Is your public relations team reaching the right media contacts? Having a list of journalists compiled in a media database helps you stay organized and efficient with your media outreach. Read on to improve your PR strategy through tips to creating and maintaining a journalist database.
Are you looking to leverage a media database in the Australian market? Check out our dedicated blog.
Table of Contents
What is a Media Database?
Filling & Maintaining a Media Database with Lists of Journalists
1. Identify your target audience
2. Identify relevant journalists
3. Review previous coverage
4. Utilize social media lists
5. Nurture journalists for your media database
6. Pitch with intention
7. Watch your market and competitors
8. Refine your targeting
9. Keep your list of journalists up-to-date
How To Create a Media List with Meltwater
What is a Media Database?
A media database is a repository of media contacts and journalists that PR professionals can use when reaching out for earned media coverage of a product, service, or company announcement.
Media or PR databases include, at a bare minimum, contact information for each journalist. Ideally, though, each journalist will also be tagged with other information making it easier to sort by industry and improve the relevancy of your public relations outreach.
Looking for media contacts? Check out Meltwater's media database.
Filling & Maintaining a Media Database with Lists of Journalists
Discovering relevant press contacts to add to your media database is a painstaking job. You could approach this project in-house, however most public relations agencies will use a service, such as , to access a curated list of global journalists and influencers.
Here are the 9 top tips to compiling and using a stellar press list of journalists for your media database:
1. Identify your target audience
To help with pinpointing the right journalists from a PR database, it’s good practice to build a detailed persona of your target audience. Who do you want your story to be read by? The more niche your answer is, the more relevant (and ultimately more useful) your media list will be.
Of course, you’ll be considering basic demographics like age range, gender, location, and job title but these don’t tell you the whole story.
Psychographics are just as, if not more, important for getting in front of the most relevant communications cross-section. They can tell you preferred social networks, lifestyle, personality, political views, and the kinds of publications they read & media they consume — do they prefer reading blogs, newspapers, trade magazines, forums, etc.? Get granular when creating audience personas; all this information will inform your journalist selection!
Tip: Take a look at the most popular US magazines
Some questions to ask yourself about your target audience:
- Who are they?
- Where are they located?
- What are their interests?
- What type of media do they consume?
- What publications do they read?
Once your audience has properly been profiled, and you know the type of content that interests them, you can start researching meaningful publications and gather your journalist list with this in mind.
Reading Tip: Take a look at the largest US newspapers
2. Identify relevant journalists
It can be easy to get caught up in reach figures. Logic dictates that reach = eyeballs, so that’s good, right? Wrong. It’s important to go after the right eyeballs, to maximize your PR efforts beyond just an impression.
Knowing exactly which contacts to add to your list of journalists is the first step in organizing and optimizing PR outreach. You need to have good foundations in order to see tangible results. We have listed a few considerations below.
Get to know writers, not just titles. Being aware of specific journalists that cover the types of content you want to get involved in is essential if you want your press list to be a useful tool.
You can uncover new journalists by staying up to date with news and jotting down key spokespeople covering the stories and trends relevant to you. This is time-consuming, however, and there’s lots of room for human error. You simply can’t read every single publication and are bound to miss some relevant writers.
To save time you can use a media monitoring tool like Meltwater to track industry news. Meltwater also provides a press contact / PR distribution solution to help scale your PR outreach efforts. Users can filter journalists by content, department, location and publication. You can also search based on topics they’ve written about recently to eliminate out-of-date contacts.
Meltwater also recently added a Media Contacts tab within our Explore tool for even more seamless way to identify and vet journalists who write on a particular topic.
What are the different types of journalists?
There are many different types of journalists that you could consider for your press list. Journalists may specialize in one specific kind of reporting or then may cover a wide range - before doing any kind of media outreach from your PR database it will be important to know the journalist's specialty.
Get more information below on the following types of journalists:
- Business journalists
- Investigative journalists
- Entertainment journalists
- Photojournalists
- Sports journalists
- Opinion journalists
Here are 6 different types of journalists your press list could include:
- Business journalists: covering stories in the business world such as notable IPOs, c-suite hires, mergers, the stock market, and investment advice. They will likely also cover various trends in business such as gender and racial diversity, or company work-from-home policies post-Covid to name a recent example.
- Investigative journalists: taking a tip or a hunch and probing further to produce heavily researched articles. These journalists often write pieces that form public opinion and will typically write on the same story multiple times as new information comes to light. Examples include: The Boston Globe unearthing years of abuse in the Catholic Church, and the Watergate scandal.
- Entertainment journalists: covering entertainment news these journalists write about film, arts, music, dance, and stage productions from many different angles. They could focus on the scholarly side, such reviews or trends, or they might focus on celebrity culture, either in tabloids or for lighter news sites such as BuzzFeed.
- Photojournalists: photojournalism refers to telling a story through visuals rather than words. Often these journalists cover major events like warzones or natural disasters. They may also work in tandem with reporters to provide accompanying images for news pieces.
- Sports journalists: like entertainment journalists, these reporters cover sporting events, athletes, teams and coaches, sports medicine, and trends in the sports industry.
- Opinion journalists: opinion pieces are written on a particular topic from an opinion-based point of view rather than purporting to be non-biased and strictly based on facts. These pieces offer a specific perspective based on the journalist's area of expertise, background, or other qualifications. Op-eds, essays, and advice columns are two popular forms of opinion journalism.
