Author: Dan Griffiths

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.

It’s been two months since we launched the free journalist enquiry service for charities initiative. The uptake has been even better than we expected. As of today over 400 UK registered charities are receiving journalist request notifications – with new charities joining every day.

Media coverage opportunities

We’ve had some great feedback, for example: “Dot Star Media offers a simple, user friendly service which has allowed us to identify opportunities for our campaigns, which we were previously unable to benefit from due to limited resource to search for opportunities” – Franchesca Allen, Macmillan Cancer Support.

More feedback on the Dot Star Media ‘for charities’ page.

Keyword filtering saves time

Charities often support a single and specific cause. When it comes to monitoring #journorequest (and other hashtags and tweets by journalists) for media coverage opportunities, having a focus on a specific cause inevitably means that most requests are irrelevant. The keyword filtering option “is great because it aggregates all the journalist requests that are specifically relevant to you, so you don’t have to trawl through Twitter and wade through irrelevant content.” – Sarah Swaysland, The Volunteer idea

Journalists seeking comment

Journalists seeking comment from charities – and other organisations, such as universities, PR firms and businesses – can submit detailed and direct requests for free using this submit form: dotstar.media/submit (we also scan Twitter for requests posted there)

Charities looking for media coverage

Charities interested in trying the service for themselves can register here: dotstar.media/charities

The next step for Dot Star Media is providing an option for journalists who want to contact our growing network of charities, universities, businesses and public relations agencies without having to post requests on social media.

A direct journalist enquiry form means that journalists who want to send more detailed briefs than Twitter allows, or prefer to avoid the public nature of social media, can use Dot Star Media directly. The form is ready to use here: dotstar.media/submit

We know that building up a network of journalists will take time. While we promote the new service to journalists and build request volumes we have decided to distribute direct requests free of charge to all subscribers. The instant request notifications sourced from social media are still only available with a Dot Star Media subscription.

To receive Dot Star Media requests register at https://dotstar.media/register

Journalists can submit direct requests at https://dotstar.media/submit

Just a few months after launch Dot Star Media has improved the way organisations monitor social media for journalist requests. We’re helping hundreds of individual subscribers jump on the ‘quick reaction’ media opportunities available on Twitter, without spending all day on Twitter.

Innovation in media requests

We’re also pleased to have introduced these innovations to the journalist enquiry service market:

• Automated near-instant alerting for most requests, because speed is crucial
• Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations, to help press office teams collaborate
• Advanced keyword filtering and digest options, to remove irrelevant requests
• AI-powered keyword suggestions, to help capture more relevant requests
• A fully e-commerce enabled flexible subscription, to give our clients total control

We will continue to work with subscribers when developing further improvements.

Charity initiative

What Jonathan and I are most proud of, however, is the free ‘media request service for charities’ initiative. This is making a real and positive difference to the media relations activities of over 100 qualifying charities. Franchesca Allen from the press office at Macmillan Cancer Support said:

“Dot Star Media offers a simple, user friendly service which has allowed us to identify opportunities for our campaigns, which we were previously unable to benefit from due to limited resource to search for opportunities. It’s also allowed us to create and build new media relationships across consumer titles such as Refinery29, LadBible and VICE.”

Join us

To try Dot Star Media for yourself please register at https://dotstar.media/register

Jonathan and I are really happy that we’ve already reached a stage where we can provide Dot Star Media service to charities free of charge.

At the risk of sounding cheesy, we both want Dot Star Media to make a difference in the world. Everyone benefits from the amazing work of charities (some areas that are especially close to our hearts are education, health and the environment). So – although we’re a new business and still have a lot of growing to do – we’re taking the opportunity to give something back as soon as we can.

If you’re a press officer at a charity in the UK or Ireland, you can find out more about why we’re doing this and how your charity can benefit here: https://dotstar.media/charities/. We’d love to hear what you think of the service.

For more detail, here’s the text of a press release we sent out today.

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Dot Star Media launches free journalist request service for charities

Monday 12 April 2021

Media request monitoring and alerting service Dot Star Media announced today that it is making its service free of charge to UK and Irish registered charities.

Charity press officers use the Dot Star Media request service to receive and respond to journalist requests for comments, quotes, case studies and statistics for news articles and features.

Journalists and the media benefit from a media request service that provides access to a wide range of sources with a good balance of commercial and not-for-profit organisations participating.

Charities will have access to the full set of features, which include keyword filtering, digest options and delivery to Slack or Microsoft Teams. Dot Star Media allows charity press teams to receive a relevant feed of journalist request notifications without having to spend hours scouring social media.

Dan Griffiths, co-founder, said: “Journalists tell us they need a diverse range of voices. Charities (especially smaller ones) are often denied a voice because they can’t afford the fees for traditional media request services. By offering Dot Star Media free to registered charities, we want to make a difference to as many people as possible.”

Jonathan Tullett, co-founder, said: “Right from the beginning, we pledged a percentage of Dot Star Media’s profits to green causes, because we want to build a socially and environmentally conscientious organisation. I strongly feel we should always be trying to do more and this is another step towards that goal.”

Free access to Dot Star Media for charities will initially be limited to the first 1,000 qualifying charities registering.

Registered charities can sign up to try the service at https://dotstar.media/charities/

About Dot Star Media

Dot Star Media supports professional journalists and broadcasters by distributing their media requests to a diverse range of organisations. Charities, universities, businesses, and public relations professionals all benefit from an efficient way of monitoring, receiving, and responding to the best journalist requests shared on social media – without having to spend hours wading through noise and spam. The company was established in January 2021 by PRTech industry veterans Jonathan Tullett and Dan Griffiths. For more information visit https://dotstar.media/about

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Nov 2022 update: There is a newer method for building apps in Slack. The newer method for getting journalists requests into Slack is documented here: https://dotstar.media/getting-your-journalist-requests-in-slack/

Dot Star Media ‘gold’ tier subscribers can receive noise-free journalist request notifications in Slack.

Receiving media request notifications in a Slack channel offers some advantages over receiving alerts by email: delivery to Slack is quicker than email and it’s easier for your team to collaborate on the best way to respond to a request.

How to set up alerts in Slack

In the Slack application, add a new channel and call it something like ‘journalist-requests’. Once the channel is created press ‘Add an app’.

Search for ‘ Incoming WebHooks’ and press the install button. This will take you to the Incoming WebHooks app in the Slack App Directory.

Press the ‘Add to Slack’ button.

Choose the Slack channel you created earlier (or you can create a channel from here).

Slack will then provide a WebHook URL. Copy this URL to your clipboard.

Then, as an account administrator, visit the Dot Star Media website and navigate to the distribution channels page. Paste in the endpoint URL created in the previous step. Click the checkbox to enable the service.

You’ll now receive journalist requests in Slack, making it easier to work on replies with your colleagues. Please let us know if you would like support setting this up or if you have any feedback on receiving requests in Slack.