What Is Public Relations?
How Earned Media Actually Works

What Public Relations Is and What It Is Not

Public relations is the work of earning attention and trust you did not pay for. When a newspaper runs a story about your expansion, when a trade publication quotes your founder, when a television station shows up at your ribbon cutting, that coverage was earned rather than bought. Advertising is space you rent. PR is credibility someone else lends you.

The distinction matters because the two behave differently. An ad says exactly what you want, when you want, to whom you want, and everyone knows you paid for it. Earned coverage says roughly what you hoped, on the outlet's timeline, to whoever they reach, and it carries weight precisely because you did not control it.

PR also includes the less visible work: how a company communicates with its own employees, its board, its donors, its regulators, and its community. Crisis communications is a branch of it. So is executive positioning, thought leadership, and the unglamorous discipline of having a spokesperson who can answer a hard question without making things worse. We cover the crisis side separately in our crisis communications guide. This page is about the everyday practice.

How a Newsroom Decides What to Cover

Most businesses pitch stories the way they would write an ad, and then wonder why nobody responded. A newsroom is not evaluating whether your business is good. It is evaluating whether your story is interesting to its audience, whether it is new, whether it can be told with pictures or sound, and whether it can be turned around before the next deadline.

A regional newsroom in Spartanburg, Greenville, or Charlotte is understaffed. An assignment editor might be juggling a dozen pitches and three breaking stories before noon. The pitches that get read are short, lead with the angle rather than the company, name a real person who can be interviewed today, and make it obvious what the camera or the photographer would see.

"Local company opens second location" is not a story. "Local manufacturer adds 40 jobs, most of them going to workers laid off from the plant across town" is. Same event, different angle. The skill in media relations is finding the version of your news that a reporter would want to tell anyway.

Relationships are real but overrated. A reporter will take a pitch from a stranger if the story is good. They will ignore a pitch from a friend if it is not. What relationships buy you is a faster read and the benefit of the doubt, which matters most when the news is bad.

What a Business Needs Before It Pitches Anything

A spokesperson who can talk. Not a title. A person who can explain what the company does in two sentences, answer a follow-up without a script, and stay calm when the question turns. If that person does not exist yet, media training comes before media relations.

Facts on paper. Founding date, headcount, locations, what you make or do, and any numbers you are willing to have printed. Reporters ask, and "let me get back to you" is a lost story more often than not.

Visuals. Current photography of the people, the place, and the work. Television and digital outlets need pictures, and a stock photo will not run. This is where commercial photography and PR overlap.

A website that holds up. The first thing a reporter does after reading your pitch is look you up. If the site is five years old, has a broken contact form, and lists a leadership team that left, the pitch dies there.

A point of view. The businesses that get quoted repeatedly are the ones with something to say about their industry, not just about themselves. A dentist who can explain a new insurance rule, a builder who can talk plainly about material costs, an attorney who can decode a new state law. That is thought leadership, and it is the most durable form of PR.

The Channels That Actually Move the Needle

Regional press. Daily and weekly newspapers, local television, business journals. These still set the agenda in markets like the Upstate, and a placement here gets shared, clipped, and cited for years.

Trade and vertical media. Publications that cover your industry specifically. A profile in a construction trade outlet reaches more decision-makers in your world than a mention in a general paper, and the editors are hungrier for sources.

Podcasts and digital outlets. Lower barrier, longer format, and the audience is self-selected. A forty-minute conversation with a host in your field produces more usable clips than a three-paragraph press mention.

Owned channels. Your own website, newsletter, and social accounts. Earned media that never gets amplified on your own channels is coverage you left on the table. Every placement should be posted, linked, and reused.

Awards, speaking, and community. Chamber events, industry panels, local awards programs. Not glamorous, but they generate the third-party signals that search engines and AI assistants now use to decide whether a business is credible.

How to Measure PR Without Fooling Yourself

The old metric was "advertising value equivalency," which multiplied the size of a story by an ad rate and produced a large, meaningless number. Ignore it.

What actually matters: did the placement reach the audience you are trying to reach, did it say what you needed it to say, did it link to you, and did anything happen afterward. Referral traffic from a story, branded search lift in the week after, inbound inquiries that mention the coverage, a recruiter's job posting suddenly getting applicants. Those are the signals.

There is also a longer-term measure that is harder to see month to month. Earned coverage builds the citation trail that search engines and AI models use to decide who the authoritative businesses in a category are. A regional firm with five years of consistent, credible press has an advantage in search and in AI-generated answers that no amount of ad spend replicates. This is one of the reasons we treat PR and SEO as the same discipline.

Mistakes That Waste PR Budget

Sending a press release for everything. A new hire, a new logo, a sponsorship. Reporters learn to skip your name. Save the release for news that is actually news, and pitch the rest as story ideas or not at all.

Paying for wire distribution and calling it coverage. A release on a paid wire gets syndicated to hundreds of sites nobody reads. It looks like results in a report. It is not.

Hiring a firm with no newsroom experience. A lot of PR practitioners have never worked a deadline or sat in an editorial meeting. They pitch the way they were taught, not the way a reporter reads. Ask who on the team has actually done the job on the other side.

Treating PR as a one-month project. Earned media compounds. A single placement is a nice moment. Twelve months of consistent, relevant coverage changes how a market perceives a business.

Ignoring the site and the search results. The coverage sends people to you. If what they find is weak, the PR did its job and the rest of the marketing dropped it.

How Sidestreet Handles Public Relations

Our PR practice is run by people who spent years in broadcast newsrooms and network production before starting the agency. We know how an assignment desk works, what gets a pitch opened, and how to make a source easy to work with. That is not a marketing line. It is the actual résumé of the people who will write your pitches.

We handle media relations, executive positioning, thought leadership content, media training in our studio, and crisis communications for businesses, nonprofits, churches, healthcare practices, and government entities across the Upstate, Charlotte, and the Southeast.

Because we also build the websites, shoot the photography, and run the digital campaigns, the coverage we earn lands on properties that are ready for it. A story that drives traffic to a site we built converts. A quote that gets picked up gets amplified on channels we manage.

We use AI tools for monitoring, research, and first drafts. Every pitch and every statement that leaves this office is written or rewritten by a senior person with newsroom experience. If you want to talk about what earned media could do for your organization, reach out.