Getting covered by The Information means giving a reporter a story their paying subscribers cannot get elsewhere: proprietary data, a named executive source, an exclusive on a deal or pivot before it is public, or a genuine scoop with on-the-record confirmation. It does not mean sending a press release. It does not mean asking for coverage of your funding round. It means bringing something their 500,000-dollar-a-year investigative team has not already found.

I run fractional PR for AI startups and Web3 protocols, and The Information comes up constantly in briefings, usually from a founder who has just raised a round, built something impressive, and wants the name on their press page. The question I get is: "Can we get into The Information?" The honest answer is: sometimes, but almost never the way founders expect. This playbook is the operator's guide to what the outlet actually runs, what the sourcing bar looks like up close, and how to calculate whether it is worth your time versus TechCrunch or the crypto verticals.

What The Information actually is

Founded in 2013 by Jessica Lessin, The Information is a paid-subscription technology journalism outlet. No ads. No sponsored content. No wire pickups. Every dollar of revenue comes from subscribers, which means the only editorial question is: will this story make paying subscribers feel their subscription was worth it today? That single constraint reshapes everything about how the outlet works.

Subscribers are mostly institutional: VCs, hedge funds, corporate strategy teams, senior operators, and the founders those people back. The coverage skews toward Silicon Valley, New York, and increasingly AI infrastructure. Crypto and Web3 appear when the story has enough mainstream tech-investor relevance, such as a major fund's token exposure, a Web3 company doing a large enterprise deal, or a regulatory development that moves institutional capital. A DeFi protocol with 10,000 users and a solid product is not a story for The Information, no matter how technically interesting it is. A DeFi protocol that a Sequoia partner is quietly backing, or that is in acquisition talks with a publicly traded company, is a different question entirely.

Field ruleThe Information writes for people who manage capital at scale. If your story does not change how they think about a market, a deal, or a person, it is not a story for this outlet. The bar is not quality, it is relevance to money moving.

The sourcing standard that separates it from every other outlet

The most important thing to understand about The Information is that it treats anonymous sources the way the Wall Street Journal's investigations desk does, not the way a crypto media outlet does. Reporters will not publish a claim on a single anonymous tip. The standard is named sources on the record where possible, and multiple independent sources with documented corroboration where not. This is not a preference, it is the structure of the outlet's credibility with subscribers who will pay $399 a year or more and trust what they read to make investment decisions.

This sourcing culture has two direct implications for founders. First, if you are the subject of a story and the reporter has named sources saying something negative, you will be called for comment and you should engage, because the piece runs either way and your comment shapes how it reads. Second, if you want to initiate coverage, you need to come with sources who will go on record, or with documents that substitute for them. "Our CEO will talk to you" is not a source offer. "Our CEO and two of our institutional investors will speak on record about the Series B and here are the documents" is closer to a source offer.

What counts as a credible source package

  • On-record named executives: the founder, a co-founder, a named institutional investor, or a named enterprise customer. The more senior, the better.
  • Documents: term sheets, internal memos, board decks shared on background, regulatory filings not yet public. These substitute for named humans in some cases.
  • Data the outlet cannot get elsewhere: proprietary network data, transaction volumes, user metrics that are auditable and exclusive. An embargo on this data is often the basis for a first call.
  • Third-party corroboration: an analyst, a competitor executive, or a regulatory official who can independently confirm the core claim.
Practical testBefore pitching The Information, ask yourself: if I removed the founder from this story entirely, does it still hold up? If yes, the sourcing is strong enough to pitch. If the founder is the only source, the story does not exist yet from their perspective.

The story types that actually run

Studying the outlet's output over several years, the stories that actually run fall into a small number of repeating patterns.

Story type What makes it land Relevance to AI / Web3
Exclusive deal or funding scoop Hard fact, multiple on-record sources, embargoed for exclusive window High, if the round is $50M+ or has a marquee lead
Personnel move Senior hire or departure at a named company; on-record confirmation Medium, if the person is known to their readership
Strategy shift or pivot Company changing direction; documents or on-record exec; subscriber-relevant Medium-high for AI infrastructure plays
Investigative / accountability Documents, multiple sources, company given right of reply High if negative; you cannot pitch this, but you can prepare for it
Market data or proprietary analysis Exclusive data set not available elsewhere; auditable methodology High if data is about AI spend, compute costs, or institutional crypto flows
Profile / feature Founder or executive with outsized market influence; multi-source; narrative arc High for AI founders whose company has >$100M valuation or significant cultural moment

What is conspicuously absent: product launches, mainnet announcements, token launches, protocol upgrades, and partnership press releases. These simply do not appear as their own stories at The Information. They might appear as a data point inside a larger funding or strategy piece, but the announcement itself is not the story.

