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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.

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.

When running a company like Dot Star Media, it’s impossible to get away from needing to run servers – quite a few servers. We have the corporate site (you’re on it now), we have the application site, and we have quite a few mailers to help you receive your enquiries within about 30 seconds of them appearing on social media.

All the servers need to be powered, and while our current hosting provider runs a decent service, they simply aren’t green, despite many people wishing they were.

At Dot Star Media, we care about our impact on society and the environment.

For society, we’re incredibly proud of our charity initiative, which is helping nearly 200 charities get media coverage for their causes.

For the environment, we pledge a percentage of our net profits each year to green causes but want to do more where we can. So this weekend we’re moving our entire hosting environment over to a new hosting provider – Hetzner Online.

Hetzner have been pioneers in using renewable energy to power their data centers; their German data centres – where we’re hosted – use hydro-power. Their hardware is chosen for energy efficiency too.

This weekend there will be intermittent access to our sites as we move our application. We’ll keep it as short as possible.

When Dot Star Media was merely a twinkle in our eye, we decided it was to be ’email first’ and that there should be few reasons the website had to be used. This drove our design for super-fast email delivery (30 seconds, on average), and straight forward configuring of profile settings.

While over 90% of our customers use email primarily for their alerts (and that being the reason so many have been able to secure media coverage – they arrive so damn quickly!) some do prefer to keep an eye on the recent enquiries page instead, or take one of our digests.

However, as features were developed – especially keyword filtering – and closely integrated with the email alerts and the recent enquiries pages, we wanted a way for people to be able to search for journalist requests which fall outside of their keywords. Perhaps you’re taking on a new client whose interests fall outside of your existing remits – being able to search the archive of requests is massively useful in helping pick your keywords!

Having access to the archive opens up other opportunities. It’s easy to search for journalists who write about certain topics – and the enquiries will be enriched with additional information where we have it. Further more, as our enquiries are only from verified journalists, we’ve removed the significant noise component of searching directly on social media.

So that’s our most recent development. Search. Super simple (single word/phrase search) with choice of how far back you want to look. Currently available from the top of the search bar:

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