Welcome to From the Lab — a monthly signal read exclusive that reports on media trends, narrative, and public positioning from inside LAUREL’s media lab, a working lab of founders and executives building public narrative in real time.
Five years ago, you could pitch a story to a journalist, and if it was a sound idea and aligned with the beat, you’d get published. News moved more slowly then; newsrooms were bigger, and the majority of the population did not feel emboldened by the subpar publicist in their pocket (is that you, GPT?) urging them to send half-baked ideas and bulleted lists to reporters who don’t remotely touch the subject matter.
Now, a trending story hits the news cycle on a Tuesday morning. By noon, the commentary begins, and by Thursday three op-eds have already been published in top-tier outlets. A fourth arrives on an editor’s desk two weeks later — carefully drafted, fully approved, and completely irrelevant. The conversation moved, the frame was set, and the first people with proximity to the topic (and a solid angle) got the spot.
We watched this happen in real time inside the lab last quarter. Repeatedly, leaders with sharp expertise and strong positions consistently arrived after the window closed. Not because they couldn't write, but because they hadn't been sharpening their opinions through iteration.
The practice at the center of this is newsjacking — inserting your perspective into a breaking story while it's still being shaped. PR professionals have done it for decades. What's changed is the speed, who has access, and how little infrastructure is left to give you time to prepare.
Newsroom cuts across radio, TV, print, and digital rose 18% last year. Cision's 2026 State of the Media survey found that nearly half of 1,900 journalists cited shrinking staff and expanding workloads as a top professional challenge — almost double the year before. Fewer reporters means faster cycles, thinner source benches, and an enormous appetite for people who show up ready.
But newsjacking isn't just responding to journalist requests — that's one lane, and it's the most crowded. Inside the lab, we've been mapping how leaders who earn consistent, compounding placement actually operate. It runs a spectrum:
Through curation: Sharing someone else's reporting with your own framing. Not reposting — reframing. Adding what the piece missed, where it applies to your industry, what it means for the people you lead. This signals to journalists and peers that you're paying attention and thinking critically. Several lab members started here because it felt lower-stakes than pitching original commentary. It is. It's also how many source relationships quietly begin.
On your own channels: The lowest barrier, the most underused. A short post on LinkedIn or a newsletter entry the same day a story breaks — no pitch, no editor, no permission needed. You're on the record, findable, indexed. We watched one lab member do this consistently for eight weeks. By week six, a regional journalist reached out to her directly. She hadn't pitched. She'd just been visible, with a point of view, at the right time, repeatedly.
Through direct pitch: Responding to news with an opinion piece or reaching out with a take that's sharp, timely, and already developed. This is the lane most people fixate on — and it's where the window is smallest. We tracked opportunities last quarter where the viable response time was under four hours. The leaders who landed placement weren't faster. They'd already been writing about the subject for weeks. They had material to pull from, which meant they could quickly respond to requests and when the interview happened, they sounded like themselves.
The newsjacking spectrum, mapped inside media lab by LAUREL. Everyone starts on the left.
The last point is the finding we keep returning to. In a media environment where 86% of journalists say they don't want AI-generated material, and 43% flag it specifically for lacking perspective, the competitive advantage isn't polish — it's proof that you've been validating your perspective for longer than the current news cycle.
Every leader now has access to tools that can produce a polished response in minutes. That's exactly why polished responses don't work anymore. What's scarce is public evidence of original thinking — positions developed in real time, with the texture that proves someone was in the work, not performing from a distance.
Our data is early, but Q2 made the direction clear. Inside the lab, the leaders who maintained a consistent public writing habit — even short-form curation on LinkedIn — were the ones journalists tapped for comment when news broke. Repeatedly, the indexed record of opinion created the inbound. Across industries, across formats, the pattern held: readiness produced relationship, and relationship produced placement.
The sample is small and the findings are young. We're building on this cohort by cohort. But we've now seen it from agency clients and inside the lab, and it confirms something the comms industry has been slow to say plainly: the leaders earning media aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the best comms teams. The leaders shaping conversations are the ones who've been in public long enough that when news breaks, their voice is already a part of it.
From the Lab is a monthly series published by signal read that reports from inside media lab by LAUREL — where leaders explore modern tools and tactics for building public narrative.
signal read is a weekly publication that covers comms moves from people shaping culture and industry. To subscribe, visit signalread.beehiiv.com