Realistic expectations: who actually gets in

The clearest pattern in The Information's AI and tech coverage is that companies get covered when they are already known to institutional investors, not when they are trying to become known. A company that Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, or a named crossover fund has backed publicly is already in the conversation. A company at the Series A with $10M raised from angels and a strong product is not, regardless of the product's quality.

This does not mean early-stage companies never appear. They do, when they are the specific subject of a scoop: an unreported funding round, a surprise partnership with a tech giant, or an acquisition offer. The common thread is that the information is exclusive and verifiably true, not that the company is impressive. Impressive is table stakes everywhere. Exclusive is the admission price here.

For AI startup PR in 2026, The Information is best thought of as a milestone outlet: you are ready for it when you have a deal or data that institutional investors would pay to learn about before anyone else does. Before that milestone, TechCrunch, Forbes, VentureBeat, and Decrypt will give you better reach for less friction, and they are genuinely the right moves at earlier stages. The tier-1 PR trap is spending your energy on outlets whose bar you cannot yet clear while ignoring the ones you can.

How to pitch, when you are ready

The Information reporters are reachable but selective. They are not on the standard PR wire lists. They have not opted into your newsletter. The right approach is a targeted, short, direct note to the specific reporter who covers your beat, with the scoop up front in the first two sentences, and the source package described clearly so they can make a fast decision on whether to pursue it.

Finding the right reporter matters more than at most outlets because the newsroom is small. On the AI side, reporters covering infrastructure, enterprise software, and venture capital are the entry points. On the crypto side, coverage tends to come through the venture and fintech reporters when institutional money is involved. Reading their recent bylines before reaching out is not optional: it tells you whether your story fits their current focus and gives you the specific hook that connects your news to what they have been writing about.

The pitch structure that worksTwo sentences maximum on the scoop itself: what happened, when, and why it matters to their readers. Then one sentence on your source package: who will go on record, what documents you can share under embargo. Then one sentence on timeline: when you need a decision by and when you will share the full briefing. Do not include a press release. Do not include a quote from your CEO. If they are interested, they will ask.

Exclusives matter at The Information more than at almost any other outlet, because the subscribers are paying precisely not to get the same story from five places. Offering an exclusive window, typically 48 to 72 hours before you release to the wire, is standard for funding scoops. For investigative pieces they initiate, exclusivity is built in by the nature of the story. For profile features, the reporter will tell you what they need.

When it is not worth trying

I advise most of the founders I work with to treat The Information as a second-order goal, not a primary placement target. Here is when I tell them not to bother.

  • You have a product launch or protocol upgrade. This is not a story for them. Use CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, The Block, or Blockworks for the sector audience, and TechCrunch or VentureBeat for the broader tech audience.
  • Your funding is below $30M and your lead is not a named institutional fund. The round does not clear the interest bar for their subscriber base.
  • You cannot offer exclusivity or a named source. Without these, you are asking them to write a story their competitors could run identically, which defeats the purpose of subscribing.
  • You are early in your PR program and have not built relationships with the reporter. Cold pitches to The Information from unknown senders rarely convert. Warm introductions from investors or founders who have previously worked with the reporter move faster.
Field ruleCredibility compounds harder than CAC. If you are not yet ready for The Information, building the record at CoinDesk, TechCrunch, Forbes, and Dark Reading is not settling. It is constructing the credibility infrastructure that makes The Information possible eighteen months from now.

The preparation work that makes it possible

The most consistent pattern I see in founders who eventually land at The Information is that they did not pitch it cold. They built the record first: a series of accurate, on-record coverage pieces at tier-one verticals and mainstream tech outlets, a named investor base that reporters already know, and a relationship with the reporter through prior quoted comments in other stories. By the time they pitch the scoop, the reporter has already cited them once or twice in passing, and the name is not a stranger in the inbox.

