Get Featured in St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Most small newsrooms cannot answer every email, let alone report every story offered to them. A cold pitch to St. Louis Post-Dispatch competes with everything else happening in the community that week, and many of those pitches never get a reply. A guaranteed placement works differently: it is arranged with the publication before any writing starts, you sign off on the draft, and it goes live on stltoday.com within a window stated in writing, usually one week. It is a real article on the site that you can put in a proposal, a deck or a profile.

What St. Louis Post-Dispatch covers

Think of St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a record of its community. As a local news publication in Missouri, 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.

The tone of local news is direct and practical. Readers want to know what is opening, what is changing, who is behind it and how it affects them. That makes room for stories about a business reaching a milestone, a professional bringing a new service to the area, a nonprofit meeting a need, an event worth attending, or a resident with an achievement the community would want to hear about.

Who reads St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Who reads local news in Missouri? 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. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 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.

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.

What local coverage in Missouri does for you

Local trust is built close to home. When St. Louis Post-Dispatch covers a company, readers in Missouri see it in a setting they know, alongside news about their own communities. That context helps with customers who prefer to buy nearby, with partners who want to work with established local names, and with anyone in Missouri who checks your background before reaching out.

Demand comes mostly from businesses with a physical presence in Missouri: shops, clinics, firms, studios and venues that want more people nearby to know them. It also comes from entrepreneurs raising their profile ahead of a local launch, and from companies headquartered elsewhere that are hiring or opening in Missouri.

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.

Before drafting, we identify the strongest of the angles below. Owners often overlook the story behind the business, such as why they started or whom they serve, and it is frequently the one readers remember.

What weakens a pitch

• Nothing new. A local story needs a reason to run now, such as a date, a change, an event or a recent result.
• Missing details. Without a location, a description of what you do and a clear timeline, a feature reads as generic and local readers move on.
• Claims that cannot be supported. Local readers know the area and will notice exaggeration, and we only write what is accurate.
• A story with no people in it. Community news is about neighbors, so a feature needs an owner, a team or a client perspective.