The Media Kit Test: What Happens When a Journalist Asks and You Don't Have One

Picture a journalist replying to your pitch with two lines: “Keen to run this — can you send through your media kit and a hi-res photo?” The pitch has worked. Without a media kit, what goes out forty minutes later is likely to be a scramble: an old LinkedIn bio pasted into a Word document, a logo saved as a screenshot, and a phone photo from a product launch two years ago.

A strong pitch can sometimes survive a messy follow-up like that. It doesn’t always. A journalist on deadline moves on to the next pitch in the inbox if the kit takes too long to assemble, or if the only photo on hand is too small to print.

A media kit is one of those PR basics nobody builds until someone asks for it, and by then there’s no time to do it properly. This post covers what actually needs to be in one, how to draft the written parts with AI in an afternoon, where to host it so a journalist can open it in one click, and what AI still can’t do for you here. If you want the hosting side in more depth, The Press Page Journalists Actually Use: A Small Business Build Guide is the companion piece.

What Is a Media Kit, and Does a Small Business Actually Need One?

A media kit is a short, standing set of materials: a boilerplate paragraph, an executive bio, a one-page fact sheet, a logo, and a few hi-res photos. A journalist, podcast host, or event organiser should be able to use all of it without emailing you follow-up questions. Any business pitching media, applying for awards, or appearing on podcasts needs one, because the alternative is reassembling the same materials under deadline pressure every time someone asks.

You don’t need one if you’ve never pitched a journalist and have no plans to start. For everyone else doing PR work, the real question isn’t whether to build a kit. It’s whether to build it now, calmly, or during the ten minutes after an editor replies “yes.”

The pitch that earns that reply is covered in How to Write a Media Pitch That Actually Gets Read (Using AI the Right Way), and the list it goes to in How to Build an Australian Media List Without an Expensive Database (Using AI).

What Actually Belongs in a Kit Journalists Will Open

Keep it to what a journalist genuinely needs, not everything the business has ever written about itself. A kit that runs too long gets skimmed past the same way one missing a logo file gets a follow-up email nobody has time to answer.

• A boilerplate paragraph: 60 to 100 words describing what the business does, who it serves, and one or two concrete facts such as founding year, location, or size. This is the paragraph that closes every press release, so it needs to stay identical everywhere it appears.
• An executive bio: 100 to 150 words per spokesperson, written in third person, covering their role, relevant background, and one credibility marker a journalist can actually check.
• A one-page fact sheet: founding date, location, headcount, key products or services, and any genuinely verifiable numbers, not rounded-up guesses.
• Logo files: a transparent PNG and, ideally, a vector file such as SVG or EPS, because a screenshot of the website header doesn’t print or scale.
• Two to four hi-res photos: a headshot per spokesperson and one or two product or team shots, each at least 1MB and licensed for media use.
• Contact details: a real name, a direct email, and a phone number a journalist can use if the email bounces on deadline.

That’s the full list. A “recent coverage” section is a nice extra once there’s press worth listing, not a reason to delay the first version.

The Workflow: Building a Media Kit With AI in an Afternoon

This assumes you’re starting from nothing, using a general AI chatbot such as Claude or ChatGPT for the written parts and Canva for the layout.

1. Gather the raw facts first (20 minutes). Before opening any AI tool, write down the real numbers: founding date, headcount, locations, and anything comfortable surviving a journalist’s fact-check. AI drafts confident-sounding copy around whatever figure it’s given, so get the figure right before it goes anywhere near a sentence.

2. Draft the boilerplate (10 minutes). Feed in the raw facts and ask for three versions at different lengths: a one-line description, a 60-word boilerplate, and a 150-word “about” paragraph. Pick the one that sounds like how the business actually talks, not the most adjective-heavy option.

3. Draft the executive bio (10–15 minutes). Feed in a rough list of career facts, not a polished LinkedIn summary. AI drafts a better bio from raw material than from something already smoothed over. Ask for a 120-word version in third person and cut anything that reads as a compliment rather than a fact.

4. Build the one-pager in Canva (20–30 minutes). Use a free media kit or one-pager template, drop in the boilerplate, bio, fact sheet, and logo, and export as a PDF under 5MB. A kit that won’t open on a phone on a train doesn’t get read.

5. Sort the photos (15–30 minutes, longer if none exist). Pull hi-res shots from past shoots, or book a short photographer session if there genuinely aren’t any. An upscaled phone photo still looks like an upscaled phone photo. Confirm usage rights for every photo before it goes anywhere near the kit.

6. Build the hosting page (20–30 minutes). Covered below. This is the step most small businesses skip, which is also why most media kits end up as 40MB email attachments.

7. Get a second read (10–15 minutes). Have someone outside the business check every fact, date, and spelling of the founder’s name. This is the step that catches an embarrassing error before a journalist does.

