This article will equip you with the skills to quickly and effectively identify relevant journalists for your campaigns using JournoFinder.

Important: The focus here is on building media lists for national data campaigns and reactives. If you're looking to build regional media lists, check out this article as well.

The tool uses news search engines to surface relevant articles to your keywords.

If you search for 'hurricane sandy' you will get news articles which have mentioned hurricane sandy in their headline or body.

One word searches are much too broad to bring up relevant articles. For example, if you search for 'Jordan' there are multiple things this can refer to (shoes, different people, a country).

If you had a story on Air Jordan sneakers, and used the search 'Jordan' to build your media list, you might find some fashion journalists, but you will also find journalist that write about politics and breaking news.

There is zero point targetting a journalist that writes about politics when you have a sneaker focused campaign. You will get a much better hit rate if you narrow down the scope of your search.

Focusing on specific stories or possible headlines similar to the story you want covered will leads to more relevant journalist discoveries.

For example, search for headlines like "King Charles diagnosed with cancer" over the more generic "royal family" for targeted results. Or search for "Tesla recall" rather than "car" or "auto", or "popular baby names" rather than "baby".

Specific queries help avoid the clutter of broad searches and make sure you get a diverse range of sources.

Because one of the 'ranking factors' of Google News search is authority, broad terms tend to favour top sources like BBC, CNN, and APNews, limiting your scope. You can also get a lot of .gov sites in the results (as below).

A precise search results in a wider variety of outlets because even high-authority news sites can only publish so many stories on one topic, which means you don’t miss out on valuable contacts.

Here you can see we are getting a lot more 'local' news sites rather than big government sites.

The graph below illustrated how a specific news search returns both more individual journalists and outlets compared to a generic search.

Imagine you have a reactive campaign based on a story about a photoshopped or altered photograph of Kate Middleton.

For a reactive campaign, first target the people who covered the initial event. Chances are high that they’ll write a second story on the topic, making them ideal for outreach.

In this case, we want to find people who have already written about the edited photo.

What should you search to uncover these journalists?

The search works like Google search, so you need to find keywords that will surface the articles you're looking for.

To do this, look at the headlines of the type of articles you want to find, then pick out the words or angles you see most often.

For example:

For the Kate Middleton story, headlines primarily focused on the fact that media agencies were withdrawing the photo from circulation.

All the headlines use her name, ‘Kate’, and most of them refer to the ‘photo’ or 'image'.

‘Manipulation’ is another common word.

Once you have an idea of the keywords to use, you can formulate your search.

Effective searches strike a balance: sufficiently narrow to remain on-topic yet broad enough to return ample results.

Here’s an example of an ineffective search: "royal family image manipulated by AI"

It’s very narrow, doesn’t use an important keyword (Kate), and as a result, you only get 41 articles returned.

Here’s an example of a more effective search:

By going slightly broader with the search query, you get a lot more results, and they'll be relevant because you used the right keywords.

Next, I would look for other recent royal scandals that were covered in the news.

In this example, I came across some headlines about the royal Christmas photo potentially being photoshopped, so I was able to search for anyone who covered this too.

I also noted stories about William pulling out of an event last minute and the King’s cancer announcement.

Now let's look at an example of a data campaign based around Easter candy.

Who should you target?

Start off with the most obvious targeting, i.e. people who have written about exactly what you’re going to write about (Easter candy) Then think of wider topics which are related to your story but not exactly the same (holiday candy).

And then finally go even broader with the ‘umbrella’ topic - holiday gifting. But be aware that the broader you go, the more un-relevant journalists you'll have to filter out.

To find news stories related to Easter candy etc, you can start with a broad search term like 'Easter candy' and then browse through the results and see if any headlines pop up multiple times.

You can then use these headlines to search on JournoFinder in the same way I described in the previous example.

In this "Halloween candy" search, I would look for more articles relating the sugar shortage or rising prices to Halloween candy, as well as more articles talking about the 'most popular' Halloween candies.

One campaign can have multiple different angles, and it's important to identify these and search for the journalists accordingly.

For example, I had a story about false advertising and had built a media list based on journalists who had previously written about advertising and marketing. While I was searching for these journalists, I saw a couple of articles referring to false advertising as 'scamming'.

This gave me the idea to also search for journalists who had previously covered scams.

To make your life (much, much) easier later on, make sure to create different media lists for each of your angles. Then you can easily tailor the pitches and give yourself the best chance at securing coverage.

Psst... the scam angle was a lot more successful.

We are using Google's location filter, but it's important to note that this filter is not absolute. Articles that are considered relevant but originate from outside your selected location may still appear.

For example, if you search for a topic that has recently received significant coverage in UK news but not in the US, you will mostly see UK articles, even if you apply a US location filter.

To better surface articles from a specific location, you can try including the location in your search terms. Alternatively, you can search for a specific news story that's similar to your campaign and was covered in the location you want to target.