Module 2: Building Your Media List

Who to pitch

A mention in front of 500 of the right people beats a mention in front of 50,000 of the wrong ones. So the first job isn't finding journalists — it's defining "right." Your right outlet is any publication, podcast, or blog whose audience overlaps with your buyers. Start from your customer and work backward: what do they read, watch, and listen to?

There are five kinds of targets worth your time. Beat reporters at local and regional news — the business desk, the lifestyle desk — who cover stories like yours every week. Trade press: the publications and blogs inside your industry, read by peers and serious buyers. Podcast hosts in your niche — the single highest-return target for most small businesses, covered fully in Module 4. Newsletter writers: independent writers with loyal audiences who are always hunting for fresh examples. Bloggers and creators who review, round up, or opine on your category.

Match the outlet's size to your stage. If you've never been covered, don't start with the national morning show — start with the local business journal, the niche podcast with 2,000 listeners, the trade blog. Small hits are the currency that buys bigger hits — every feature becomes the proof in your next pitch (that's the Credibility Flywheel from Module 5, and it starts here). A realistic first-year target: a handful of local and niche hits, each one making the next pitch easier.

And skip anyone whose audience can't buy from you. A national feature feels amazing and converts terribly if the readers aren't your buyers. Relevance beats reach, every single time. Ten podcast listeners who need a bookkeeper are worth more than ten thousand viewers who don't.

Finding them manually

No expensive database required. Everything below is free and manual — slower than a paid tool, but the research itself teaches you what each contact covers, which makes your pitches dramatically better.

Search operators. In Google, try: your niche + "podcast", your niche + "writer" OR "journalist", site:localnews.com your niche. The quotes matter — they find pages that actually use those words. Run five variations and you'll surface shows, writers, and outlets you'd never have found browsing.

Podcast directories. Search Apple Podcasts and Spotify directly for your niche keywords. Sort by relevance, then scroll past the giant shows to the mid-size ones — hosts with a few thousand listeners answer their own email and desperately need good guests. Open the show notes of any episode: the host's contact info is usually right there.

Bylines and bios. When you read an article on your topic, note the author's name — they cover your beat by definition. On X/Twitter, bios literally say "I cover X for Y." Search bios for your niche plus "writer," "reporter," "host," or "editor." Follow ten of them; read what they post for a week before you ever pitch.

Competitor footprints. Google your competitors' names plus "interview," "podcast," or "featured." Every hit is an outlet that already covers businesses like yours — the warmest leads on your list, because someone already said yes to your category once. Add every one of those outlets to your spreadsheet before you look anywhere else.

Do this in batches: one hour, one source type, ten contacts minimum. Research is the work — there is no shortcut that skips it, and the familiarity you build is what makes the pitches land.

The media list spreadsheet

Collecting names isn't enough — you need a system, or follow-ups die and pitches go out twice to the same person. Your media list is a simple spreadsheet with these columns: name, outlet, beat (what they cover), audience fit (1–5, how well their audience matches your buyers), contact (email or handle), recent story (one they wrote on your topic — proof they cover it), pitched date, follow-up date, status.

Start with 30 contacts. That's enough to run a real campaign and small enough to research properly. For each contact, fill in the "recent story" column before you pitch — if you can't find one story they've done on your topic in the last six months, they're not a fit. Delete them. A list of 30 qualified contacts beats 300 names every time. Qualification is the whole job.

Sort by audience fit and start at the top. Work the list in order: pitch five, log the dates, follow up in five days, log the result, move to the next five. The status column is your memory — "pitched 3/12, follow-up 3/17, no reply, move on" — so nothing falls through the cracks and nobody gets pitched twice with the same angle.

Grow the list by ten contacts a week as an ongoing habit. Every article you read, every podcast you hear in your niche: check the byline, add the name. Within two months you'll have a hundred qualified contacts, and pitching becomes a machine — which is exactly what Module 5's weekly rhythm assumes you have.