Total time for a first build: two to two and a half hours. Once it exists, updating it before the next pitch is a 15-minute job.

A copyable starting prompt for the boilerplate:

“Here are the facts about my business: [paste raw facts — founding year, location, what you do, who you serve, headcount]. Write three versions of a company boilerplate: one line, 60 words, and 150 words. Plain, factual language only, no ‘passionate about’ or ‘revolutionising.’ This needs to work as the closing paragraph of a press release.”

Can AI Write Your Boilerplate and Executive Bio?

Yes, for a first draft, and it’s genuinely faster than staring at a blank page. AI is good at turning a list of raw facts into a boilerplate or bio that reads cleanly, as long as it’s given real information rather than being asked to invent the flattering parts itself.

What it can’t do is know which facts are true, current, or worth including. An AI-assisted bio can list a qualification someone hasn’t actually finished, and a boilerplate can keep saying “founded in 2019” two office moves later, if nobody checks before it ships. Treat the AI draft as a first pass that gets checked against the business’s own records every time, not just the first time.

Where Should the Kit Live So a Journalist Can Actually Find It?

It needs to live at one stable link that drops into an email in a single line, not an attachment someone has to download, unzip, or request access to.

A simple hosted page, built with a tool like Carrd, is the cheapest option that still looks considered: one page, a custom domain or a clean subdomain, and a direct link to each asset. A Carrd Pro Standard plan with a custom domain runs US$19 a year for up to ten sites, according to carrd.com/pro — correct at the time of writing, as with any subscription price.

A folder on Google Drive or Dropbox, shared as “anyone with the link can view,” works as a free fallback, though it looks less considered and gives far less control over layout. It’s a reasonable starting point for a business not ready to commit to a dedicated page yet.

A page on the existing business website is the better long-term option for anyone already updating that site regularly, because it keeps the kit under the business’s own domain and in front of anyone researching the company, not only journalists who received the direct link. If that is the route you take, the press page guide linked above covers how to structure and build it.

Avoid a password-gated form as the only way in. A journalist on deadline who hits a “request access” screen before seeing a logo file will often just grab whatever low-res image turns up on a quick search instead.

What This Actually Costs

The free version costs nothing beyond time: a Google Drive folder, the free tier of Canva, and whichever AI chatbot the business already uses or a free plan of one.

A more polished setup costs under US$20 a month, and most of it is optional. Canva Pro runs A$165 a year for one person, according to canva.com’s Australian pricing page — correct at the time of writing. A Carrd Pro Standard site with a custom domain is US$19 a year. A general AI chatbot such as Claude Pro runs around US$20 a month billed monthly, according to claude.com’s pricing page, again correct at the time of writing and worth checking before committing, since plans shift.

For businesses that outgrow the DIY version (several spokespeople, frequent updates, built-in media monitoring and distribution), dedicated PR software such as Prowly starts at US$258 a month billed annually for two users, according to G2’s pricing listing for the platform. That’s a real jump, and not the right first step for a business sending its first media kit. It earns its cost once there’s enough PR activity happening that the time saved on distribution and tracking outweighs the subscription.

What Not to Do With Your Media Kit

Don’t send it as a 40MB PDF attachment. Most inboxes reject or bury it, and a journalist on deadline won’t wait for it to download. Host it, and send the link.

Don’t use an AI-generated headshot in place of a real photo. Readers and journalists are getting sharper at spotting synthetic images, and a business caught using one for its own founder’s photo takes a credibility hit that’s hard to walk back, particularly given how much scrutiny AI-generated imagery is getting right now. The wider disclosure question is covered in AI Wrote the First Draft. Do You Have to Say So?.

Don’t let the boilerplate drift. If the website says “12 years in business” and the media kit still says “10,” that’s the kind of small inconsistency that makes a journalist double-check everything else on the page.

Don’t leave stale numbers sitting in the kit for years. A headcount, customer count, or award mention that was accurate in 2023 and never updated is worse than leaving the field out, because it actively misleads anyone who takes it at face value.

Don’t skip the photo rights check. If the business doesn’t hold clear usage rights to a photo, including one taken by a client or an event photographer, it stays out of the kit, no matter how good the shot is.

What AI Can’t Do Here

AI can’t verify the business’s own facts. It writes a confident, well-structured sentence around whatever number it’s given, true or not, and it has no way of flagging that a headcount figure is eighteen months out of date unless someone tells it so.

AI can’t take the photos or clear their usage rights. That still means booking a photographer, or at minimum checking with whoever took the shot that it’s cleared for media use.

AI can’t judge which version of an asset a specific outlet needs. A print magazine wants a different resolution and crop than a podcast’s show notes page, and that call still sits with a person who knows the request.

And AI can’t keep the kit updated on its own. Someone on the team needs to own a standing task, once a quarter is enough for most small businesses, to check the facts, swap any photos that are ageing badly, and confirm every link still opens.