Reverse-Engineer the Publication's Mission
Editors serve their audience, not you — decode who each outlet serves, then fit your story to that mission.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 92%
Founders pitch outlets by category logic ('it's called Entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur'), which fails because publications don't see themselves as directories of their category. Each has a hidden editorial mission — the specific job it does for its readers. Feifer's method is to read a batch of the outlet's stories, infer what they all have in common, and reshape your story into that pattern.
Origin
Jason Feifer, contrasting his editorial missions at Fast Company (under Bob Safian, 'where business is going') and Entrepreneur ('a magazine about thinking').
Core principles
- 01Editors care about their reader/listener/viewer, not about you
- 02No outlet publishes its true editorial mission — you infer it from the pattern
- 03The same company can be broken into different story angles for different outlets
- 04General-interest outlets have section-level missions, not one mission
How to run it
- 1
Identify who the outlet serves
Start with the audience: who is this publication trying to reach, and what are they in a mindset to do (create, buy, learn)? This anchors everything else.
Pro tip Business titles reach people in a 'creating mindset,' not a 'buying mindset' — a consumer product may not belong there at all.
- 2
Read a batch and find the common thread
Pull five or more recent stories and ask what they all have in common. The recurring pattern reveals the mission — e.g. Entrepreneur runs counterintuitive decisions that solved a business problem, framed as lessons the reader can use.
Pro tip For general-interest outlets, parse by section — the Sunday business section's mission differs from the weekday one.
Watch out Don't assume the About page tells you this; the real mission is the internal editorial logic, never published.
- 3
Break your story into outlet-specific angles
Decompose your journey into pieces and match each piece to the outlet whose mission it fits — the Entrepreneur founder-decision angle vs. the Cosmo product-roundup angle.
Pro tip Do this forward (audience first), not in reverse (deciding your narrative then shopping it everywhere).
Watch out Picking one narrative and blasting every outlet with it is the most common failure — most inbound pitches ignore what the outlet actually publishes.
In the wild
Merzel pitched Feifer her hinged butter dish — not interesting to Entrepreneur because a clever product isn't a thinking lesson. But she then described bootstrapping her market research: quoted $10,000 by a research firm she couldn't afford, she realized airport gate-waiters had nothing better to do than answer questions about butter dishes, and surveyed them gate by gate for free.
→ Feifer ran the airport story because it embodied Entrepreneur's mission — ingenuity other entrepreneurs could learn from — even though it was a tiny random company.
Common mistakes
Category-logic pitching
Assuming 'it's a magazine called Entrepreneur so it writes about entrepreneurs' — the outlet is not a directory of its category; it serves a mission, and category membership alone doesn't qualify you.
Leading with the product instead of the lesson
Pitching the clever thing you built (a better razor, a better butter dish) when the outlet's mission is insight — the feature isn't the story, the transferable lesson for the audience is.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and PR people preparing a targeted pitch to a specific publication
Not ideal for
Purely local or trade coverage where audience fit is obvious and mission-decoding is overkill
From the transcript
“they don't care about you they care about their reader or their listener or their viewer that's who they care about that's who they're serving”
“you have to step back and read what these Publications are publishing and ask yourself what are they doing what is the purpose here”
“it's not even a magazine about business it's a magazine about thinking”
“did they make some interesting counterintuitive decision that solved a problem in their business”
From the episode
How to get press for your product
Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine)