Some tips for interacting with the press
Here are a few things I've learned over the years about the best ways for entrepreneurs to interact with the press (by press I mean blogs as well as traditional media). — Don't be afraid to ask what the rules are. Is this on or off the record?
Context & Ripple Effects
Chris Dixon — writing as both a venture investor and a longtime blogger — distills his own experience into rules for founders facing reporters, opening with the most basic one: ask upfront whether a conversation is on or off the record. His framing that "press" includes blogs as much as traditional media extends a running genre of practitioner advice, from TechCrunch's 2008 PR Secrets for Startups to Micro Persuasion's 2006 take on reinventing the media interview.
The off-the-record point lands on contested ground: Dan Lyons argued back in 2008 that people telling the truth about themselves don't insist on going off the record, so Dixon's advice to simply ask what the rules are reads as a middle path between spin and exposure. Same-day shares from tech-community accounts like @semil and @tomkrazit show the advice circulating through exactly the founder-investor-blogger network it addresses.
First-order effects
- Founders who adopt the habit of clarifying attribution rules before speaking gain a measure of control over how their quotes appear, while reporters face sources who know the ground rules are negotiable.
- By defining blogs as press, Dixon legitimizes founder-to-blogger outreach as a first-class channel, changing which outlets a startup prioritizes when it has news.
Second-order effects
- When investors publish playbooks directly instead of routing founders through PR firms, the intermediary's gatekeeping role shrinks and public-relations advice becomes free, shared infrastructure.
- Bloggers gain negotiating leverage as acknowledged press: sources who treat them as equals arrive prepared, raising the baseline quality of what gets reported.
Third-order effects
- If source-side literacy keeps compounding, media handling shifts from a hired specialist function to a core founder skill, with every interview treated as a negotiation over terms rather than a favor granted.
- The blurring line between blog and outlet points toward a single press ecosystem where distribution depends less on masthead than on whether a founder trusts the person asking questions.
The trend: Startup-media relations are consolidating into a self-taught discipline in which blogs and traditional outlets form one press ecosystem and ground rules are negotiated conversation by conversation.