DIY PR: How To Make Your Media List Perfect for Press Pitching

Did you read my last post detailing how to write a press release that people want to read? This is the follow-up – how to make your media list perfect for press pitching.

You’ll learn what a media list is, how to create one for free and where to find those all-important journalist contact details.

Ready to take the next step in securing that much-needed media coverage for your business?

Here’s how to create a pitch-ready media list.

#PR #PublicRelations #MediaLists

A media list is as a media list does

If you’re thinking “what in the blue blazes is a media list, Rob?”

Here’s the answer…

A media list is a list of media contacts, complete with helpful information such as the name of the journalist, their email address and the publication they work for.

It’s a super-handy document that helps you streamline your pitching process and make sure you’re reaching the right people in the right places.

Make sure yours is up to date and easily-accessible before you start reaching out to reporters, podcasters, radio stations and TV broadcasters to feature your business.

Wherefore art thou, media list?

There are plenty of platforms that have done the job of rounding up media contact information for you, and offer functions such as batch emailing.

• Cision

• Muck Rack

• Roxhill

• Prowly

• Prezly

• Qwoted

All great tools, but they come with a (hefty, in some instances) price tag.

I’ll talk more about the tools of the trade that some PR Consultants use in another post. But there’s a free, albeit manual and time-consuming method to building a media list.

It requires searching for the names and numbers yourself and collating them in some form. I use Google Sheets, but other brands are available.

We’ll get onto that part shortly. First, like any decent ‘how-to’, we’ll start at the beginning of the process.

The steps to making a media list for perfect for press pitching

Creating a media list is a multi-step process, including:

• Strategy and planning

• Research and information gathering

• Data collation and storage

Step 1: Get your story straight

Before you go scouring the web for names, numbers and emails, you need to be clear on your goals. Understand the story you’re telling, why you’re telling it, and why now?

• Are you pitching a company announcement, such as an award or a change of location for your company HQ?

• Is it a thought leadership article? An editorial piece on overcoming financial challenges as a startup tech company, perhaps?

• Or are you offering up interviews with your newly hired CTO, looking to share his knowledge on the latest trends in AI?

Having a strategy and planning accordingly will help you pinpoint the types of media and media personnel you need to reach out to.

• Is it a worthy story for the nationals, or more niche and better served to trade mags?

• Are you going to pitch at radio and TV, or focus on digital news sites?

Whichever angle you approach it from, make sure your story is timely, relevant and newsworthy,

Step 2: Initiate search

Without access to any of the aforementioned platforms with ready-made lists, how do you find the right people to pitch to?

A Google search is a smart starting point.

(We’re working here on the assumption that you don’t already have a specific list of publications you want to pitch to. If you do, skip to step 3.)

As an example, if you’re a tech startup sharing news of a significant funding round, search UK investment news publications.

An example of what the SERPs (search engine results pages) bring up in response to that search query can be seen in the image below.

You’ll see the top three results on Google are:

• Investment Week

• UK Investor Magazine

• Financial Times

(The results you get may differ depending on location, prior search activity and various other factors that contribute to the personalised search experience of the modern day.)

Change it up

A single google search won’t show you every potential publication that falls under your search term. It’ll show you the ones that have mastered (or manipulated) the art of SEO (search engine optimisation, mostly.

You will have to scroll past a few pages/results to get to lesser known news sites.

You’ll also need to rejig the search query a few times too. For example:

• Investment news publications UK

• UK news publications investment

• Business Investment news UK

• UK business investment news sites

Alternative ways to find relevant journalists and broadcasters

Search engines aren’t the only way to find relevant journalists and broadcasters to pitch your story to. Here’s some others.

• AI chatbots:

ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot. These are examples of AI-powered chatbots that use natural language processing to respond to prompts. These tools can be useful in finding additional news publications.

See the example in the image below, where I asked ChatGPT to provide a list of UK tech news publications that share healthtech, medtech and health technology news.

Below is another ChatGPT example, where I requested a list of all Health Editors at UK National Newspapers.

It’s not a foolproof method. Some publications the bot lists may no longer exist, and it's possible that the editors named have since moved on from those roles.

