Get Featured in The Baltimore Sun

Local reporters have to choose from a long list of community stories every week, and a business announcement rarely tops that list. Getting The Baltimore Sun to cover your opening, milestone or project on your own usually means repeated pitching and a lot of waiting. A guaranteed placement removes that uncertainty: the piece is arranged with the publication in advance, you approve the draft, and it publishes on baltimoresun.com inside a written window, usually three to five days. It is a real article on the site that you can put in a proposal, a deck or a profile.

What The Baltimore Sun covers

Every community has stories that never reach a national outlet: a new clinic, a restaurant changing hands, a nonprofit campaign, a planning decision, a team’s season. Local news publications exist to report them. The Baltimore Sun is one such publication, serving readers in Maryland, and its coverage, published at baltimoresun.com, is built around what is happening in its own area and who is involved.

Because the audience is nearby, usefulness counts. Coverage that tells readers something they can act on, such as a service now available, an event to attend, a cause to support or a business to try, fits local news well. So do stories of local people: owners, practitioners, organizers, authors and artists whose work has a clear tie to the community and a reason to be told now.

Who reads The Baltimore Sun

For most organizations with a local customer base, the people who matter most live within driving distance. Those are the readers a publication like The Baltimore Sun serves in Maryland: residents, families, professionals, owners and community groups who follow local news to stay informed about the place they call home and the businesses and people in it.

Recognition close to home is often worth more than attention far away. A feature in a local publication gives an owner, a professional or an organizer something concrete to share with customers, donors, members and referral sources. It also gives people who look up your name a news story from your own market to find.

Reaching readers and customers in Maryland

Coverage in The Baltimore Sun reaches people who live and work in Maryland, which is where most local buying decisions are made. Readers tend to give more weight to a business they have seen in a publication from their own area. When a customer, landlord or potential partner in Maryland looks up your name, a local feature gives them something familiar and credible to find.

Typical clients include owners of family businesses, founders of growing local companies, authors and speakers with roots in Maryland, and leaders of community organizations. Regional chains and out-of-state firms expanding into Maryland also seek local coverage so that their arrival is explained in a publication residents already read.

The question every local reader asks is simple: what does this have to do with here? A good feature answers it in the first lines. That can be an address, a hometown, a local client base, a community project or a new service for residents. Everything else in the story builds on that connection.

The angles below are where we begin. One clear angle, backed by real details about your work in the community, makes a better local story than a list of everything you offer.

What weakens a pitch

• No local connection. If the story could run unchanged in any town, readers of a community publication have little reason to stop on it.
• Sales copy presented as news. Readers come for information about their community, so a list of offers and slogans reads as out of place.
• Vague claims. “Best in the area” and “top-rated” mean little without something a reader can verify, and everything we write must be true.
• Too many messages. One opening, one milestone or one person, told clearly, is stronger than a tour of every service you provide.