How to Get Featured in the Vancouver Sun

The Vancouver Sun is a long-established daily newspaper covering Vancouver and British Columbia. It is staff-written, which means coverage is earned, and locally focused, which means a founder here has a real opening that a national pitch would not give them.

What the Vancouver Sun is

A city and provincial newspaper reporting on Vancouver and BC news, politics, business, housing, health, sport and culture for a general readership.

Its journalism is produced by staff reporters and columnists. There is no contributor programme to join and no fee that becomes a news article.

Who realistically gets covered

People and organisations with a real presence in British Columbia. Local employers, property and housing stories, technology and clean energy firms, resource and trade businesses, health and research organisations, and experts who can speak to provincial policy.

The province has its own preoccupations — housing costs, the environment, resource industries, the port and trade, wildfire and climate, and the relationship between the Lower Mainland and the rest of BC. A pitch that connects to one of those is playing on home ground.

Read a fortnight of the paper before you pitch anything. Ten minutes spent seeing which reporter covers which subject will do more for your odds than any amount of polish on the email itself.

Why local relevance decides it

This is the point most pitches miss. A city desk is not weighing your business against every company in the country. It is asking whether readers in Vancouver and BC will care.

That makes the field much smaller and your odds much better, but only if the local connection is genuine. Be specific: the neighbourhood, the number of people employed here, the provincial rule that changed, the local consequence you can describe. A national press release forwarded to a city desk announces itself instantly.

If you have no real BC connection, this is the wrong target, and pretending otherwise wastes a journalist's time and your own.

How to pitch it

• One sentence, one story. What happened, who it affects here, why now.
• The right desk. Business, city news, environment and culture are separate beats with separate editors.
• Evidence. A figure, a document, a named person who will talk. Checkable beats impressive.
• A person at the centre. Local journalism runs on people, not on companies.
• Speed. Answer quickly. Same-day deadlines decide who ends up in the piece.

What you cannot buy

Editorial coverage. Advertising and sponsored content exist, they are labelled, and they are legitimate products when you know that is what you are buying.

Nobody outside the newsroom can guarantee a news story. If an offer promises one, ask directly whether it is a reporter's article, an advertisement or a wire release, and treat evasion as the answer.

That question is worth asking of every offer you receive, not just the obviously dubious ones. The distinction between earned journalism and a paid placement is the whole of what you are buying.

What we do

Digital Networking Agency identifies the angle a BC desk would treat as a story, builds the press record that supports it, and places clients in publications where we have real reach. You approve every word before anything goes out.

We do not sell newspaper placements, because nobody can. What we can do is make your story worth a reporter's attention and give you a public record that makes the next pitch easier than the last one.

We will also tell you when a masthead is not realistic for your business right now. That is more useful to you than a promise nobody could keep.

Frequently asked questions

Can you pay to be featured in the Vancouver Sun?

Not for editorial coverage. Advertising and sponsored content are separate, labelled commercial products.

Do I have to be based in Vancouver?

You need a genuine British Columbia connection — an office, staff, customers, a project or a provincial issue you can speak to credibly. A postcode alone is not the point.

Is local coverage worth pursuing if I want national press later?

Yes. It is more attainable, it is real journalism, and a track record of it is exactly what makes a national pitch credible when you make one.