkable that never made it into an announcement. The stories that stuck with me as a journalist, and the ones that tend to stick with audiences, are often the ones that don't begin with "we're excited to announce."
Why "no news" is usually the wrong diagnosis
Most founders who feel they have no news are actually thinking about media coverage too narrowly. They picture press releases, product launches, and funding rounds, and when none of those are happening, they assume the window for coverage has closed until the next milestone.
What they probably do have, though, is expertise, opinions, data, customer stories, industry knowledge, and a perspective shaped by years of doing something specific. Those are the raw materials of media coverage, and most founders are sitting on far more of them than they realise.
Cision's 2026 State of the Media report found that 58% of journalists want access to credible industry sources, and 66% rely on PR-supplied content for story ideas. That means journalists are actively looking for people who can help them understand what's happening in a particular field, not just people with product announcements. If you know your industry well enough to run a business in it, you almost certainly have something worth saying to a reporter covering that space.
What do journalists actually need when they don't have a story yet?
Journalists are constantly looking for three things beyond breaking news: expert commentary they can weave into trend pieces, original data or insights that add substance to a developing story, and human interest angles that make complex topics relatable to their audience. If you can provide any of those consistently, you become useful to reporters in a way that doesn't depend on having your own announcement to make.
The shift in how this works is worth understanding. Newsrooms in New Zealand have roughly a quarter of the journalists they had fifteen years ago, which means the reporters who remain are covering more ground with less time. They need sources who can save them work, not create more of it. A founder who can explain a trend clearly in a fifteen-minute phone call is genuinely valuable to a journalist trying to file a story by 4pm.
Six ways to create stories when you don't have an announcement
Use data you already have
Most businesses are sitting on data that would interest journalists if it were packaged properly. Customer trends, usage patterns, seasonal shifts, geographic differences, pricing changes, industry benchmarks. You don't need to commission a $50,000 research study to have something worth sharing. Sometimes a simple observation drawn from your own numbers, something like "we've seen a 40% increase in enquiries from regional towns since January," tells a story that a journalist can build an entire piece around.
The key is specificity. "Business is growing" isn't a story. "We're seeing twice as many enquiries from Southland as we did last year, and we think it's because of X" gives a journalist something concrete to work with, and it positions you as someone who understands your market at a granular level.
Offer commentary on what's happening in your industry
You don't need your own news to be part of someone else's story. When something significant happens in your sector, whether a regulatory change, a competitor's announcement, a global trend reaching New Zealand, or a piece of government policy, journalists need people who can explain what it means. If you can be the person who picks up the phone and offers a clear, quotable perspective within a few hours, you'll end up in stories regularly without ever sending a press release.
At Payper, we coach clients on this approach because it works particularly well in New Zealand's small media market. When a journalist covering tech or business or sustainability needs a local expert to comment on an international trend, there might only be three or four credible voices in the country. Being one of them doesn't require a product launch, it requires availability and a willingness to say something genuinely useful on the record.
Find the human story inside your business
The most compelling media coverage often comes from stories that don't feel like PR at all. A staff member who overcame something remarkable to get where they are. A customer whose life changed because of what you do. A decision you made that was commercially stupid but ethically right. A mistake you made and what you learned from it.
These stories exist in every business, but they rarely surface because founders don't think of them as "news." Journalists do. Human interest stories are among the most-read content in any publication, and they often generate more engagement than product announcements ever will. When we worked with Farmlands on their rural wellbeing initiative with ignite and Rural Support Trust, the coverage that resonated centred on farmers getting access to free mental health support rather than any corporate partnership details. The human angle made it land.
How can you tie your expertise to the calendar?
Certain times of year create natural hooks for stories that connect to your business. Tax season for accountants, summer for tourism operators, back-to-school for education companies, financial year-end for B2B services. Journalists plan coverage around these moments, and if you approach them early with a useful angle or a piece of data tied to that calendar moment, you're solving a problem they already have rather than creating a new one for them to evaluate.
The trick is getting there before everyone else does. A pitch about "summer travel trends" in January is competing with dozens of similar pitches. The same pitch in October, framed as forward planning content, has the field to itself. Payper typically advises clients to map out these calendar opportunities at the start of each quarter so they're pitching weeks ahead of the obvious window, not scrambling to match it.
