Having been directly involved with multiple first-tier PR firms in my career to date: you can spend $1000, $10,000, or $50,000 in a year on a PR firm and still get nothing.

Here's the thing. PR firms are not magic. If you have something interesting to cover, you can get it covered in the trade press (or Techcrunch or whatever) without a PR firm. On the flip side, if what you have is not naturally interesting, the trade press isn't really going to cover it even with a PR firm.

In my experience, the "value" PR firms offer includes:

* Two-hour long meetings about company positioning and the values you want to communicate to the press

* Press training (note: actually valuable)

* A PR landscape assessment where they tell you that you care about Techcrunch, ComputerWorld, Wired, and Slashdot, and your competitors were mentioned N times last year

* A snippet service wherein a human being will do the job of Google News Alerts for you, mostly by means of using Google News Alerts

* A filing service for your press releases

Apart from press training, which you don't need and can only use if you're getting in front of the press, there's nothing that a PR firm does to get you covered that you can't do just as effectively yourself, regardless of what PG says.

My company has gotten pretty good coverage in the press, by which I mean that my company has gotten more coverage in some trade pubs than successful public company competitors. Here's my take on what to do:

* Blog. Many trade press reporters skim blogs for leads.

* Court controversy. Take sides on every issue you can reasonably take sides on.

* Figure out things to do with your product or service that will be newsworthy. Your product or service is itself probably not newsworthy.

* Court Reddit aggressively. I kind of doubt Reddit has any trickle-down effect into paper PR --- or even Slashdot --- but if you're reading YC, the people you want to reach are probably easiest to address with Reddit votes.

* Secure speaking opportunities. Make a calendar of every event in your space throughout the year, put together a set of abstracts, and cold call. Short of having printable intel on the most recent Apple security vulnerability, nothing gets press hits like speaking slots. (Imagine a PR person trying to allocate a slot for you at a technical conference --- they actually try!)

* Figure out who the people who actually write stories in your space are, and make friends with them. More on this, but not much more, in a sec.

Here's what I think doesn't work:

* Press releases. There may be value in getting into the habit, but we stopped doing this real quick. Remember: the only reason for you to issue press releases is if you honestly think someone will write it up. If you want to do it, you can get a PRNewsWire account for cheap (or use a "free press release" service). The advice you will get is, look at an Apple press release and copy as much of it as you can, so that yours looks professional.

* Cold pitching stories to editors. This doesn't even work for PR people (witness all the companies who drop $50,000 for 200 printed words a year and, if they're lucky, an pay-for-play "op-ed").

In the past few years, we've figured out a bunch of things that have gotten us closer to the press. I'm not about to give them up, but I'll tell you the (obvious) theme: be helpful to the writers. Writers are (a) on a deadline and (b) looking for interesting stories. What you have to say is probably not interesting, but that doesn't mean you can't help with both (a) and (b).