PressFriendly
p/pressfriendly
The better way to do PR.
Joel Andren

Find a Reporter — Submit AngelList URL and find the best TechCrunch reporter

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Ria Blagburn
Awesome idea @joelandren - it's great to hear about tools that actually benefit both sides (i.e. startups spend less time finding the right journalists and improve their chance of successful contact, and journalists get more pitches that match their interests).
Joel Andren
@riaface Thanks Ria!
Neil S W Murray
@joelandren Why limit to TechCrunch? Presumably you have an algorithym which matches key words from the pitch to key words from past articles? So why not open it up to more tech publications?
Joel Andren
@neilswmurray Hi Neil, we'll be featuring other sites in the next few weeks. The PressFriendly service tracks and matches over 40,000 media sites (including The Nordic Web) to help create custom media lists. We just thought we'd share this as a public service.
Neil S W Murray
@joelandren Ok cool, that makes sense, oh and thanks for including us ;-)
Kyle Russell
If this is used to send out a pitch that actually speaks to why I'd want to cover something, great. But I feel the current layout encourages sending something drawn from AngelList, which does the opposite of what this is supposed to accomplish by making things more personalized.
Joel Andren
@kylebrussell Totally agree. We don't use the AngelList profile for the pitch, just the ranking. In fact, the first thing we counsel startups is that they need to have NEWS and it needs to be relevant to the reporter. Here's the blog post we wrote about it: http://blog.pressfriendly.com/20...
Eric Bahn
Very nice service. I'm quite impressed that you guys were able to turn around a product so soon after TC released their reporter e-mail contacts. As other commenters mentioned, would love to see this service extended to other major news outlets as well. There is definitely a premium I would pay to see some deeper "analytics" on what trends/topics certain reporters cover.
Joel Andren
@ericbahn Thanks Eric. We've been working on this technology for 10 months. Check out @pressfriendly where we track over 40,000 media properties using the same tech.
Melinda Byerley
@ericbahn hi Eric! how is sabbatical? I'm a very happy customer of Joel's and highly recommend his service. Great to see two amazing founders connect!
Tom Maxwell
@joelandren this (kind of) solves the complaint that TC reporters had last week about that site that offered email addresses. Awesome job. :)
Romain Dillet
This is slightly better, but I still believe in things that don't scale when it comes to press coverage. http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Joel Andren
@romaindillet I agree with you. Things that don't scale include building relationships with reporters. It should not include building a press list. That's why we use machine learning to identify the best reporters: to help startups focus on the things that don't scale.
Eileen Carey
I dont know-this seems like a really narrow pitching system. There are more publications other than tech crunch. There is a lot of value working with publicist's who can actually craft your story for different audiences. PR people have long standing relationships with journalists and a 'automated pitch machine' does exist-it's called business wire.
David Haddad
Smart way to market your core service. Does newsjacking with an app have a name? :-)
Joel Andren
@daveying99 Haha, thanks. I'm open to suggestions. Newsapping?
andrew
Great idea, but I assume TC already have similar back end systems in place for such spamming
Joel Andren
@acondurache Not sure what you mean by "spamming." We're advocating finding the right person to reach out to, especially since all their emails are public. It's only spamming if you email multiple people on the list with an irrelevant message.
andrew
@joelandren ah ok, was more referring to people using TC emails for spam and thinking that TC might have some filtering or moderation in place... if not this could also be used for that sort of thing.. cool idea though
drew olanoff
This is awful and lazy.
Paul Denya
@drew I wouldn't call it awful, it works really well in most cases. As for lazy, we put months of work into the system that powers this to save people some effort.
drew olanoff
@pdenya Having worked at companies and as a journalist, I can honestly say that "saving people some effort" rarely works out. people work hard for a reason, because it works.
eddie wharton
Really cool. Seems like a tool that has the ability to reduce friction for all parties
Michael Arrington
love it.
Alexander Taub
Seems awesome. Checking it out now.