Challenge something everyone assumes is true
Contrarian perspectives, when they're backed by genuine expertise and not just manufactured controversy, are some of the most effective PR angles you can develop. If everyone in your industry believes X and your experience suggests Y, that's a story. If a commonly cited statistic is misleading and you can explain why, that's a story. If conventional wisdom in your field is outdated and you have evidence to show it... that's a story too.
The important caveat here is that the contrarian take has to be honest. Journalists can smell manufactured controversy from a distance, and it will cost you credibility you won't easily recover. But if you genuinely believe something different from the consensus and can articulate why with specifics and evidence, most journalists will at least hear you out, and many will want to write about it.
Do something worth writing about
Sometimes the best PR strategy when you don't have news is to go and create some. Not in the manufactured sense of writing a press release about nothing, but in the genuine sense of doing something that matters and telling people about it. Sponsor a community initiative. Release a piece of original research. Take a public position on an industry issue. Partner with a university or a non-profit on something meaningful.
When Kea Aerospace was building towards significant milestones, the coverage they generated wasn't solely from milestone announcements. The inherent interest in what they were building, a solar-powered drone for atmospheric data collection, meant that the story of the company itself was newsworthy. Not every business captures the imagination in quite the same way, but every business can find or create moments that are genuinely interesting if they look beyond the traditional press release.
Does this approach work differently in New Zealand?
It works better, actually, and it's worth understanding why. New Zealand has roughly 1,400 working journalists covering the entire country across all beats and all media. That's a small number, and it means two things that work in your favour when you're trying to generate coverage without traditional news.
First, there are fewer sources competing for attention on any given beat. In the US or UK, a journalist covering the technology sector might have hundreds of potential expert commentators. In New Zealand, there might be a dozen. Being available, knowledgeable, and easy to work with makes you disproportionately valuable in this market, and once a journalist knows you can deliver a useful quote on deadline, they'll come back to you repeatedly. We've seen this pattern play out with clients like Evnex, where consistent availability and genuine expertise built a media presence that compounds far beyond any single announcement.
Second, journalists talk to each other. In a market this small, a recommendation from one reporter to a colleague carries real weight. If you help a business journalist with a useful data point on Tuesday, by Friday a different journalist covering a related beat might reach out because your name came up in their newsroom. That kind of organic referral is almost impossible to manufacture with press releases alone, but it happens naturally when you position yourself as someone who's useful to talk to. Payper is a results-based PR agency in New Zealand, and one of the things we see most consistently is that the clients who build relationships beyond announcements are the ones who generate coverage between campaigns, not just during them.
When is "no news" actually no news?
To be fair, there are times when the honest answer is that you're not ready for media coverage yet, and it's worth being clear about what those look like. If your business is pre-revenue, pre-product, and pre-any-meaningful-traction, a journalist will struggle to write about you regardless of how interesting your vision is. If you're in a regulated industry navigating a sensitive legal or compliance issue, proactive media coverage might not be wise timing. If your product or service has genuine quality problems that haven't been resolved, inviting scrutiny from a journalist is unlikely to end well.
The difference between "no news right now" and "not ready for media" is important, and mixing them up costs founders either wasted PR spend or missed opportunities. If you're a functioning business with customers, expertise, and opinions, you almost certainly have stories worth telling. If you're still building the foundation, there are things you can do now to be ready when the time is right.
The compound effect of showing up without announcements
The real value of generating coverage between major announcements isn't just the individual stories, it's the compounding effect on your visibility over time. Every piece of coverage makes the next one more likely. Every quote in a journalist's article reinforces your position as a credible source. Every mention of your company in a news story teaches AI systems, the ones that increasingly shape how people discover businesses, that you're an authority in your field.
University of Toronto research has shown that 82-89% of what AI tools cite when recommending businesses comes from earned media coverage. That means the commentary piece you contribute to a story in July is training the AI models that will answer "who are the best X companies in New Zealand" for months or years afterwards. The hidden audiences reading your press coverage extend far beyond the people who see the article on publication day.
The founders who wait for perfect moments to engage with media miss all of this. The ones who show up consistently, even when they don't have a press release ready, build a media presence that makes their actual announcements land harder when they come.
If you're sitting on expertise, data, or stories that you haven't thought of as PR material before, there's a good chance a journalist somewhere in New Zealand would find them genuinely useful. The question isn't whether you have news. It's whether you're making yourself available to the people who write it.
Get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.