Show HN: A categorized database of ~400k journalists
Hey guys!
Press Hunt (https://presshunt.co) is a categorized database of almost 400k journalists, reporters, and media outlets.
Finding the right journalists to pitch your business to––then finding their email address––is a nightmare. The data is spread out all over the internet, down the google rabbit hole, news sites, and twitter accounts.
Research can take hundreds of hours on it’s own, not even counting the time it takes to run an effective email campaign.
Over the last year we’ve run hundreds of PR campaigns for companies like Instacart and Dos Toros. Our campaigns have been featured by hundreds of media outlets like The Washington Post, The Independent, and VICE.
We started out building media lists by hand, but that sucked. We built crawlers to compile the 1.0 of this data, then purged, cleaned, and enriched it all. With this update we’ve added millions of data points: new tags, phone numbers, journalist media outlet, photos, and more!
Since our 1.0 almost a hundred companies (startups, photographers, PR agencies, etc.) have used Press Hunt, logging almost 80k searches.
For our 2.0 we’ve completely revamped the UI, updated & enriched our dataset (with new attributes like phone numbers, social media accounts, and millions of new data points), and built out a new system for you to save journalists to media lists and export their contact info to CSV (so running email campaigns to them is now even easier).
Like our 1.0, journalists are categorized by tags representing what they’re likely to write about next (based on what they’ve written about before, where they write, and what they tweet about). The dataset includes emails, phone numbers, where they write, and their industry focuses.
We’d love feedback––thanks for reading this
- Matt & Aaron Is there any way for journalists to check if the information you have is accurate (and provide accurate information if it isn't) without subscribing? Yes! Anyone can use the trial search on our homepage for free to see if they're in the database and how they're categorized. If you're not in there and want to be added, just let me know. If you're in there and don't want to be, just leave a message in the live chat of our site. Same goes if you'd like to update your tags! This is great. I'm curious how your offering differs from incumbent media database like Cision and Meltwater. Thanks! Cision is one of those behemoths that doesn't care too much about UI or UX, or improving their product quickly for that matter. Used Cision in the past and hated it, figured there was a better way to build something for this use-case. Working on a lot of data science opportunities here + integrating other web services like gmail to 10x the efficiency of the PR outreach process. what does your data look like? say, i looking for journalists about 'fish' or something similar, can you provide a sample of what the output might look like? it can be blury or whatever Yeah, you can actually search through our entire database for free on our homepage (we've just redacted premium data like emails and phone numbers). For 'fish' we have almost 17k results. A lot of media outlets related to fish like Fishipedia. For 'fishing travel' there are results from Voyages de Peche (which I'm pretty sure is literally "fishing trips" in French), who writes about 'fish' and 'travel'. We have their writer Julien's name, email, and phone number here. Our of curiosity, how long did it take for your team to build this? Thanks for commenting! We've been working on this for ~3 months, and we've exclusively invested all our engineering resources into this for the past 6-7 weeks We launched Press Hunt 1.0 in late March, so we've been validating etc. since then