How To Pitch Stories to Crunchbase News with Christine Hall

Crunchbase is a database with curated business information about private and public companies. Their service tracks investments and funding information, founding members and individuals in leadership positions, mergers, and acquisitions.

Crunchbase News covers startups and companies in the private sector. Their news coverage puts your company in front of investors and media reporters, making them a desirable outlet for many PR firms breaking news about startups getting funded.

Crunchbase News is owned by Crunchbase, but the company does not exert any editorial control or influence over the newsroom or coverage decisions. If you're curious about what it takes to get your news considered for coverage, listen to this podcast.

The Crunchbase research team does, from time to time, assist in pulling more intractable queries from the dataset to aid in our data-driven reporting. Christine Hall, writes for Crunchbase News and in this interview, she shares about what she covers and how best to pitch her story ideas.

“We’re all about data-driven journalism,” she says. “You know, basically tapping into the Crunchbase database to round out our typical funding announcements and feature stories.” Crunchbase News currently has five writers, each with a different editorial focus. Christine, covers financial services, ecommerce, healthcare, agriculture, and food tech.

Given the number of companies out there, how does Crunchbase News figure out what deals to cover? “It comes down to whether it’s interesting,” Christine says. “Is it something really disrupting in that industry? It’s doesn't necessarily need to be a big number, because I’ve covered funding as low as $1 million seed rounds. It’s just a matter of our personal likes, and if it’s something that will make for a good story.” But $1 million is usually the minimum amount of funding required to get featured on the site.

In order to increase their reach, Crunchbase News has a daily newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers, as well as a new section called the Briefing, where they run the breaking news items. For Christine, a successful story has a good narrative behind it. While it doesn’t necessarily have to be about the founder’s background, it needs to have some “color.” Unsuccessful stories are the ones that are boring to write. .

Christine alone receives at least 50 pitches per day. The good ones are those announcing new rounds of venture capital. Around half of the pitches she receives are not newsworthy. So it doesn't really matter what a PR firm does when they pitch. If it isn't a funding deal, it's not a fit.

Crunchbase News is relatively unique in their coverage, but they do compete against Venture Beat, Tech Crunch, Axios, Fortune, Forbes, and The Information. Crunchbase News is a subscriber benefit so this outlet is not ad-supported.

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