The founder's media kit: what reporters actually need from you

A reporter emails back and says yes. This is the moment you worked for, and it is where most founders fumble. The reporter is on a deadline and needs a few things from you now. Make them wait or chase you for assets and the story cools. Sometimes it dies. A reporter who sends three emails to get a usable logo files you under hard work, and hard work is the first thing a busy desk drops.

A ready kit decides whether you get used

Reporters do not owe you patience. They juggle several stories at once, and the one that runs is the one where the source made it easy. Answer a yes within the hour, with clean assets and clear facts, and you become the easy source, the one they come back to. A media kit buys that speed in advance. You build it once, while you are calm, so the yes does not catch you scrambling.

What belongs in the kit

Keep it lean. A kit is the few things a reporter needs to write about you accurately, and nothing else. Here is the whole list.

• Your boilerplate, in two lengths. One paragraph and one line that do the same job at different sizes. A reporter drops one in verbatim, so write them once, clear them internally, and use the same words everywhere.
• Three to five key facts, cleared for print. Founding year, the markets you operate in, team size, one real number you can stand behind. Only facts you are happy to see in print, because a reporter uses them exactly as written.
• A high-resolution logo. On a transparent background, in a format that scales and prints. One clean file.
• One or two product images. Current, in focus, and representative of what you sell. A legible screenshot, a sharp product shot.
• A founder headshot. A real photo at print resolution, recent enough to look like you today.
• A named spokesperson with real availability. One person, with a title and a fast way to reach them. If a question comes at 5pm, the reporter needs to know who answers.
• A short, dated facts page on your own site. One link where all of the above lives, stamped with its last-updated date. This is the anchor everything else points to.

The facts page does double duty

That last item earns its own section, because its second job is new. A reporter checks a facts page to confirm a detail before filing. The new reader is the model. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini about your category, those models answer from pages they can find and verify. A clean, sourced, dated page under your own name is exactly what they trust. The same page that stops a reporter misquoting you helps a model describe you correctly.

Write it plainly. State each fact, date it, keep it current. Do not bury it in a PDF. A page a browser can open is a page a model can read.

Get the format right

The contents matter, and so does the delivery. A good kit sent badly still makes work.

• Send one link, not a 40MB zip. Point to the facts page or a single shared folder. A heavy attachment clogs an inbox, and some mail systems strip it. A link opens on any device in a second.
• Name your files like a human. Use companyname-logo.png and jane-tan-headshot.jpg, not final_v3_USE_THIS.png. The reporter files your assets in seconds and never has to ask which one is current.
• Make the images usable. High enough resolution to print, the right format, the right way up. An image a designer has to chase you to replace is an image that holds up the story.

What to leave out

A kit fails by being too full as easily as too thin. Leave these out.

• Marketing fluff. Mission statements, adjectives, superlatives. A reporter cuts them on sight, and they bury the real facts.
• Gated downloads. No form, no email to hand over, no login. Every gate is a reason for a reporter on deadline to give up and write around you.
• A sales deck. Your investor or customer deck exists to persuade. A reporter wants facts to verify. Sending the deck buries the five things they needed under thirty they did not.

Build it in 30 minutes

You can assemble the whole thing this afternoon. Set a timer.

• Minutes 0 to 10. Write the one-paragraph and one-line descriptions, then the three to five cleared facts underneath.
• Minutes 10 to 20. Gather the assets. Export the logo at high resolution, pick one or two clean product images, drop in a real headshot. Rename every file plainly.
• Minutes 20 to 30. Put it all on one dated page on your own site. Name a spokesperson with a real contact. Send yourself the link, open it on your phone, and confirm every file opens and every fact is right.

That is a kit. It needs no design, only to be correct, current, and one click away.

Clarity is the real asset

When a reporter says yes, the window is short, and the founders who get covered make the next step effortless. A lean, ready kit does that, and the same clear facts serve the models your buyers now ask about you.

This is where Cites X fits. The brand and message work it runs first gives you the approved boilerplate and the facts you can stand behind, so the kit writes itself from a story you have already settled. It then keeps that story consistent everywhere you publish, so the reporter checking your facts page and the model answering for your category read one clear company.