Why doesn’t my superpower work anymore?

In the early part of career as a writer, my ideas were considered interesting enough to make headlines.

Going viral was surprisingly easy and frequent. Stealing the spotlight and capturing the media cycle with my story about wearing a nametag everyday was enough to earn massive amounts of ink.

Without paying a dollar or cold calling a journalist.

Man, those were the days.

I remember being interviewed on the biggest television news network in the country, and my quirky little story was ranked higher than the war in the middle east. Guess it was a slow news day.

Of course, that was back the early two thousands. Which almost seems like a quaint memory at this point.

Fast forward to a decade later, and then public relations had become a bit more of an uphill battle. In the twenty teens, the advent and popularization of social media, along with data driven content ecosystems and the democratization of publishing, made getting press much harder.

Because the secret was out. Now everybody had their own personal brand and worked the system to get paid, earned and owned media.

I recall hiring a publicist for the first time at that point in my career. My strategy of sitting by the phone and waiting for the media to call wasn’t working anymore. I told the publicist how easy it was to secure news coverage during my first act as a writer, but the new media landscape was no longer impressed.

He understood my dilemma and validated my decision to hire him. And with his help writing releases and executing media relations, we got solid media coverage over the next few years to promote my various creative projects.

And that brings us to now. Twenty plus years after first starting my publishing company.

Today we live in a world where journalism is perceived as a joke, social media is a legitimate public health concern, sponsored content dominates objective information, journalism is a mass produced consumer product that’s mostly uninformed opinions, fake news is free flowing like wine, and thousands of spammy content farms are scraping duplicate content to boost paid advertising revenue.

Forgive me for being bleak, but that’s the reality.

Now the odds of securing significant media coverage are approaching zero.

You wrote a book? Great, so did literally one million other people this year.

You launched a new startup? Congrats, now get in line with the other eight hundred thousand companies who did the same, most of which will be defunct in three years.

When I launched my software as a service platform during quarantine, media relations were abysmal. Connecting with journalists was like pulling teeth. Even after my publicist sent out several releases, conducted targeted outreach and did dedicated follow up, there was a low response rate.

Sure, we got a few good hits, but nothing even close to the action we got five, ten or fifteen years ago.

Ultimately, my three part story here zooms out on twenty years of business experience and notes a clear downward trend.

Personally, it makes me frustrated, apathetic and scared as an entrepreneur. Like there was this superpower that used to serve me so well, and now it simply doesn’t work anymore. What a crock.

But it’s a good lesson for anybody.

What winning strategy are you too reliant on? How are you evolving your marketing strategy to satisfy the changing media landscape?

Trust me, cynicism isn’t the answer. We can be as resentful as we want about the state of current affairs, but that isn’t going to magically will the journalists to bang down our door.

If we’re doing work that guarantees we remain obscure, and then hating the world for not knowing who we are, that’s our fault.

What if you gave yourself permission to try other approaches to success?