You have a product launch, a funding round, or a founder with opinions, and someone on your team says you should be in Politico. So you take the press release you sent to TechCrunch, swap a few words, and fire it at a Politico reporter. Nothing happens. Not a reply, not a bounce, just silence. This is the most common way companies approach Politico, and it fails every time, because Politico is not a tech outlet or a business outlet. It is a politics and policy outlet, and a pitch that does not understand that distinction is dead before the reporter finishes the subject line.
To get featured in Politico you have to think the way its newsroom thinks. Politico was founded in 2007 by John Harris and Jim VandeHei to cover the mechanics of power in Washington, and it has stayed close to that mission even after Axel Springer acquired it in 2021. Its reporters care about legislation, regulation, lobbying, campaigns, and the people who move those levers. Your company is only interesting to them when it touches one of those things. The good news is that almost every company touches policy somewhere. The work is finding that point of contact and leading with it.
Lead with the policy, never the product
The single biggest reason a pitch to get featured in Politico fails is that it leads with the company. Politico reporters do not write product reviews and they do not run announcements. They write about what is happening in and around government. So the first sentence of your pitch cannot be about your launch. It has to be about a policy development, a regulatory shift, a fight in Congress, or a trend in how an industry is being governed, with your company positioned as the example, the data source, or the expert voice that makes the story concrete.
I teach this as the policy hook. Before you pitch, you write one sentence that names the policy question your story illuminates, and that sentence has to be true without mentioning your company at all. “States are quietly rewriting how telehealth gets reimbursed, and small clinics are getting squeezed” is a policy hook. Your telehealth company is the proof point inside that story, not the headline. If you cannot write a policy hook that stands on its own, you do not yet have a Politico pitch. You have a press release looking for the wrong home.
The reframe is harder than it sounds because it requires you to subordinate your own news to a larger story you do not control. Founders resist this. They want the company to be the subject. But Politico’s reader does not care about your company in isolation, and the reporter knows it. The companies that get featured are the ones willing to be a vivid example inside a story about power, rather than insisting on being the story themselves.
Match the reporter to the beat
Politico is organized around beats with a precision most outlets do not match. There are reporters who cover health care policy, others who cover technology regulation, others on energy, defense, financial services, agriculture, and trade. Pitching the wrong reporter is worse than not pitching at all, because it signals you did not read the publication. A defense reporter has no use for your fintech story, and they will remember the name that wasted their time.
Spend the hour it takes to find the right person. Read recent Politico stories in your space, note the bylines, and study what angles that specific reporter returns to. The flagship Politico Playbook newsletter and the various Pro verticals will show you who owns which beat. When you pitch, reference a recent piece they wrote and explain why your story is the natural next chapter. A reporter can tell within one line whether you actually read their work, and that recognition is most of what earns a reply.
The beat discipline extends to timing. Politico runs on the rhythm of Washington, so a pitch tied to a hearing, a markup, a regulatory comment deadline, or a fresh ruling has a hook the reporter can act on now. A story with no time peg competes against everything else in the inbox and usually loses. When your example connects to something moving on the policy calendar this week, you give the reporter a reason to open the story today rather than filing your email under maybe.
Bring data they cannot get elsewhere
The pitches that get featured in Politico almost always carry something the reporter cannot easily source on their own. Politico reporters are flooded with opinions and starved for original data. If your company sits on numbers that illustrate a policy story, a dataset on how a regulation changed behavior, a survey of how an industry is responding to a proposed rule, internal metrics that quantify a trend, you are holding the most valuable thing you can offer. Data turns you from a company seeking coverage into a source the reporter needs.
The data does not have to be a formal study. It can be a sharp observation backed by your own numbers. A payments company that can show a measurable spike in a certain transaction type after a state law passed is handing a reporter a lede. Lead the pitch with the finding, state it plainly, and make clear you can put a named executive on the phone to explain it. The combination of an exclusive number and an available expert is close to irresistible for a policy reporter on deadline.
Be ready to be a recurring source rather than a one-time placement. The relationship is the real prize. A reporter who learns that your company gives them clean data and a straight answer will come back, and the second and third stories come faster than the first. Getting featured in Politico once is a placement. Becoming the person a Politico reporter calls when a story in your sector breaks is a position, and it is worth far more than any single article.
Find the policy fight your company can see more clearly than anyone else, then hand the right reporter the number that proves it.