@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.
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@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.
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.
@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...
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.
@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.
@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?
@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.
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.
@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.
@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
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).
@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.
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