Author: Dan Griffiths

Working on media coverage for your organisation or client? Here are six reasons why monitoring #journorequest can help you get better results. If you haven’t got time for all 6 reasons, the super reason is: #journorequest is where journalists are.

1. Journalists at high profile media outlets use #journorequest

The appeal of Twitter to journalists is obvious. A journorequest tweet is a quick and effective way to access a massive network of sources. People know people and will tag in experts they know. ‘Twitter magic’ creates interesting and serendipitous connections – helping journalists produce original content. These are the most frequently mentioned outlets from the biographies of the thousands of journalists using #journorequest.

2. Journalists choose #journorequest because it’s so fast

One of the reasons journalists choose #journorequest is because it’s fast. When all a journalist wants to finish a piece is a quick chat and a short quote, then using Twitter as a rapid response service is helpful. Here are examples of journalists using #journorequest to look for quick comment in ‘the next hour’. All were high profile media coverage opportunities.

3. Journalists work odd hours; #journorequest is open all hours

In the real world journalists work odd hours and shifts. They send requests in the evening and at weekends. Granted, this might not be ideal for work-life balance, but having a #journorequest monitoring service working in the background can give peace of mind that you can see relevant media opportunities whenever you’re at your desk (or smartphone).

4. Requests can be delivered to your inbox

You don’t have to be constantly monitoring Twitter yourself to find your journalist requests. Tools like IFTTT or Zapier can be used to monitor Twitter and trigger alerts. It’s possible to have tweets populate a Google Sheet. An easy and reliable way to keep up with #journorequest is to subscribe to Dot Star Media and have requests come straight to your inbox (or Slack or Microsoft Teams). As part of our journalist enquiry service we track the hashtag and deliver notifications for requests from verified journalists. You’ll also receive the requests that journalists submit directly on our submit form.

5. Tweeted requests are concise

Brevity is highly valued by anyone who has to scan hundreds of media requests every day. Twitter lends itself to brevity and 280 characters is usually enough space for a journalist to say what they need. Journalists are pretty good at saying what they want to say within finite word limits.

6. You can filter #journorequest to receive requests relevant to your sector

#journorequest is a popular hashtag full of media requests in many sectors. Dot Star Media classifies requests into topics. This means you can receive sector based requests, without noise. Here are the topics, showing request volumes over a 6 month period.

As well as classifying requests in to topics, Dot Star Media lets you filter requests by keyword. Keyword filtering works particularly well for single issue specialists, or niche organisations who value relevance over the volume of requests.

Last word

We’ll leave a last word in this post to Will Hobson, PR + London Director at Rise At Seven.

I’m loving Journorequest atm so many good opportunities on there make sure if you’re a PR you’re checking it out regularly!

— Will Hobson (@WillHobson) January 6, 2021

---

More information on how the Dot Star Media journalist enquiry service can help tracking #journorequest can be found here.

Subscriber growth

It’s just a number, same as every other number. But this one feels good because it’s a round number. Dot Star Media has reached 1,000 confirmed recipients for its journalist enquiry service. Here’s a week by week chart showing recipient growth since our January 2021 kick-off:

Would you like to try Dot Star Media?

To try Dot Star Media for yourself please register for a two-week free trial at https://dotstar.media/register

Thirty UK university press offices receive journalist requests delivered by Dot Star Media. We received testimonials from two of them this week:

University Press Offices are able to use keyword filtering to receive journalist requests that are relevant to their areas of expertise. Press office teams can review the media opportunities, contact journalists for more information, and if appropriate connect their institution’s academic experts with journalists to generate positive media coverage for their institutions.

A well-balanced network of sources

Meeting the needs of the journalists submitting media requests is just as important for us as meeting the needs of the organisations receiving their requests. We’re putting together a truly diverse range of sources to form a well-balanced network of recipients drawn from commercial, academic and not-for-profit organisations.

Businesses

Charities

Academia

Public Relations

Sending a journalist request

If you’re a journalist and would like to send a request to the Dot Star Media network, use the journalist enquiry submit form. It’s free to submit requests.

We’ve added a page on the Dot Star Media service that gathers together an individual journalist’s previous requests. This includes requests sourced from Twitter and any that a journalist has submitted directly on our journalist enquiry submit form.

Why previous journalist requests are useful

Looking through earlier requests can help you better understand the journalist’s typical style and the subjects they have already covered. This is especially useful if you’ve never pitched the journalist before and can help you improve your pitch.

How to see previous journalist requests

To view a journalist’s previous requests click on the ‘Previous Requests’ link in the alert email.

If you are receiving your media request alerts in Slack or Microsoft Teams click the ‘View previous requests’ links that appear at the bottom of each alert.

How to find previous journalist requests in your Dot Star Media account

Log in to your account on dotstar.media and go to the Enquiry Search or Recent Alerts page. Then just click the profile picture or name of any journalist to go to a list of their previous requests.

We hope this feature makes Dot Star Media even more useful for subscribers and journalists. Do let us know what you think.

User interface update

We’ve added text to the profile page to indicate whether filters are active and affecting your journalist request feed.

