How to use JournoFinder to find regional journalists

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, use 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.

Using the outlet search, you can isolate outlets from a particular location. For example we can set our filters to:

Scroll through these, and pick out the outlets you would like to target with your news.

Let's go with Miami Herald.

You can use the Article search, filtered on your chosen outlet.

Or Google News search with the "site:" operator to search for journalists covering your topic at a specific outlet.

Then search for headlines related to your campaign.

For example, we want to find journalists who write for the travel section of Miami Herald, so I try the search 'travel' in the Article search and filter the results to the last 3 months and see a bunch of related articles with journalists I can investigate.

You can do the same with the Google News search.

You might need to try a few different searches.

If you find a name that looks good, you can search for that journalists profile using JournoFinder's journalist search.

Once you have your list of location-specific outlets, you can also isolate journalists that work for that outlet via the journalist search.

Fro example, here I made a search for journalist that work at the Miami Herald and mention business in their job title or bios.

If you decide to search for articles on the news outlets website, you can still use JournoFinder to quickly get all the emails you want.

Here are the steps:

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 journalist 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 (which you can find on the outlets profile on JournoFinder).