Pitching blind is one of the most exhausting things you can do in public relations. You spend time crafting a story angle, writing something you’re actually proud of, then spend the next 45 minutes trawling LinkedIn and Twitter trying to work out whether the person you’re sending it to still works at the same publication they did two years ago. More often than not, they don’t.
This is the unglamorous reality of media outreach that nobody really talks about when they’re selling you the dream of getting your client in The Guardian. The story is maybe 30% of the job; the other 70% is knowing who to send it to, and having a way to actually reach them that doesn’t involve guesswork or cold-reading somebody’s bio.
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The Problem With Outdated Contact Lists
Most small agencies and in-house teams are still working off spreadsheets that were last updated sometime during the pandemic. Journalists move around constantly, beat specialisms shift, some publications fold entirely and the email bounces back with a 550 error that nobody checks for weeks. It’s a mess, honestly.
And the cost isn’t just wasted time. Pitching the wrong person, or pitching someone who left a publication six months ago, actually damages relationships. Editors talk. If you’re the agency that keeps sending irrelevant pitches to journalists who’ve moved on, that reputation sticks around longer than you’d expect.
This is why having access to a properly maintained media database changes the way you work in a fairly fundamental sense. Not because it automates your thinking, but because it removes the hours you’d otherwise spend on admin that has nothing to do with storytelling.
What Good Looks Like
There’s a distinction worth making between a media database that’s essentially just a glorified contacts export, and one that’s actually useful on a day-to-day basis. The useful kind is updated regularly, tells you what topics a journalist actually covers rather than just listing their job title, and ideally gives you some sense of what formats or angles they respond to.
Beat information matters more than most people give it credit for. A technology editor at a regional paper is covering very different stories to a technology editor at a national broadsheet, and a list that lumps them together is barely more useful than a Google search. You want specificity.
Contact details that are actually current are, somewhat obviously, the baseline. But beyond that, the best tools let you filter by geography, publication type, circulation, recent coverage and a few other variables that actually affect whether your pitch is relevant. If you’re trying to reach trade press journalists in Yorkshire, you don’t want to wade through 4,000 results to find eight relevant contacts.
The Time Argument Is Real
There’s always a conversation about whether the subscription cost is worth it, particularly for freelancers or small boutique agencies running on tight margins. And look, I get that. Some of the bigger platforms charge north of £3,000 a year, which is genuinely hard to justify if you’re doing three or four campaigns.
But the time calculation usually ends up pointing in one direction when you sit down and actually do it. If a senior account manager is spending four or five hours a week on contact research, that’s somewhere around 200 hours a year. At a billable rate of even £50 an hour, that’s £10,000 worth of time going into something a decent database could handle in twenty minutes. The maths aren’t complicated.
That said, no tool replaces the actual relationship-building part. A database gets you the door. What happens after you knock on it is still entirely down to whether your pitch makes sense for the journalist’s audience, whether your timing is decent, and whether you’ve done the basic work of reading their recent articles before you email them. Plenty of people haven’t.
Getting It Into Your Workflow
The agencies that use these tools well tend to be the ones who’ve built them into the research phase from the start rather than bolting them on as an afterthought. They pull their target list before they finalise the angle, which sometimes changes the angle entirely once they see who’s actually covering the space.
That’s a slightly different way of working to how a lot of teams operate, but it generally produces better results. The pitch fits the journalist rather than the journalist being crowbarred into the pitch. Which, when you think about it, is how media outreach should have worked all along.
