Muck Rack Redefines News Media Contact Research for PR Firms

Muck Rack is changing the news media research process by taking a novel approach to the age-old problem of a PR firm distributing company news to the right reporters.

Albeit not transactional, Muck Rack — a news media contact database service founded by CEO Gregory Galant — is the first company to take an online marketplace approach to connecting media relations professionals and journalists.

To give you a sense of how vital getting email addresses and phone numbers for journalists is to public relations people, PR Enablement Platform Cision, which sold for $2.74B this week, started selling print directories of reporters. They updated the directories annually.

Public relations can’t get their job done without accurate news media contact coordinates.

News media contact information has always been dynamic, but it’s changing faster for several reasons. But let’s start with this one.

Over the last ten years, the press corps has been steadily diminishing.

Reporter, correspondent, and broadcast news jobs declined 10% in 2018, and the industry cut 3,000 more jobs at the beginning of the year.

Plus, reporters regularly change their news beat coverage, making it exceedingly challenging for public relations to keep their media lists current.

The minute you stick a contact record in a static database, it must be maintained, or it will decay.

LinkedIn is always current because it’s in our best interest to keep our records up to date, and Muck Rack is approaching the news media contact database business the same way.

They’re catering directly to journalists, much like the newswire services used to, offering them professionally designed online portfolios of everything they’ve ever written, regardless of where it was published.

Reporter portfolios include all their published news clips with their social media profiles automatically compiled and regularly updated, providing access to all their active links and lightning-fast search.

Muck Rack does something else beneficial that no one else does.

They give public relations access to the reporter’s portfolio and their contact information in one place, without switching from screen to screen.

This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. To understand why, consider the media relations workflow and the bigger picture.

The value of PR to clients and companies is usually pegged on their ability to generate news coverage from an ever-dwindling press pool.

Under pressure to get noticed and score coverage, it is not uncommon for public relations to cast a wide net when pulling a media list from a directory.

With inaccurate, nonspecific information, it’s easy for public relations to pull overly broad lists of reporters that get used to carpet bombing reporters with press releases they aren’t interested in, which is bad for companies and journalists.

Another problem with conventional news media contact directories is they attempt to reduce a reporter’s area of interest to a single “news beat” field.

In addition to the decay/accuracy problem, you can’t boil down a reporter’s body of work to a database entry, particularly in this age of overlap and disruptive innovation.

If you’ve got a press release about a new revenue operations software as a service offering, do you send it to a technology reporter or a business reporter?

There are kinds of different business reporters.

Should that business reporter who likes to write about sales, marketing, customer service, leveraged growth, product-led growth, or something else?

What if it’s a press release about a vertical solution tailored to a specific industry?

Should it go to a reporter covering that trade?

What if it’s gig economy-related? Who should you direct that kind of news to?

Should you build a list of reporters covering your sector’s market leader? What if they’re public and you’re not?

You’ll pull a list of business reporters who cover the stock market, which your company isn’t listed on, and miss the mark.

You see, it is impossible to target your news accurately without good information. Media relations are seldom cut and dried.

What about columnists like Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Friedman, or Maureen Dowd? How could you accurately describe their areas of interest with a single “news beat” field? Yet getting a mention in any of their published works could be a game changer.

Getting news releases to the right reporters is an ongoing challenge, often above the pay grade of the resource tasked with pulling the list.

Since Muck Rack provides access to a reporter’s published work, junior public relations can vet contact records against their portfolio before adding them to a list, a process that used to require searching a news media contact database first, searching a separate news media monitoring service next by each reporter’s name to read their coverage and cutting and pasting the vetted contacts onto a spreadsheet, where the list starts getting old the day it’s created.

While there are all kinds of technology solutions to help sales reps personalize communications, public relations has been personalizing communications forever, and they’ve been doing it manually.

PR Enablement Platforms offer email distribution, but not necessarily with the ability to hyper-personalize each email as it goes out.

The other media contact database services also give you public relations a way to email merge news releases to reporters. However, hyper-personalization is a modern feature that most are yet to implement, further aggravating the PR carpet bomb scenario.

Muck Rack developed an intuitive workflow that allows you to personalize each email as it goes out, like Emma and Lemlist.

This article was written based on a meeting I had with their VP of Marketing, Mike Schneider (he cut his teeth in digital marketing at MongoDB, on Overview’s Product Led Growth Index) at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in San Diego.

Expect Muck Rack to do to news media contact research what Linkedin did to the Rolodex.