3. Review previous coverage
Keep a record of previous earned media and refer back to see which journalists and media outlets provided the highest volume of coverage. Do you see a pattern? Is there a particular story that received more press? Are there journalists or outlets that frequently cover you? If so, these are valuable contacts with whom you should maintain a good working relationship. They’re likely to be quick wins for coverage compared to others who aren’t familiar with your company.
In addition to the number of hits you received, look at the sentiment of the mentions. This helps you identify the journalists who consistently write favorable articles and flag those authors who may require some extra nurturing. Any good media monitoring tool will be able to provide you with this kind of insight.
Don't forget competitor coverage
Your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can easily become yours, so it’s good practice to put the same amount of effort into reviewing your competitor’s coverage as you do your own. Make a note of the types of publications their name keeps popping up in and add the journalists mentioning them to your own media list.
Tip: Learn how to conduct a competitor analysis
4. Utilize social media lists
Where you can, try and build media lists on social platforms too. Journalists may prefer communicating via channels like X or Facebook rather than by emailed or phone. This is also an easy way to keep up with the content they’re sharing on social media.
Social media can also be used to spot future opportunities. Journalists use hashtags such as #journorequest when they’re looking for support with stories. A social listening tool can send you instant alerts when a journalist tweets something along those lines, so you’re the first to know!
5. Nurture journalists for your media database
Authentic relationships take time to build, but those who play the long game are rewarded with sustainable and fruitful PR partnerships. Media relationships need to grow before they reach their full potential, yet many PR professionals’ skip the nurturing process and dive straight into what they want from the influencer — thereby not realizing these opportunities.
Instead, you should build up engagement over a long period of time. Start by following the journalist across all social platforms. Like their content, ask questions, and respond to questions posed by their community. Basically, get on their radar before “needing” them.
6. Pitch with intention
A blanket pitch sent to a broad set of journalists is easily disregarded as spam. Editors and journalists get up to hundreds of pitches a day, so it’s important to stand out and pitch with intention. The key is to identify the right person at a publication to pitch.
Pitching multiple people at the same publication reveals the lack of exclusivity, which immediately diminishes the value of your story. Meltwater can help save you time here by using keyword searches to identify individuals who write about topics relevant to your pitch. Further refinement is possible through a range of filters (geography, media type, role, reach, etc.).
Tip for journalists: having a Meltwater profile can be a helpful asset in receiving pitches that are relevant and if you move publications, this information is easily updated as well.
7. Watch your market and competitors
Keep a close eye on the market and your competitors on a regular basis. Note the publications and journalists that have already talked about subjects related to your company. These types of journalist lists are more likely to warm to your message since they have already shown a strong interest in your sector.
When you pitch, one thing you should always be considering is how to differentiate yourself from your competitors. After all, if they have already talked about a product similar to yours, they’re not going to want to cover the same story again. But you could offer them an alternative viewpoint or an extension of the story.
8. Refine your targeting
Keep your press lists short and sweet. It’s more effective to have a handful of very relevant journalists with whom you have good relations than a huge database of contacts you rarely speak to.
Here are some criteria to pay attention to when refining your list of journalists:
- Is the journalist a generalist or specialist?
- Are they addressing the general public or are they experts in a specific area?
- What’s their editorial line: critical, humorous, analytical?
- Do they mind being contacted via social media?
- Do they write chronicles, reports, articles, blogs etc?
By being aware of the above, you can adapt your messages to their way of processing information.
We can’t emphasize this step enough.
Journalists are overwhelmed by information. All it takes is one irrelevant email to become a blocked contact.
It’s easy to think that the more people we pitch to, the higher our chances are of landing a PR hit. This isn’t the case. Quality is better than quantity and personalization goes a long way. Even just addressing a journalist by their first name can make a difference!
9. Keep your list of journalists up-to-date
Creating a media list takes time, as does making sure your PR database stays up-to-date. Journalists will move around, so a regular audit of your media contacts will only help your outreach efforts.
There is no media list “final draft”, but rather a working draft that you will continue to add journalists to and modify over time. Here are our top tips for cleaning and maintaining your media database:
Monitor bounce backs
If emails start bouncing back from a media contact, it’s likely the person has left. Bounce back emails contain a lot of valuable information — who’s on vacation, who’s covering them, who’s left the outlet and, perhaps, who is replacing them. Don’t delete these emails until you mine them for information and update your media database accordingly.
Be aware of no responses
If you’ve tried pitching someone a number of times and they still haven’t bitten, don’t waste your time badgering them. After several failed attempts it's time to move on.
Never stop adding media contacts
Continuously look online, in the news, and on social media for those journalists who dominate relevant conversations that you want to be a part of and add them to your list.
Tip: Developing a relationship with somebody who is just starting out in the field is a lot easier than with a journalist who is very well established.
Keep tabs on media moves
There are lots of publications out there that provide readers with the movers and shakers in the industry — PR Week for one. You can also set up a search using your media monitoring tool to notify you when conversations around people leaving companies take place. That way you can begin building relationships with their replacements.
How To Create a Media List with Meltwater
If you’re interested in finding out more about how Meltwater can help you build a robust media database with relevant journalists, creating ROI driving PR outreach, be sure to fill out the form below to schedule a demo!
