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As 2024 unfolded, the journalist requests distributed by Dot Star Media revealed trends and key themes. Here’s a month-by-month breakdown of what journalists focused on and the opportunities for PR professionals to connect.

This summary was created by tokenising the words in nearly 20,000 journalist requests. Using keyword analysis we identified recurring topics, terms and phrases to uncover broader themes. To make sense of the data, we grouped related terms into six major categories: Technology, Health, Politics, Lifestyle, Business, and Entertainment.

January: A Fresh Start

Journalists kicked off the year with a focus on:

• Health & Wellness: Resolutions and trends like fitness and mental health dominated.
• Lifestyle: Travel and interior design were in high demand.
• Business: Start-ups gained attention, with requests for innovative economic stories.

February: Love and Policy

The short month saw:

• Health: Continued focus on wellness, particularly diet trends.
• Politics: A spike in government-related queries ahead of policy announcements.
• Entertainment: Valentine’s Day 💘 drove interest in events and celebrity partnerships.

March: Springboard for Innovation

March highlighted:

• Technology: Requests around innovations in AI and blockchain.
• Lifestyle: Outdoor travel themes alongside fashion features.
• Business: Journalists explored funding trends in start-ups and small businesses.

April: Fresh Perspectives

Spring brought:

• Entertainment: Event-heavy coverage, from festivals to film premieres.
• Health: A rise in mental health awareness campaigns.
• Lifestyle: Garden and home stories gained traction.

May: On the Move

With warmer days, journalists looked for:

• Travel: Emerging destinations and summer getaways.
• Health: Wellness retreats and fitness journeys.
• Technology: Continued buzz around emerging apps and tech solutions.

June-August: Summer Peaks

The summer months were filled with:

• Lifestyle: Stories on vacation trends and summer living 🌞
• Entertainment: Festivals and music events took centre stage.
• Technology: Coverage of innovation in green energy and AI integration.

September: Back to Business

As routines resumed:

• Business: Increased focus on economic forecasts and market trends.
• Health: A push toward work-life balance and employee well-being.
• Politics: Discussions around upcoming US election.

October: Storytelling Season

Autumn storytelling focused on:

• Lifestyle: Seasonal home décor and holiday travel.
• Technology: The lead-up to major tech launches and reviews.
• Entertainment: Awards season brought celebrity features to the forefront.

November: Reflect and Prepare

Journalist request focus shifted to:

• Business: Year-end financial summaries and projections.
• Health: Pre-holiday wellness and mental health.
• Politics: Continued discourse on government policies.

December: Closing Chapters

The year’s close highlighted:

• Lifestyle: Reflective features on travel and home.
• Business: Predictions for 2025.
• Health: A resurgence in fitness resolutions and detox plans.

Don’t miss out on shaping 2025 – subscribe to Dot Star Media to receive real-time journalist request alerts and stay on top of the trends.

Anyone working in public relations will know that X/(Twitter) is still regularly used by journalists and remains an influential platform. Grok’s ability to access current X posts (Tweets) means that there are potential use cases for public relations professionals.

All Premium subscribers to X have access to Grok, the large language model developed by xAI. It’s worth taking a look.

Grok for media research and insights

Grok appears to be able to provide up-to-date information on various topics, including trends, public sentiment, and competitor activities.

For example, try asking Grok ‘What topics are [sector] journalists talking about right now?’ and Grok will return a summary, including recent posts. This is potentially useful for identifying up-to-the-minute trends and developing pitch ideas.

Grok for summarising and contextualising news stories and events

Grok also seems to be capable of providing story backgrounders and context for current news stories.

Be sure to fact check the output though. In Grok’s own words – it’s ‘an early feature and can make mistakes’.

Help A Reporter Out’s (also known as HARO) long running three-times-a-day request digest emails stopped on 2^nd April 2024. To access HARO queries you now need to login to Cision’s Connectively platform. Receiving email notifications for HARO queries has become a paid feature based on saved keyword searches.

There are plenty of reasons why Cision moved their service to a new platform, not least dealing with automated AI generated pitches. The changes, however, have left some HARO subscribers looking into other sources for media requests. The original founder of HARO, Peter Shankman, has responded to the demise of the free HARO digest emails by launching Help Every Reporter Out (HERO), a free service echoing the style and spirit of his original project.

Monitoring #journorequest for USA and Canadian media requests

The #journorequest hashtag 𝕏/Twitter is well used by UK journalists. It also includes requests for sources from journalists writing for US, Canadian and other media outlets from around the world.

At Dot Star Media our job is to deliver prompt email alerts for requests posted on 𝕏/Twitter alongside the requests directly submitted by journalists on our journalist enquiry form.

We primarily issue alerts for media requests from journalists writing for UK and Irish outlets, for which we charge (see pricing). Requests from journalists writing for outlets in USA, Canada and the Rest of the World are available free of charge.

How to get free USA and Canadian media request alerts

Register for access at https://app.dotstar.media/register using a business email address. Select your topics of interest and make sure that your ‘Regions of interest’ alert options include the ‘USA & Canada’ region.

We’re seeing, and including, increasing volumes of journalist requests from non-UK/IE journalists in our alert feeds and so have added a Regions of interest preference setting to the profile settings page.

