Tell real stories. Draft your own story for release and send it to a writer to get their interest. If your writing is good, they'll likely lower their rates if they are interested in the work, and then they'll work to one-up the quality and content of your story. But you could also just release your draft locally and then hold its hand through a virality process.

That is, there are many horror stories of good people with great stories paying a publicist that gets an article "in" to some sort of a major brand or press, but it takes a bench seat or heaps into a side-brand or lodges into a connected page to the real brand, which has very little chance of anyone from the front page actually finding it. Of course, you don't want this.

Get around that with a real PR strategy that starts with real local heat, builds to regional distribution, and then national fire. You can influence every step of the way if you plan the strategy ahead of time and are prepared to do the tactical work to lift it. Authentic virlaity vs. paid virality is a whole other conversation. You don't want to try to push junk content into national attention. Better to have something with real quality, fire, and then add smart sweat and oxygen to spread it around. Think: Armies of people. How many armies do you have access to? How do you get them to shoot in the same direction? What's in it for them? And how do you momentously build wars of conversations that lead to fear, peace, excitement, and the influential emotions that get people talking about the same thing.

You might use emotional planning frameworks like Cialdini. Russia likes to use bots and social automation. You might target opinion leaders with "social snipe" style ads, or directly engage local communities in the conversation through pre-planned events, co-promotion, or reciprocity campaigns that build momentum.

You'll learn a lot more and get a lot more if you do it yourself and get good at building your own PR strategies from a local to national level. Sometimes, foot on the pavement and relationships goes further than money, if you know what's effective.