Get Featured in Houston Press

Most small newsrooms cannot answer every email, let alone report every story offered to them. A cold pitch to Houston Press competes with everything else happening in the community that week, and many of those pitches never get a reply. With a guaranteed placement, the outlet is confirmed first, you approve every word, and the article publishes on houstonpress.com inside the window written into your scope, 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 Houston Press covers

Think of Houston Press as a record of its community. As a local news publication in Texas, it belongs to a category that reports on public meetings and local decisions, businesses arriving and expanding, school and sports results, cultural events, and residents doing something worth noting. Stories are chosen for their connection to the place and to the people who live there.

Local publications favor concrete detail over big claims. Where is it, when does it open, who runs it, what does it mean for the neighborhood. A story that answers those questions plainly reads like news. That applies equally to a family business, a medical or legal practice, a charity, a festival or a company arriving from elsewhere, and it is the standard a feature should meet.

Who reads Houston Press

Who reads local news in Texas? Residents who want to keep up with their community, owners watching the local market, professionals looking for referrals and partners, and newcomers learning the area. Houston Press writes for that readership. Its audience is defined by location, which means a story there reaches people who can actually visit, call, book or attend.

For a local business or practice, that makes a Houston Press feature a way to be seen by the people most likely to become customers, clients or patients. It is also a credential you can show: local news coverage tells prospects, partners, lenders and landlords that your work is known in the community you serve.

Why coverage in Texas matters

Coverage in Houston Press reaches people who live and work in Texas, 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 Texas 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 Texas, and leaders of community organizations. Regional chains and out-of-state firms expanding into Texas 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.