Grace Tranter

Finding relevant journalists is getting harder, but there are smarter ways to go about it.

Google and Talkwalker alerts aren't just for tracking your own coverage — they're brilliant for building media lists. Grace used this approach to collect over 50 highly relevant contacts for a travel campaign without manual searching.

The method is simple: set up alerts for campaign-related keywords before launch. This builds a bank of journalists who are already actively writing about your topic. As alerts keep coming in, you keep finding new contacts.

It's a significant time-saver compared to manual research, and it keeps surfacing new names as the campaign runs.

Journalists' inboxes are busier than ever. A pitch that lands well can still get lost — deprioritised, buried by the next wave of emails, forgotten.

The fix is to make your pitches easy to search for and revisit. A few habits that make a real difference:

• Don't rely on brand names alone — they're not always clear. Include strong positioning upfront, e.g. "science-focused skincare brand, The Ordinary"
• Add a short brand summary at the end of your email with more detail: what they do, key products, and positioning
• Test subject line tags like [Expert Comment] or [Product PR] — they make it instantly obvious what the pitch is, and increase the chances it gets opened, saved, and revisited

The goal is to make it as easy as possible for a journalist to act on your pitch later — even days or weeks after it first landed.