How To Find Relevant Journalists For Your Pitch

Finding relevant journalists to pitch to is no easy task. And knowing how to find the right journalists can be the difference between landing coverage (or not!)

Media relations is hard, but we have your back. Here are some of our top tips to help you connect with relevant journalists and turn that story into a headline.

Research Recent Work

Before doing anything else, you might want to research the journalist’s work and everything they have covered in the few months. This is helpful in figuring our their interests and beats.

However, if last week they wrote a story that’s very similar to the one you’re pitching, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be interested in your piece. In fact, chances are that if they literally just wrote a story on it, they probably aren’t looking to write another.

Instead focus on the broad areas they are covering, see what sorts of angles they focus on, do they always include statistics or case studies.

Engage on Social Media

Journalists are people too. And often their people with opinions that they’re sharing on social. Take a look at what their engaging in, what work of their own they’re sharing and see if they’re directly asking for specific story types.

While scrolling through all of this can take time, platforms like LinkedIn, Bluesky and X are still a great way to see what journalists are looking for here and now.

Try a media database

There are lots of media databases out there and most will have some sort of research functionality and list building tool within them. They can be a really easy way to give yourself a headstart in finding targets.

However, these databases can become out of date quite quickly with journalists changing jobs, beats and entire team structres altering. They also often define a journalist sector based on historic data and can be quite broad meaning that ‘lifestyle’ journalist you might be contacting for your garden story, has actually only been writing about food for two years.

Use Synapse

Synapse brings journalists into the research process in two ways. Firstly, journalists themselves maintain their profile information meaning it’s much more up-to-date. Secondly, the platform tracks activity. Often PRs are expected to know what a journalist wants that week, without any real method of finding this out.

Synapse looks at what journalists are searching for within the platform, the pitches they’re accepting, pitches their rejecting and more. All of this then feeds the ‘matching score’ PRs get given when getting ready to pitch via Synapse. We look at your story, look at what journalists are currently browsing for and searching and then show you matches.

Ultimately a small number of really well researched pieces of outreach are far more likely to generate coverage than blasting out an email to 200 (likely irrelevant) journalist. Next time you’re building your media list, consider using a combination of these methods so that you can give yourself the best shot. And rememeber even if you don’t land coverage, pitching a relevant, personalised and engaging story to a journalist is often the best way to start building a relationship with them.

Register to try out Synapse today.