ChatGPT won’t provide email addresses either. As per the example below:

I asked ChatGPT to Provide the email addresses of editors at the daily mail.

It’s response?

“I can’t provide specific email addresses for individuals at the Daily Mail or any other organization, as sharing private contact information without consent would violate privacy norms. However, many news outlets provide general contact or submission email addresses for inquiries, story submissions, or corrections.

So there’s still manual work to be done. Still, AI chatbots do have a place in media list curation.

• #JournoRequest

Journalists use the journorequest hashtag to find sources for their stories, when they need expert insight or opinions..

It’s heavily used on Twi–, nay, X.

It’s also gained steam on BlueSky, the new kid on the social media block.

In November 2024, BlueSky experienced a whopping 352% rise in usage in the UK (519% in the U.S.) compared to the 10 months prior. Largely due to a mass exodus from the aforementioned X.

Search #JournoRequest on either of these social sites and you’ll find numerous calls for contributions from reporters.

Step 3: Find the right contact

Let's take the top result from our earlier UK investment news publications search – Investment Week – and use that as the starting point for step three.

In this instance, we’re looking to pitch news of a successful funding round for a tech startup. You have a few options for finding the right Investment Week journalist to cover your story.

Go direct to the contact page

As seen in the image above, you can access the Investment Week contact page by clicking ‘more’ in the header.

Within that page it lists the members of the editorial team and their email addresses. Easy!

You can click on the names to access a bio that tells you a bit more about each editor's role, which may or may not make it clearer as to who to email.

On this occasion, it’s a safe bet to say that Investment Week’s News editor, Valeria Martinez, is the one to pitch to.

View the publications staff list/masthead

Sometimes the contact page is unhelpful. Either it doesn’t list names, or only has a single, company-wide email.

Quite often, believe it or not, news sites don’t have a contact page – or, at least, there’s no visible tab on the page to click.

When faced with this scenario, you can often find a list of editors and reporters by clicking a tab (usually in the site’s footer) called ‘meet the team’, ‘staff list’, ‘masthead’ or something similar.

They’re often listed in the site’s ‘about us’ page too.

If all of these pages come up short, you can always go back to Google and search ‘investment week news editor’ or ‘contact investment week’.

Search for a similar story and see who the named author is

Another way to find the right reporter to pitch your news is to utilise the website’s search function to find similar stories.

After typing ‘tech startup funding round’ into the search bar, I’m met with a list of related stories on Investment Week (see image below).

Clicking on the top result opens the article, where you’ll see the author’s (in this case, Linus Uhlig) byline. Sending your story to them is also a safe bet.

Finding the author’s email address varies in difficulty, depending on the publication.

Oftentimes it’s easily viewable in the author’s bio. Sometimes you have to go back to the contact page.

On occasion, you’ll find that the email address isn’t there, but a link to their Twitter…sorry…X, is – and journalists often have their email in their X bio.

Address not found

Not all news websites make it easy to find the journalist’s contact details. Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper – sometimes it’s impossible to find a specific email address, no matter how hard you try.

In these instances, you’ll have to use the generic email found (usually) in the website footer.

Step 4: The little black… worksheet

Where do you put all these valuable contact details you’ve found?

Back in the day, PR professionals had a little black book worth its weight in gold. Lose it at your peril!

But these days, as with everything, it's digital.

You can use CRM software, like Hubspot or Monday. But I use Google Sheets.

It’s free, easy-to-use and does exactly what I need it to do.

If you’re not a fan of Google, there’s always Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers. Either way, the process of storing your contacts in a spreadsheet is simple. Here’s one I made earlier…

As you can see, there are 4 columns in use, titled:

• Publication: For the name of the newspaper, magazine, podcast, radio station, etc.

• Name: Meaning the name of the journalist.

• Role: The job title of the journalist, i.e. Culture Editor.

• Email: The email address with which to contact said journalist

This is the baseline info required. You can add other details to your media list, such as phone numbers or links to relevant articles.

Media list made

That’s how you create a media list ready for pitching the press. My next blog will cover the actual pitching, so keep an eye out for that.

In the meantime, if you’d like to delegate the task of creating a media list onto someone else, send me a message. I can save you hours of research and deliver a comprehensive list relevant to your business and the stories you want to share.