How to Newsjack a Breaking Story

Reporters need experts on deadline, and most companies are too slow to be one. Newsjacking fixes that. Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 found that 58% of journalists want interview access to relevant sources with a pitch, and 88% immediately delete pitches that miss their beat. A good newsjack gives them the first and avoids the second.

David Meerman Scott, who pioneered the term in 2011, defines newsjacking as “the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story so you and your ideas get noticed.” At Prism PR, an award-winning, full-service PR agency that is also a digital PR and linkbuilding firm, we newsjack for clients every weekday morning. I have run Prism for eight years, and this is the most repeatable way I know to put an executive in a story that is already running.

Here is exactly how we do it, step by step, with a worked example from our own published work.

Why Newsjacking Works for Companies Without a Famous Name

Most brands wait for news about themselves: a product launch, a funding round, a new hire. Those stories are hard to sell, because reporters have no reason to care yet. Newsjacking flips the order. The news already exists, an editor has already assigned it, and a reporter is looking for someone who can explain it.

Scott explains why that opening exists in his free newsjacking excerpt. The basic facts of a breaking story are easy to find, and they go in the first paragraph. “The challenge for reporters is to get background information that rounds out the basic facts in subsequent paragraphs.” Your expert is that second paragraph.

The demand is real. Cision’s 2026 State of the Media report, a survey of nearly 2,000 journalists, found that 66% rely on PR for story ideas. The same survey found that 72% of journalists say fewer than a quarter of the pitches they get are relevant. That gap is where a well-built newsjack wins.

There is a second payoff. Each story that quotes your executive can carry a backlink (a clickable link from a news story to your website, which lifts your Google ranking). That helps SEO and AEO: showing up when people search on Google and when they ask AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Muck Rack’s What Is AI Reading? report found that about 84% of AI citations come from earned media.

Step 1: Watch the News Before Your Competitors Wake Up

Newsjacking starts with monitoring, and the clock matters. Scott puts it plainly: “Now doesn’t mean tomorrow. It means now.”

At Prism, our own AI tools run a search for every client before 7 a.m. Eastern. They pull U.S. stories from the past 24 hours on each client’s topics, drop duplicates, and rank what is left by how much heat it has and how well it fits the client’s spokesperson.

You can start with free tools:

Google Alerts. Set Google Alerts for your industry terms, your product category and the problems your customers have. Choose “as-it-happens” delivery.
Google News. Search your topics and filter to the past 24 hours.
Your trade press. Read the two or three outlets that cover your industry every morning.
Government releases. Federal agencies publish data and warnings on a schedule. Those dates are newsjacking opportunities you can see coming.

The rule we follow: breaking means the last 24 hours. An old story only counts if something new happened to it today.

Step 2: Decide Whether You Have a Real Tie to the Story

Most stories are not yours to newsjack. Before we write a word, every story has to pass three newsjacking tests.

Expertise. Can our client’s spokesperson say something a reporter cannot get from the press release? A scam-prevention company can explain how a new scam works. It should not comment on a celebrity divorce.
Taste. Tragedies, deaths and disasters are off limits for promotion. If the only angle is “our product could have helped,” skip it.
Safety. The angle never puts the client in a fight it does not need. We never name a competitor, its product or its numbers in a pitch, and we stay away from topics where the client has legal exposure.

Scott’s own example shows what a real tie looks like. When photos of Prince Harry in Las Vegas went viral, the Wynn hotel’s owner publicly waived the bill, and the Wynn appeared in what Scott counted as 3,657 stories. The hotel was the setting of the story, so it had a reason to speak.

If a story fails any of the three tests, we drop it and move to the next one. A missed newsjack costs nothing. A bad one costs credibility with reporters you will need again.

Step 3: Find the Angle Only Your Expert Can Give

The angle is the second paragraph the reporter has not written yet. We look for one of four things:

Context. How big is this, and is it a record? Federal data usually answers that.
Explanation. How does the thing in the news actually work?
What to do. Practical advice for the reader, from someone who deals with it daily.
What happens next. Where the story goes from here, from someone inside the industry.

We write the angle as one sentence before anything else. If we cannot, the newsjack is not ready.

Data makes a newsjacking angle much stronger. Muck Rack’s 2026 survey found 40% of journalists value original data or research with a pitch. That is one reason we pair newsjacking with a newsworthy, data-driven industry study for many clients. When a scam story breaks, a client with its own state-by-state data has a number nobody else can offer.

Step 4: Build a Newsjacking Media List by Reading, Not Keywords

This is where most newsjacking goes wrong. A list built from keywords catches everyone who once used the word “scam” in a story. That is how pitches end up in the 88% that get deleted.

We build every list in Muck Rack first, then check other news search tools for who has written about the story in the past day. Then we read each reporter’s recent work, with help from our AI tools, and write down a reason for each one: their beat, how often they cover this topic, their latest relevant story and its date, and whether they would write this pitch. No written reason, no spot on the list.

Two rules from experience:

Story and beat both have to fit. A personal finance writer who once wrote about a scam is not a scam reporter. Muck Rack’s survey found 70% of journalists want a pitch to show clear relevance to their beat.
Spread the outlets. We pitch no more than three people at the same outlet on the same day. Newsrooms notice when one sender hits the whole staff.