This setting allows those that want to receive journalist requests from regions outside of the UK and Ireland to receive them, and those that don’t, to exclude them.

There are two new regions of interest available. Receiving requests from both of these two new regions is free of charge:

• USA & Canada
• Rest of the World

Existing subscribers who want to receive requests from journalists covering non-UK & Ireland regions can opt-in by login into your account and clicking the checkboxes for the additional regions that you want.

If you’re new to Dot Star Media and would like to receive journalist enquiries from the USA & Canada region, or the Rest of the World region – free of charge – sign-up here.

Links in the journalist request alert emails and the button labels in the online media request archives have been updated for 𝕏, the new name for the website formerly known as Twitter.

Journalists are welcome to submit their media requests for comment to an established network of public relations professionals at agencies, businesses, charities and universities using the Dot Star Media journalist enquiry form.

PR Live – event series with Natalie Trice

Natalie Trice will be hosting PR Live, the first in a series of ‘meet the journalist’ events on Friday 10 November 2023. The launch event features three established freelance journalists each speaking about their careers and how best to pitch stories to them. Each speaker session is followed by a question and answer sessions and live pitching opportunities.

Event #1: The Freelance Session

Kelly Rose Bradford

Kelly has been a freelance journalist for over 25 years. today she divides her time between freelancing as a features writer and commercial copywriter with a staff position with one of the UK’s biggest newspaper and magazine publishers. With extensive television and radio experience as a social commentator, Kelly will open your eyes to the potential of PR and the need to pitch well.

Sarah Whiteley

Sarah has been working in real-life and human-interest journalism for the past 17 years. After working as the features editor for Best magazine for six years, she is now a freelance writer and a parenting columnist. Sarah works for all of the national magazines and newspapers and it’s a job she still feels passionately about and a world she will let you into.

Sam Brick

Sam has been a features writer for the last 15 years and mainly writes for the Daily Mail, The Sun and various women’s weekly magazines. Before that, she worked in the US and UK in television where she was an award winning documentary producer. Got a question about hitting the right note with the press, Sam will tell you how.

Tickets and Event Details

Friday, 11th November 2023 at 10:45am

• Session 1: 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM – Kelly Rose Bradford
• Session 2: 12:00 PM – 12:50 PM – Sarah Whitely
• Session 3: 1:00 PM – 1:50 PM – Sam Brick 

Tickets are £25/session (discount available for all three sessions) and available from the PR Live website

Using Python and AI to analyse 1,320 PR Agency website home page title and description meta tags.

We extracted web page meta tag data from over a thousand public relations agency homepages and did some text data analysis.

The most generic PR Agency description tag ever written.

Given a text file of 1,320 UK PR Agency meta tag page descriptions Claude.AI was asked to assimilate the text and write the most generic PR agency description tag possible. The resulting, rather soulless, AI generated, most generic PR Agency description is:-

“Award-winning PR agency offering integrated communications strategies including media relations, digital marketing, content creation, brand building and crisis management. Based in the UK.”

Here’s the prompt:

One discovery from this research is that 108 out of 1320 PR agency websites didn’t have a home page meta description at all. Google has said for a long time that meta discription tags are not a search ranking factor, so while not critically important, meta descriptions are easy to add and can help improve click through from search results.

Common keywords in PR Agency page title and page descriptions

We used Python to crawl page title and page descriptions. The extracted results were then tokenised, cleaned, and stopwords removed before counting word frequencies. From a dataset of 1,320 UK PR Agency websites, the words that occur most frequently in UK PR Agency page description and page title meta tags are shown in the chart below.

The dominance of London shows through. There are so many agencies describing themselves in their page descriptions as award winning that one wonders if it’s a distinguishing factor at all.

pr: 1468
agency: 925
marketing: 679
communications: 473
digital: 375
media: 300
relations: 274
public: 262
london: 219
social: 190

home: 186
award: 185
creative: 182
winning: 180
brands: 172
based: 171
content: 149
brand: 148
services: 138
uk: 125

consultancy: 123
business: 121
seo: 109
clients: 106
businesses: 94
help: 93
campaigns: 91
lifestyle: 89
specialising: 88
b2b: 86

Clustering and Categorisation

For fun, and to maybe take the analysis a step too far, let’s look for patterns of similar messaging in how UK PR Agencies describe themselves and identify any outliers. First, the text data is converted into numerical vectors using the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectorisation. Then an attempt is made to cluster the PR Agency page descriptions into categories based on common themes using the K-Means clustering algorithm.

Overall the page descriptions used by PR Agencies do (as you might expect) share pretty similar characteristcs. This is why we have one large mega-blob on the cluster chart below.

Manually reviewing meta descriptions within each cluster revealed groups of agencies that put their emphasis on ‘Public Relations’, some that lean towards emphasising their ‘Sector Specialism’, a group of agencies that focus on their ‘Digital Marketing’ expertise, and a less well defined cluster of agencies around ‘Marketing Communications’. The outlying green cluster is mainly those agencies with no, or incomplete page meta tags.

JournoRequest Service

Most of this post has little to do with our media request service – that said, if you are a sector specialist interested in receiving prompt alerts for #journorequest posts from 𝕏/Twitter, and also in receiving journalist requests submitted by journalists directly on our website – please register for a 14-day free trial.