There is a stretch in the life of most small brands where earned coverage clearly matters and there is no budget for anyone to go and get it. Allen Halas, who has worked the music side of this, describes the window plainly on the Unscripted Small Business podcast.
My background, I started as a journalist, worked through that.
Joshua Altman, Unscripted Small Business
That is Joshua Altman, and it is worth noting first because it reframes what follows. The people deciding whether to quote you came up through newsrooms, and they are reading for whether you can actually answer the question – not for whether you hired someone to ask.
The DIY window is real, and it closes
I left that thinking I’d go back to a newsroom after being a freelance reporter and didn’t go back to a newsroom.
Joshua Altman, Unscripted Small Business
Allen’s version of the same argument is about money rather than credentials. His point, lightly condensed from the recording: if you are an independent artist, learning to craft a press release and build a brand online carries you a long way – until there is enough revenue to hire a PR firm or a music PR agent at a couple of thousand a month.
What this means for links
The link-building version of this is that outreach and digital PR are the same motion at different budgets. A founder who can explain their subject clearly in an email is doing the job a publicist would be hired to do. The constraint is never the writing. It is knowing which reporter is asking, today.
More on this: earning editorial links with owner quotes and podcast guesting as digital PR.
Joshua Altman’s quotes are verbatim, verified against the raw transcript on 11 September 2026. Allen Halas’s contribution is paraphrased rather than quoted, because the cleaned version joined two of his turns and removed filler – the substance is his, the exact wording is not.