Imagine your job was to cover technology news and trends. How many times could you see “unique” and “cutting-edge” pitches before those adjectives no longer had meaning? According to a Cision survey, most journalists receive 50+ pitches a week, at least three-quarters of which are irrelevant.

These are some of the factors that make journalists a skeptical bunch — not to mention that healthy suspicion is part of their job description.

Journalists aren’t here to promote you. What are you doing that’s truly new, different, and impacting people in a concrete way?

Marie Williams, Coderella

There’s another audience known for its skepticism: the developers you want to discover, try, and eventually champion your product. That’s why seeing your dev tool like a journalist can help you harden how you talk about it with developers.

While I have a background as both a developer and a journalist, I wanted to round out my advice by reaching out to others — you’ll see quotes from journalists and PR professionals who understand this topic better than I do. Thankfully, they agree on some basic things to help you see your dev tool like a journalist.

The Product Is Not the Highlight

Before I founded this technical content agency, I reported tech news for Wired and was the first editor of the API journal ProgrammableWeb. The majority of press releases I received were navel-gazing feats of unveiled promotion. The best were highly targeted, coverage-aware offers to help me better understand an evolving technology ecosystem. And that’s how journalists will always see your dev tool — as part of a much larger trend and collection of products.

Another thing about journalists is that they probably won’t visit your website thinking about how they’d like to promote your product. They may not visit at all if it’s unrelated to the topics they cover. Dev tools aren’t exactly mainstream.

Don’t expect a niche product to appeal to a broad audience.

Justin Pot, freelance journalist (WIRED, LifeHacker)

For example, unless you have a broad angle, your dev tool is unlikely to get coverage in The Verge. The publication claims to cover “companies and products that shape the way we live.” Yes, software powers many of the tools we use daily, but making a direct connection is tough. Your product is more likely to get noticed by journalists with a narrower focus.

At ProgrammableWeb, I was always looking for API news. That’s still a niche topic, but it was even more so then. Though we focused on APIs, it didn’t mean we’d cover each one that made it to market. The pitches we received suggested that most companies thought otherwise. “Our product has an API” was the extent of many emails I deleted.

At one point in my tenure, we were identifying five new APIs per day. Even if we published five posts daily, they couldn’t all be about brand new APIs.

It’s not enough to talk about what your product does or how well it’s built. Think outside the box — you may be delivering a product, but the business outcome could be completely unrelated to development itself.

Jennifer Lankford, Lankford Communications

Journalists must filter out what’s most newsworthy. In fact, that’s their job. If you want them to pay attention to your product, help them filter. One of the ways they do this is through interviews — which is something you can do to make sure you know why your product is interesting.

Interview the People Who Know

Marketers for technical products often don’t have engineering backgrounds. Even if you do, you can’t possibly know the intricacies of the product and the problems it solves as well as those who built it.

Similarly, journalists can’t be experts, even when their beat is highly technical. That’s where they use interviews to unravel what matters. Sometimes, that’s difficult to find on a modern dev tool website.

We hear a lot about the developer experience. The journalist experience needs attention, too. Find ways to break down the barriers between the journalist and the developers who can provide the journalist with explanation and analysis.

Alex Williams, The New Stack

You may bristle at the idea of connecting a journalist to your top engineers. What will they say? First, you can take on the role of journalist yourself. Your reporting efforts won’t be in the newspaper — they’ll be on your website, blog posts, and other materials.

Make sure you cover both features and benefits in a way that understands the developer point of view. Interviews with your product and engineering teams are one way to gain that point of view.

Obviously, that’s still a biased set of interviews. You don’t have to talk to competitors like a real journalist would, but you should talk to someone familiar with other options — the developers themselves. Yes, you’ve heard that customer interviews are essential. If you already have a folder full of videos, dig into them. But also try a few on your own. Just make sure you discuss the problems, not your product.

Journalists want to keep their readers informed about what’s happening in the world and how it affects them. Journalists want to write impactful stories, not puff pieces.

Marie Williams

You might appreciate a “rah-rah” article that only praises your product. Developers will see it and quickly move on to something more trustworthy. They’ll see your content the same way, so you want to follow the most crucial credo of journalism: Find the story.

Find the Story, Obviously

Long before Nora Ephron wrote popular romantic comedies, she was a journalism student at Beverly Hills High School. One story made a huge difference in her career. Much later, it made a difference in my life, as well.

Ephron’s teacher, Mr. Simms, grabbed chalk and wrote six words on the blackboard: “Who? What? Where? Why? When? How?” He explained that the first line of every news story must contain these facts. Then, he went on to tell them some facts for their news story.

The school’s teachers would travel the following Thursday to Sacramento for a colloquium on new teaching methods. Ephron and her fellow students diligently wrote out these facts on their typewriters (this would have been the late 1950s). Everyone had some version of the same lede (or lead), the first line of a newspaper article.

Mr. Simms collected them all, read each aloud… and threw them in the trash!

“The lead to this story,” he said, “is: There will be no school Thursday!”

If you watch Ephron tell it, it’s clear this was a powerful moment for her. She realized journalism is about finding the point — understanding why something matters. While at the helm of ProgrammableWeb, my team and I sought to figure out what mattered in API news. But I always felt like tech companies could have shouldered some of that burden. Here I was, doing a Mr. Simms, throwing their work in the trash.

You might be very proud of a redesign (or whatever is new), but in what specific ways does it help people do stuff better? What does it do now that it didn’t do before?

Justin Pot

To see your dev tool like a journalist, you must identify what matters. What use cases does it solve? What dev trends does it follow — or disrupt? You need to find and tell the story in everything you do.

At developer events, speakers may tell you it’s only necessary to provide the factual details. Indeed, “Just give me the docs” is a familiar developer refrain. However, that’s often a reaction to getting too many glossy stories. You’ll build developer trust when you find and tell the unvarnished journalist story. You’ll inspire them to go to the docs with purpose, not to try to figure out why your product matters.

Skipping building a strong messaging framework is the biggest mistake a dev tool company can make. Find that big ‘ah hah’ message that makes your dev tool a no-brainer to buy — for the CTO, but for the CFO or CRO, as well.

Jennifer Lankford

As it turns out, the story matters to more than developers. But if you can nail it for them, you’ll have something that matters across your customer audiences. The story does not come by shining a big spotlight on your product. It doesn’t emerge from a shiny pitch. It takes interviews, research, and uncovering the reality where your product lives.

Connect with Outside Experts

To write this article, I knew I needed to get feedback from people with more recent journalism experience. That’s why I reached out to PR professionals and current tech journalists. I crafted my “story” around their observations from years in the industry, along with my own experiences. You can similarly use outside experts to fill knowledge or bias gaps.

Or, work that expertise gathering into your engineering workflow:

Make it a requirement for developers to narrate their work and post in public documentation via micro posts or the company blog.

Alex Williams

However you identify and disseminate the objective story of your dev tool, an outside expert can help. For example, they might interview your engineers or translate technical narration into something that fits your messaging framework.

If you aren’t yet aware, EveryDeveloper supports API and dev tool companies to better tell their stories in a way that resonates with your technical audience. See how we can improve the way you present your dev tool. That way, it’s ready for journalists, developers, and anyone who cares about the problems you solve.