Once the assistant has built a first pass of your list, the most valuable work is shaping it.
The list is live throughout, so every change shows up within a few seconds.
Refine against a rule
You can narrow the list with a simple inclusion or exclusion sentence, for example:
Only keep UK tabloid journalists.
Remove anyone who mainly covers this angle (for example, if you built a list asking for everyone who covers the royal family - but then want to remove people who mainly covered the royal wedding, you can ask this).
Drop everyone who writes for a national outlet.
The assistant reads every contact on the list, judges each one against your rule, and comes back with the contacts it suggests removing plus any it is unsure about.
Nothing is removed until you confirm it, so you stay in control. Keep the rule to one idea at a time, either an inclusion or an exclusion, rather than both at once.
Remove specific people
If you just want to drop a particular contact, name them and the assistant will remove them.
Expand the list
Refining isn't only about cutting.
If a list is looking thin, you can ask the assistant to grow it. There are a few ways to do this:
Run more searches on the same angle. If the list is on the right track but short on names, ask the assistant to search again with different wording. The same story can be described several ways, and each phrasing surfaces journalists the others missed.
Add an adjacent angle. Think about who else would write about your story. A sleep study might sit naturally with health reporters, but parenting, education, and consumer-tech desks could all have a way in. Ask the assistant to explore one of those and add the results to the same list.
Find more journalists like the best ones. If a handful of contacts are exactly right, ask the assistant to find more reporters in the same vein - similar beats, similar outlets, similar recent coverage.
Loosen a constraint you set earlier. If you restricted the list tightly at the start (one region, one outlet tier, the last six months only) and it came back thin, widening one of those can help.
See Searching journalists and articles through the assistant for more ways to expand the ls deeper.
Segment the list
Segmenting groups your contacts along an axis you define, so you can tailor your pitch to each group rather than sending everyone the same email.
You can segment by things like beat, seniority, region, outlet type, or relevance tier, and you can apply up to three different segment axes to one list.
Common reasons to segment:
By outlet type - split a launch list into trade press and national press, so you can lead with the technical detail for trade and the broader angle for nationals.
By region - group contacts by location so you can localise the same story, pitching each reporter the version that mentions their area.
By beat - separate, say, the health reporters from the consumer-tech reporters on a study that touches both, so each gets the angle they actually care about.
By seniority - distinguish editors and desk heads from staff reporters, so you can adjust your approach and your expectations on response time.
By relevance tier - group your strongest matches into a priority tier to pitch first, before rolling the story out more widely.
Review the current list
You can ask the assistant to review any additions it made in more detail - either a particular person, or everyone it added from a particular search.
This gives you a deeper understanding of why each contact is on the list: what they cover, the article that matched, and how strong the assistant judged the fit to be.
It's a useful sanity check before you pitch, especially on a list built from several different search angles where it's easy to lose track of who came from where.
If you disagree with a decision, you can ask it to reverse it.
Check the count
At any point you can ask how many contacts are on the list, and the assistant will give you the number.
Export when ready
When the list is ready to pitch, ask the assistant to export it and you will get a downloadable CSV of your contacts.
Export may depend on your plan and available credits. If you hit a limit, you can review options at app.journofinder.com/plans.
Why wording matters:
One rule at a time. Keep each request to a single idea - either an inclusion or an exclusion, not both at once. "Keep only tabloid journalists and remove anyone outside London" is two rules; run them as two steps.
Wording matters. The assistant takes your rule literally, so how strict you are changes the result. "Remove anyone who only covered the royal wedding" will keep a journalist who covered the wedding and anything else. "Remove anyone who's on this list mainly because of the royal wedding" gives the assistant room to judge. Use strict words ("only", "exclusively") for precise filtering, and looser words ("mainly", "mostly") when you want it to use judgement.
Want to go back to basics? See Building your first media list with the assistant.