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:
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:
We’ve had some really good results so far and there’s a wide range of outlets and journalists reaching out on a whole host of topics.
This type of resource is an excellent way to share the university’s expertise and support journalists to produce informed and well researched content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
In the Dot Star Media laboratories, we’re always trying new experiments to see what we can do to improve the relevance of enquiries you receive. Most don’t see light of day – rigorous testing disproves many theories. Sometimes, however, the results are good enough that they’re added for customers to use.
A recent theory was that follower count could be used as a rough proxy of how well a journalist is established, and their influence. With the idea that some organisations would prefer to respond to enquiries from more established journalists than those new to the beat. This idea was given some further weight with some feedback received on the service.
We’ve added a new subscriber filter option. The ‘journalist follower threshold’ allows a subscriber to filter journalist request alerts based on the number of followers a journalist has. It looks remarkably like this:
You may well be wondering what sort of effect this would have on the number of alerts received, so we spent time doing some calculations and produced a graph which demonstrates how effective this can be:
If you want to see the impact of each setting with your topics and keywords, choose a new journalist follower threshold and click ‘save’; you will then see how many requests would have come your way in the previous week:
There are exceptions to the theory: specialist trade journalists, for example, so it’ll be a personal choice based on your circumstances ultimately.
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.
Dot Star Media has built a large and diverse network of sources who can help journalists with their stories. Today there are over 600 organisations receiving requests. Journalists can use Dot Star Media to easily – and rapidly – ask questions and receive comment from hundreds of businesses, PRs, universities, and charities.
Subscribing organisations receive alerts by email or straight into their Slack or MSTeams software. We send thousands of individual alerts every day. Journalists wanting to connect with the Dot Star Media network can do so in two ways:
Include the hashtag #journorequest in your tweet. This makes it simple for anyone following the hashtag individually, and the various PR networks, including Dot Star Media, to pick up your request.
For requests that are too detailed for Twitter, or to simply access the Dot Star Media network outside of Twitter you can submit journalist requests directly using this media request form.
For security and efficiency, we won’t distribute your request until you have confirmed your email address via a ‘magic link’, so that replies go straight to you.
This diagram summarises the system. Replies from sources to the journalist are made by email or Twitter. We don’t intercept or interfere in the reply process. We simply connect journalists with sources, and then get out of the way.
Graphic made with PowerPoint! – design not my strongest skill. Please get in touch us with any questions about how the Dot Star Media journalist enquiry service works.
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.
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.
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.
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.