News

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

We have a new home on Twitter!

After six months of perseverance with Twitter’s support staff, we were finally able to have @DotStarMedia transferred over to us on Saturday:

There was much rejoicing at Dot Star Media HQ.

If you were following us, no action is needed: you’ll receive the same quality content as before. If you’re not yet following us, now’s a great time to do so.

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