For most stories, the list mixes national reporters, trade outlets and local reporters in the markets the story touches.

Step 5: Write a Short Newsjack Pitch That Offers an Interview

The pitch is short, specific and built around the reporter’s story. Muck Rack found 69% of journalists prefer pitches under 200 words, and 71% reject pitches that feel overly promotional.

Our newsjack pitch has five parts:

The news, in one line. State what happened and link the original source, such as the agency’s own release. We never write “The Washington Post reported” in a pitch. Other outlets do not want to chase a rival.
Why it matters now. One sentence with a number.
What the expert can add. Two or three short bullets with specific points.
The offer. An interview, today, with a named executive and their title.
A plain sign-off. No attachments, no logos, no hype.

Personalization matters, but it has to be real. “I read your piece on the new text scam” works when it is true. “I know you cover scams” does not; reporters know what they cover.

For the full pitch playbook, see how to pitch a journalist.

Step 6: Fact-Check, Then Send Fast

Speed and accuracy fight each other in newsjacking, and accuracy wins. Every Prism pitch goes through our Editor-in-Chief check before it sends: the news peg, the timing words, every number, the reporter’s outlet and beat, and the personalization line. Anything wrong is fixed. Anything that cannot be confirmed is cut.

Then we move. Muck Rack found 78% of journalists want pitches before noon, so our newsjack pitches go out in the morning, at a human pace, from a real person’s inbox. We never pitch reporters after 4 p.m. Eastern; a pitch that lands after a reporter has filed is wasted.

One follow-up is plenty. Half of the journalists Muck Rack surveyed say one follow-up is ideal, and 46% say repeated follow-ups without a response make them delete a pitch.

Step 7: Publish Your Own Take on Your Site

Pitching is half of newsjacking. The other half is publishing your expert’s take where reporters and buyers can find it. Scott’s point is that “journalists may find you as they use search engines to research their story as they write it.”

Our worked example. Anthropic updated the usage policy for Claude, effective Nov. 12, 2026, with a new section titled “Do Not Engage in Deceptive Campaigns or Artificial Activity.” It bans using Claude to “manipulate the sources from which search engines or AI systems draw answers” with content that misrepresents where it came from. A PRmoment column on Oct. 29 called the ban “objectively very good news.”

That story sat right on our expertise, so we newsjacked it. On Nov. 2, ten days before the rules take effect, we published Claude’s GEO Crackdown: Earned Media Is the Real AI Visibility. It walks through what the new rules ban, what AI tools actually cite, and what to ask your agency. It passed all three tests from Step 2: we build our own AI tools for PR, the topic was not a tragedy, and it named no competitor.

Clients can do the same on their own blogs, and every post gives the pitch something extra to link to.

Step 8: Measure Newsjacking Results and Plan the Next One

Newsjacking is not done when the pitch sends. We track every story that runs, whether it carries a backlink, and the outlet’s Domain Rating, on a live dashboard the client can open any time. Here’s a live dashboard for our client CareScout showing what we’ve secured over the last 9 months, which was a full-service campaign, including these monthly studies.

Then we plan the newsjacks we can see coming. For Social Catfish, Prism built a year-round news calendar around romance scams for Valentine’s Day, IRS scams around Tax Day and holiday scams in the fourth quarter. That campaign earned 3,862 editorial backlinks at an average DA of 77.3. Across all clients, Prism has placed 25,000 stories and earned 20,000 backlinks.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is newsjacking?

Newsjacking is reacting to a breaking news story with your own expert, data or point of view, so reporters include you in coverage of a story that is already running. David Meerman Scott coined the term, and Oxford Dictionaries shortlisted it as a Word of the Year in 2017.

How fast do you have to newsjack a story?

Within hours, ideally the same morning. We work from stories published in the past 24 hours and send pitches before noon. By the next day, most reporters have filed and moved on.

Is newsjacking ethical?

Yes, when you have a real tie to the story and something useful to add. It turns unethical when a brand exploits a tragedy or disaster for promotion. If your only angle is a sales pitch, skip the story.

Can a small company use newsjacking?

Yes. Reporters need expertise, not fame. A small company with a credible executive, a clear point of view and its own data can win coverage that a household name misses because it moved too slowly.

Does newsjacking help SEO and AEO?

It can. Stories that quote your executive often carry a backlink to your site, and AI tools draw heavily on earned media when they answer questions. More coverage in trusted outlets makes your company more visible on Google and in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

Let Us Newsjack for You

Newsjacking is a daily habit. It takes morning monitoring, a fast read on which stories fit, a media list built by reading reporters’ work, a sharp pitch, a fact check and the discipline to send before noon. Then it takes doing it again tomorrow.

At Prism, newsjacking is part of our full-service PR, alongside media relations, crisis and reputation work, and SEO linkbuilding built on earned media. You can see the results in our case studies.

But if you don’t want to deal with all this, let us do it for you. Contact us and tell us about your company.

How to Newsjack a Breaking Story: Our Newsjacking Process, Step by Step