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By Brooklynn Loiselle, Account Coordinator

If you were offered one golden egg or 100 normal eggs, which would you take? While having 100 eggs may provide you with plenty of meals, you’ll likely pick the golden egg because unlike the typical egg, which most people have, a golden egg is rare and valuable.

We hear the phrase “quality over quantity” a lot in life, from friendships to memories and even with the time we spend with others. While it’s often associated with our personal lives, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this common phrase can also be applied to the type of coverage we secure for our clients as PR professionals.

Because let’s face it — The New York Times is different from a small publication that syndicates almost every piece of news it receives.

National publications like The New York Times are selective in their coverage. They only pick the most enticing and important news to cover and, in turn, elevate the story to a national platform. Additionally, The New York Times is trustworthy; a Statista report from 2020 recently found that only 15% of people seriously doubt the credibility of The New York Times.

TechNews logoJust as we want to create quality friendships in life, we also want to earn quality coverage for our clients — which is why a platform like TechNews is such a powerful tool in B2B tech PR.

TechNews is an online index of tech coverage that provides advanced search possibilities from coverage to journalists, helping PR professionals secure the best possible storytelling coverage for the client.

We all know how outdated those author bios can be, and when creating TechNews, founder Travis Van recognized that most earned media service providers did not offer all the necessary information to make an informed pitch.

Because Travis studied journalism in college but started his career in PR, he knew what both the PR professional and the journalist needed to be successful at their jobs and drew up his idea for TechNews on the back of a napkin. After many trials, including the death of the company’s cofounder, Travis was able to turn his napkin doodle into a successful business.

In February 2021, Travis gave The Hoffman Agency a virtual training on how to use his platform’s advanced search abilities. He showed us how we can stack up against our competition with the ultimate goal of securing the most quality coverage for our clients.

TechNews gives the user various capabilities, including:

  • Coverage tracking
  • Media lists
  • Share of Voice (SOV) charts
  • Weekly email roundups
  • Events
  • Award submissions — occasionally

And while we cannot walk you through all its helpful features, we have decided to call out a few that our agency uses the most frequently: coverage tracking, topics and share of voice.

TechNews’ website has a fairly streamlined look. However, by simply searching for a term, reporter or publication, your searches significantly advance and allow you to find the top targets of interest. We’ll use the search term “IoT” to illustrate:
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At first glance, you can see the reporters who most commonly cover this topic, the outlets that cover this topic and a list of coverage. The coverage can be sorted by date, name and even influence — aka our top-tier publications. With these capabilities, PR professionals can easily find those key reporters and publications for their subject.

If the user already knows the journalist or publication they’d like to target, they can also type the name in the search bar, select it and then search within that publication or journalist’s coverage for a particular topic. This feature can help you determine a journalist or publication’s relevancy.

Historically, monitoring for coverage like this is rather time-consuming, but with TechNews’ “Topics” feature users can save their common search queries and can easily access news about clients, competitors, executives, trends, technology and more, all in one place.
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Above, you can see a main topic of AWS — in this case, the client. On the right is a list of AWS’s most recent coverage, and on the left are other subtopics related to AWS, including competitors like Azure and trends like hybrid cloud. By clicking on each subtopic, you can see its most recent coverage. This feature makes coverage tracking simple because it remembers research terms for you — allowing you to quickly click and skim through all recent coverage and identify key target pubs and journalists.

But TechNews allows you to do more than just coverage tracking. It also allows you to compare your client’s coverage to competitors through its “Charts” function.
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With SOV Charts, you can directly compare how your client’s coverage is stacking up with its competitors. In the above example, we can see that LG owns most of this market.

While the chart is helpful to determine what share of the coverage market you own, the grid on the right can be equally important to help identify journalists and publications that write about your competitors but haven’t talked about you (yet).

Travis let us know that TechNews is working to showcase the most accurate share-of-voice distribution by determining a way to distinguish the quality of this coverage to prioritize features over brief mentions.

While SOV Charts and coverage tracking are just a few of TechNews’ features, they play greatly into our role as PR professionals. It is our job to find the best opportunities to share our clients’ stories, and with TechNews, you might even find yourself in possession of a golden egg.


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