A few days ago, I got to make one of my favourite kinds of phone calls. I rang Kat Lynn from The Soup Box to tell her something big: her story was about to be shared live, on national television.

It's the kind of call that makes this job worth doing. But it didn't happen because I got lucky, or because I sent a nice email to the right person at the right time. Landing PR and media exposure like this comes down to storytelling, and the years I spent learning how newsrooms actually think.

Have you heard of The Soup Box?

Here's how it works. People buy fresh produce from farmers at the Toowoomba Farmers Market. That produce gets donated to The Soup Box, which passes it on to Base Services, where it's turned into meals for our most vulnerable community members.

It's a simple idea, built on a genuinely good cycle: support local farmers, feed people who need it, strengthen the community in the process. And now, the plan is to take that whole initiative national. This coverage on Weekend TODAY wasn't just a nice mention. It was a real step towards that.

Why storytelling is at the heart of good PR

I'm a trained journalist. Before I started MJ Communications, I was pitching stories DAILY, hunting for the unique angle that would make a story stick with a reader long after they'd finished reading it.

That background matters more than people realise when it comes to landing media coverage. I understand how the news cycle works, and more importantly, why people actually want to hear a story in the first place. That's not something you pick up overnight by watching a few YouTube tutorials on PR. It's years of knowing which angle will land, which moment in a story matters most, and how to pitch it so a newsroom actually says yes instead of scrolling past your email.

This is really the difference between PR and general digital marketing. Digital marketing Toowoomba businesses are used to is often about consistency: regular posts, steady engagement, a clean brand feed. Media coverage is a different skill entirely. It's about knowing exactly which single story, told exactly the right way, is worth a journalist's time.

What actually gets a newsroom to say yes to your PR pitch

When I sat down to pitch The Soup Box, I wasn't just thinking about what made the charity special to the people already involved with it. I was thinking about what would make a producer sitting in a Sydney newsroom, scrolling through dozens of PR pitches a day, stop and pay attention.

That meant leading with the human angle, not the mission statement. It meant finding the moment in the story that a viewer at home, who has never heard of Toowoomba's farmers market, would still feel something about. And it meant understanding the practical realities of a national breakfast show: what fits their format, what their audience responds to, and what timing actually gets a segment across the line.

This is the part that gets missed in a lot of small business marketing advice. Getting media coverage isn't about writing a well-crafted email and hoping. It's about understanding storytelling itself, not just being able to write a nice caption.

The takeaway for your own PR and storytelling

If you want your story told properly, on a stage bigger than your own social pages, you need someone who thinks like a journalist first and a marketer second. That's the difference between a PR pitch that gets ignored and one that gets a phone call back.

For Toowoomba businesses especially, this matters. Regional stories don't automatically land on a national producer's desk. They need someone who understands both the local context and what a newsroom is actually looking for.

A huge thank you to Weekend TODAY for giving The Soup Box a platform to share that story with the whole country. If you want to see how it all came together, you can watch the interview here:

If you want to understand how to properly tell your story, jump into The Story Lounge for just $98 a month, cancel anytime, and start learning the same approach I use to get client stories in front of the people who matter. Click the image below.