A media list is an organized collection of data about media professionals like journalists, bloggers, and influencers - anyone who creates content for an audience and can share your brand story or news in an impactful way. These lists are typically broken down into media contacts who cover specific topics or regions, and include their contact information to facilitate your media outreach. You can usually access their email addresses, social media handles, and phone numbers.

Some brands and PR professionals opt to build their own media lists, and it's definitely possible. However, you should be prepared to dedicate a significant amount of time and energy to this, since manually searching for and verifying this kind of contact information can easily take hours.

PressHackers' media database contains updated contact information for media professionals in different US states. It's our job to update and expand this list regularly, so you can count on finding accurate information in our media lists.

This depends on exactly what your media outreach goals are. Most people prefer to organize their lists by subject or region - we've already done the latter for you. 

In order to approach media professionals successfully, you need to personalize your approach to each media contact on your list. Make it clear that you understand what kind of stories they cover, and highlight why your story would be of interest to their audience. 

There is no hard and fast rule for how often you should update your media lists since journalists don't move jobs or change their areas of coverage on a specific timetable. While it's best practice to update your media lists every 4 months, you'll probably have an easier time paying for media contacts that are already updated.

• Don't send the same generic copy-pasted email to all the contacts on your media list.
• Don't address your recipient by the wrong name. 
• Don't send an irrelevant pitch to any of your contacts e.g a sports journalist won't be interested in hearing about your new beauty product.
• Don't harass media contacts by sending the same pitch over and over again.

In order to remain GDPR or CAN-SPAM compliant, all the information you distribute to the media contacts in your media list should perform an informative rather than promotional function. Additionally, it's important to comply with requests to stop contacting a particular journalist.