This guide demonstrates how to use JournoFinder to find relevant regional journalists, using an example of targeting journalists in Florida for a study on tourist attractions.

Start by combining key phrases related to your topic with the location of interest. Our example study focuses on tourist attractions in Florida, so start with searches like:

If you're not familiar with boolean search operators, using AND in all caps ensures that only articles containing all specified keywords are shown in the search results.

To further refine your results, consider using the 'intitle:' modifier to find articles with “Florida” in the title.

While these searches won't result in exclusively Florida publications, they will give you a significant number of local results, providing a solid foundation for your media lists.

Although these searches seem to contradict my advice against being too broad, adding the location helps to narrow things down. Using a shorter time period than the default 1 year, such as 6 or 3 months, can also be helpful to reduce the chances of your search being dominated by large, national news sites.

If a particular news story related to your topic appears repeatedly, use it for a more focused search.

For example, under the “travel” AND “Florida” search, I noticed a story come up several times about how busy Thanksgiving was expected to be, so I made a separate search for this story.

The headlines were using the words "AAA" and "holiday" a lot, so I included those as well as "Florida" in my search. Again, I used 'AND' to make it clear I wanted all three of these words to be in the article.

My exact search was: "AAA" AND "Florida" AND "Holiday".

It may not be immediately obvious which articles come from local sources, but URLs containing local place names (e.g., Jacksonville, Tampa Bay, Orlando) are a good indication.

Longer place names can sometimes have shortened versions like ‘jax’ for Jacksonville or ‘tb’ for Tampa Bay.

You will also see local versions of bigger news sites. For example, CBS News is a national news station, but CBS12 and CBS4 are smaller parts of the network covering Florida. The URL might be an obvious subsection of CBS, like in the example below where the URL is 'cbs12.com'.

Or it might be the generic CBS website, 'cbsnews.com'.

However, you can usually be sure that if the article mentions the name of a place, then it will be posted on a local news subsection of the main site, and therefore be written by a local journalist.

Bizjournals is another example of a big site that has multiple subsections based on regions. All the URLs will be ‘bizjournals.com’, but if a specific state is mentioned in the headline then you can be pretty certain it’s from the regional section of the site.

Lastly, URLs like ‘wptv.com’, ‘mynews13.com’, ‘wesh.com’ and ‘pnj.com’ might look a bit spammy, but they are in fact respected local news outlets. You will see a lot of similar URLs to these and all are worth contacting.

The next search option you have is slower but very thorough. Under ‘resources’ we have lists of all the biggest publications by state (including newspapers, radio and TV).

For example, you can search Miami Herald for travel to find journalists who cover travel-related news and collect articles from there.

If you’re struggling to find relevant articles, look for the newsroom contacts (i.e. a list of the staff who work at the outlet) and pick the most relevant person from there to contact.

E.g in this case we can contact the travel editor.

If there is no obvious email available in the newsroom, you can type the name of the journalist into the journo search section of JournoFinder and get their email this way.

You can often navigate to the newsroom via the 'About us' page or the 'Contact us' page. But note not all outlets will have a newsroom.

If all else fails, you can contact the newstips email for that outlet.