The best way to search with JournoFinder and uncover the best journalists is to think:

"what kinds of headlines do I envision the journalist writing for my pitch?"

Then you can branch out and think of headlines journalists who would be interested in your story might have written.

These headlines are the sorts of searches you should be making.

Searching this way is what I call 'news focused' searching. Topic focused searching, i.e. where you search for a broad or general topic like 'dog training', 'real estate', or 'construction', is easier but the results will not be as good.

Here are some examples:

Campaign: You're looking for people who have covered expert advice surrounding real estate.

❌ Do not search "real estate".

You will end up with lots of government and education websites, as well a wide range topics within real estate.

Why?

The search decides which articles to surface based on a few different factors, including authority and relevance. Because the search is so broad, lots of high authority articles will be relevant and these will get surfaced first.

✅ Instead search for things like:

These searches will surface journalists who have quoted real estate experts in previous articles, so will likely be interested in what your real estate expert has to say.

Campaign: You're looking for people who would cover a study to do with house prices.

❌ Do not search "house prices".

Again, you can see this is surfacing a lot of .org sites. While the articles are news articles, the authors will not be receptive to most digital PR pitches.

✅ Instead search for things like:

"Starter homes worth $1 million"

"Most expensive neighbourhoods"

These searches will surface journalists who have previously covered studies on similar topics to house prices, and therefore are likely to be interested in your study.

Once you have done a few searches, you should hopefully uncover more headlines you can search for.

If you're just starting out in a niche and don't have any ideas of recent studies you could search for, try simply searching 'house price study reveals' (in this example).

This should throw up a few house price studies that you can use for inspiration of the types of searches you can make.

I would also advise heading over to a news site you would like to get covered in and having a look at the types of stories they write in your niche. This can also provide inspiration for searches you can make.

And if you're really stuck on the best searches to make, you can reach out to us and we will help :).