I think your best bet would be to find the intersection of two sets: people who will be excited about what you are making, and people that have well-read blogs or write for good tech outlets. Contact them and, using your best skill of engagement, see if you can get them to look at your service. If you can win them, and get them excited, you might get them to feature you.

If you are featured somewhere, it's easy to post that article onto HN and reddit (or get it posted). Then you need to hope someone notices. Tweets from people with followers tend to help too. Once a story gains a certain critical mass, it will grow itself. It will have "gone viral".

The big thing here is that you need to be doing something that's interesting enough to be newsworthy, or you need to be someone who is interesting enough that what you're doing becomes newsworthy by association. The rapportive guys? They had a fantastic idea that /one/ person in the news industry got excited about - who helped to win other people over, and they had a response. My point: is your product good enough to get people excited? What is the power of the intersection of that set? That's what you need for press coverage.

Not everybody can be featured on NYT without a product out, but setting up a basic marketing campaign is not difficult (and it is certainly inexpensive). That's my (current) recipe:

. Twitter and Facebook - Open a twitter and facebook company account. Invite all your friends and colleagues. Follow interesting people (blogger and tech leader). Most importantly: don't spam, but engage in conversations.

. Blog - Obviously, you need a blog. Don't make it a boring marketing blog. Keep a personal voice. Talk about your experience building the product/company. Share advices.

. YouTube - Upload screencasts of your product

. Conferences - That's the best place to meet bloggers. Hang around with your company (funny) t-shirt, hat, something that attract the attention of the people. That's a good ice-breaker to start talking to people.

. Startup Competitions - That's the best way to go to techcrunch or important blogs. Participate in startup competition. You don't need to win; just with the participation you'll see the name of your company in the major blogs.

All these thing won't probably be enough to be featured on the NYT, but they will certainly spread out the name of your company/product. At least, it worked quite well in my case.

There are some really interesting blogs on this topic. I am actually going to post one shortly.

I based my strategy off of this post: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-ad...

It's a must read.