I get this call more than any other: "We're getting coverage. We're in the trades, we're in local news, sometimes we're national. And nothing is changing." The lawyer isn't wrong that they have press. They're wrong about what press is for.
Coverage is a proxy metric. Opinion, pressure, and settlement posture are the actual targets, and the two move independently more often than people expect. A defendant can absorb a story if it lands in front of the wrong audience, on the wrong day, in an outlet nobody the defendant answers to actually reads. Volume without placement is just noise that happens to be true.
When coverage isn't moving anything, I don't start by writing more of it. I start by mapping where it's actually landing against who needs to see it — the board, the insurer, the local jury pool, the regulator, the reporter's own editor who decides whether this is a one-day story or a beat. Most of the time the gap isn't effort. It's aim.
That's an audit, not a guess: what ran, where, who shared it, and whether it reached the audiences that actually apply pressure. Once that's mapped, the redirect is usually specific and small — a different outlet, a different spokesperson, a different day relative to a filing — not a bigger campaign.
Even well-placed coverage fails if the story itself doesn't do its job. Every piece has to answer four things, in order, or a reader with too much competing for their attention will scroll past it: what happened, why they should care, what it's costing them, and what to do about it. Skip a step and the story reads as accurate but forgettable — technically coverage, functionally invisible.
The volume of press a case generates is the easiest thing to point to and the least useful thing to optimize for. The harder, more useful question is always the same one: who actually needs to read this, and did it reach them.