Keyword filters, when applied, reduce the number of requests that you receive by excluding all requests except those that include your keyword. The new indicators serve as a visual reminder that filters are being applied.

Keywords are great for ‘single-issue’ organisations

Keyword filters are particularly useful for single-issue organisations who can find the individual Dot Star Media topics too broad. Say you are looking to get some media coverage for a nature reserve you might choose to receive only journalist requests that include words like: ecology, ecosystems, environment, trees, plants, bio-diversity, biology, wildlife, nature, reserve, environment, etc, etc

Using keyword suggestions

Getting into a journalist’s head and thinking of all the possible keywords that you want to be alerted on isn’t easy. To assist with the process, as you enter keywords we’ll automatically suggest possible related terms – click on these to add them as keywords.

Support

For help and advice on getting your keywords right please contact us. We’d like to help.

When your interest is in a specialist subject, or you have niche clients to promote, our individual topics can deliver a range of journalist requests that is too broad for your needs.

For example, a wildlife conservation charity may find requests delivered in the ‘Pets & Animals’ topic deliver domestic dog and cat related requests that aren’t relevant for them. In these situations we recommend keyword filtering to improve the relevancy ratio of journalist requests received.

The wildlife conservation charity could enter a long list of relevant keywords around the topic of conservation and only receive journalist requests that include one of their keywords. A simple keyword list could look like this:

Basic keyword filtering works by matching from the beginning of a word. For example, ‘restaurant’ would match ‘restaurant‘, ‘restaurants’ and ‘restauranter’. But the keyword ‘restaurants’ wouldn’t alert on a request including the word ‘restaurant’. So it’s important to take care when entering keywords, and think about the words entered.

Using regular expressions

In some sectors, like science and technology, acronyms are popular. Filtering on acronyms can return false positives. Take ‘artificial intelligence’, which can appear in requests as the acronym ‘AI’ or ‘#AI’ or ‘AI/ML’. If you use the simple keyword of ‘AI’ you would also receive matches on words that begin with ‘ai’, such as ‘aircraft’, ‘aim’, ‘aid’.

To get round this we have enabled regular expressions on the keyword search. In the image below the word ‘ai’ is given a word boundary, allowing us to perform a whole word search. This stops alerts on ‘airport’, but continues to alert on ‘AI’.

Usefully, the word boundary ignores non-word characters such as slashes and hashtags, so this will still trigger alerts for mentions of ‘AI’ when it appears as ‘AI/ML’ or ‘#AI’, like this request:

Support

Some people find regular expressions are fun, and this includes the team at Dot Star Media. We’re happy to provide support and advice on getting your keywords working well. If we can help – please get in touch.

 

Joe Tyler

We’re pleased that Josef Tyler has agreed to join our team to help us deliver the best possible journalist request service for media professionals submitting enquiries and for subscribers receiving alerts.

Josef joins us from the well regarded (but now closed) JournoRequests.com service where he gained deep experience looking after media request selection and moderation.

Joe joining the team helps progress our plan to use the latest technology to build a modern media request service with these aims in mind:

• meeting the need for journalists to get rapid responses from a diverse range of sources
• giving subscribers easy access to a reliable stream of media opportunities at fair prices
• growing a business that’s environmentally sound and helps society

Keyword filters make your Dot Star Media journalist request feed more relevant by removing requests that don’t contain one of your keywords. Used well, keyword filtering will save you many hours a month.

The trouble is, choosing what your actual keywords should be isn’t always easy. If you don’t have the right keywords, you might miss out on relevant requests.

A subscriber asked us yesterday how they could test to see if they had missed out on any requests because of their keywords. We wanted to provide a straightforward way of doing this, so today have added a filter toggle to the Recent Enquiries page.

Clicking the keyword filter button shows all the requests that would have been delivered without your keyword filtering in place.

This makes it easy to see if you have missed any requests due to keyword filtering. You can scan through these requests to identify words to add to, and improve, your keyword list.

To see if the Dot Star Media request service might work for your business please register for a self-service no obligation free trial.

We reached a new milestone last week: Over 500 different organisations – commercial, academic and not-for-profit – have now registered to receive journalists requests submitted through the Dot Star Media request form. New organisations are joining every week.

Building a diverse and representative network

The media works better when it represents a wide range of sources and journalists tell us that they want to hear from diverse voices. Our aim is to provide a service that meets the needs of the journalists submitting media requests just as much as it meets the needs of the organisations receiving them.

For this reason we’re committed to providing journalists with access to a diverse range of sources from a well-balanced network of recipients drawn from commercial, academic and not-for-profit organisations.

Businesses

Charities

Academia

Public Relations

We’re attracting commercial businesses and academic institutions by offering fairly priced flexible subscriptions. Registered sources can switch topics when they please and to stop and start monthly subscriptions according to their current requirements.

To give not-for-profits an equal footing in accessing to journalist requests, and to help charities get their voice heard, we are providing the media request service to qualifying registered charities completely free of charge under our charities initiative.

Sending a journalist request

If you’re a journalist and would like to send a request to the Dot Star Media network, use the journalist enquiry submit form. It’s free to submit requests.