Startup founders: reach out to journalists and reporters

[throw_away_2012]

As a startup founder bootstrapping my own site, I found a service called Cision.com that provide media contacts (journalists, freelance writers, etc.) This database is used by lots of PR firms and media people to find out who's who. But the price is steep, about $2,500 for the package. What you get is a whole list of detailed contacts infos (phone number included) of all journalists who's writing about your vertical.

So being an entrepreneur myself, my idea is to split the cost with someone else, ideally 4 or 5 other startups to lower the cost (but more is better). If we get a group of 5 or more, our average cost will be lowered substantially.

So if you're looking for journalists to reach out to them, this is it (or you'll have to spend countless hours going through Twitter and LinkedIn). I had a demo with them and a bunch of screenshots as well. Ping me if you want to see.

(Disclaimer: I'm a regular HN here. This is a throw away account because I don't want to risk posting stuff that link to my original account.)

[waderoush]

I'm a journalist for one of the publications listed in Cision. (I'm San Francisco/Silicon Valley editor at Xconomy.) Cision is a fine company, but if I were an entrepreneur at a cash-strapped company I would never pay $2500 for a list of media contacts.

A much better (and cheaper) strategy is to read the publications that follow your industry, figure out which reporters at those publications write about your niche most often, and contact them directly with a quick summary of your company and its latest news. Most publication's websites list reporters' email addresses, or at the very least provide an address for story tips. Of course, maybe digging up this information counts as "spending countless hours," but I don't think a media strategy has to be so time-consuming. Whatever your company is working on, there are probably only five to 10 journalists who will know enough about your field to do an accurate, thoughtful story. Figure out who they are and target them directly.

By the way, my address is wroush at xconomy dot com.

[throw_away_2012]

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'm not an expert of PR at all, and when it comes to PR and press, it sounds more like a dark-art than science. So it's good to know that you can obtain these infos through other means than purchasing an expensive db.

If these infos are publicly available, what can benefit more startups people is to have a free db which crawled all the public listings. I'll do some more research into this.