For AI founders, the path typically runs through Forbes, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat, with bylined placement at industry publications and a founder essay or two that establishes a named point of view. I ran exactly this sequence for Gaia AI, placing a Forbes piece framing them as "the Stripe for AI agents," then Decrypt and Benzinga, and a six-podcast tour that built the founder's voice as an entity in the AI infrastructure space. By the time a story of The Information's calibre becomes accessible, the founder is no longer introducing themselves to the reporter. That preparation work is the service I run under AI startup PR.

The same logic applies to Web3 founders. The MANTRA Chain coverage strategy, which broke through with a CoinDesk exclusive on the $11M raise and the Middle East RWA angle, worked because the founders had prior record, named investors willing to speak, and a genuinely differentiated angle the reporter's subscribers had not seen. The scoop was real. The sourcing was clean. The preparation existed before the pitch went out.

What to do if they are writing about you already

Sometimes The Information calls you, not the other way around. This happens when a reporter has a tip about your company, your investors, or a deal involving you, and is doing the standard right-of-reply call before publication. This is the situation where most founders make a costly mistake: they go silent, assume the story will not run, or give a non-answer that reads badly in print.

The right move is to engage quickly, provide a named spokesperson, and correct factual errors on the record with documentation. Silence is not protection. The story runs regardless, and silence reads as confirmation or evasion to the outlet's institutional audience. A clear, on-record statement from the CEO that corrects a material factual error and provides the accurate version of events is both the ethical response and the strategically smart one. The subscribers reading The Information piece will be the same investors and operators your founder needs to trust them for the next round.

The broader point is one I come back to across every tier-one placement: narrative architecture is built on accuracy, not spin. The Information's reporters are very good at their jobs, and the outlet's institutional subscribers are very good at detecting the difference between a company telling a story and a company reporting a fact. The two should be the same thing. When they are, The Information is genuinely achievable. When they are not, no pitch strategy closes the gap.

SJ
Shilika Jain

Fractional PR and ghostwriting for Web3 and AI founders. 50+ protocols placed across Forbes, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, The Block, Blockworks and AI Magazine, with bylined founder op-eds and essays across opinion desks. View full profile → · Book a 30-min teardown →

Frequently asked questions

What kind of story does The Information actually cover?
The Information covers stories that change how institutional investors, senior operators, and fund managers think about capital allocation: exclusive funding scoops, personnel moves at significant companies, strategy pivots backed by documents or on-record sources, and market data not available elsewhere. It does not cover product launches, token announcements, or protocol upgrades as standalone stories. The editorial test is whether a paying subscriber would feel the story was worth their subscription fee.
How many sources do you need to get a story placed?
There is no fixed number, but the effective standard is at least one named on-record source plus independent corroboration, either a second source or documents. Anonymous tips without corroboration rarely move forward at The Information. The outlet's credibility with institutional subscribers depends on sourcing that holds up to scrutiny, so reporters are methodical about confirming claims before they run.
Should an AI startup founder target The Information early in their PR program?
No. The Information is a milestone outlet, not an entry point. For most AI startup PR programs, the right sequence is TechCrunch, Forbes, and VentureBeat first, building the named record and investor relationships that make a future Information pitch credible. Pitching cold before that groundwork exists is usually a waste of a good story on an outlet that will pass. The tier-1 PR trap is spending energy on outlets whose bar you cannot yet clear.
What is the best way to pitch The Information?
A direct, short note to the specific reporter covering your beat, with the scoop stated in the first two sentences and the source package described clearly. No press release attached, no generic pitch to the editorial inbox. Identify the reporter through their recent bylines, connect the story to what they have been covering, and offer an exclusive window of 48 to 72 hours. Warm introductions from investors or founders the reporter already knows convert significantly better than cold outreach.
What should a founder do if The Information is writing a story about them?
Engage immediately. Provide a named spokesperson, correct factual errors with documentation, and give a clear on-record statement. Silence is not protection: the story runs either way, and non-engagement reads as evasion to an audience of institutional readers. The right-of-reply call is an opportunity to shape the record, not a threat to avoid. Treating it as the former is the strategically correct move and the honest one.

Building toward tier-one placement? Start with the AI startup PR program for the full record-building strategy, then read how to get into TechCrunch for the upstream placement sequence. The full playbook library covers pitching, pricing, and the AI-search layer.