The Media List: One of the Absolute Best Tools in Your Media Outreach Toolkit

Ahhhh the media list, it’s like your address book in your phone…so much so that you even have your favorites! You know exactly what I am talking about (the starred numbers in your phone that is)!

Interested in garnering media attention? You first need to reach the right people. Reaching the right people requires some research – yes, time and effort.

There are many tools available to efficiently build a media list, but we’ll save the tools for another day.

Let’s start with the basics… some fields you’ll want to identify on your list:

1. Outlet: Name of the outlet

2. Contact Name: Reporter/editor name (please address people by their name and send individual emails)

3. Beat: Focus area. If you’re pitching a story on Men’s Health Month, for example, you’ll likely want to identify the health reporter for a specific outlet (of course, if it’s for a local event for Men’s Health Month then a community or local reporter might also be interested and should be featured on the list)

4. Contact Email: Email is your best bet. Some stations have news tips emails or news desk email aliases that reach multiple reporters so you can include them as well

5. Contact Phone: While phones are used much less than they used to be, if you’re pulling a list, you might as well recognize phone numbers as well in the spirit of efficiency just in case a phone call is requested

6. Social Profiles: Keeping up with stories on social media is another great way to stay up to date with recent stories and can also be another method of contact