No matter how reputable a PR distribution company is, it can't compare to the personal contacts and relationships you develop with journalists. Building your own media contact list is a time-consuming task, but it is well worth the time and effort required.

To be successful in media relations, you must develop a media contact list that is customized to your specific needs. Send releases only to publications that are relevant in some way to your message, and make sure that you reach the appropriate journalist(s) at each publication. Blasting out press releases to any media contact that you come across will not result in good coverage, and will most likely damage your reputation.

Read on to learn about available media directories, as well as building and managing your own media contact list.

There are a number of good media contact directories and databases that can be purchased online. Some are inexpensive; others may be a significant expense for your organization.
Good directories provide detailed information on each contact - what they cover, how they prefer to receive press materials, and more. Use the directories to develop customized media lists for every release that you send out.

MediaMap -- Offers informative media dossiers on more than 20,000 top media contacts and their publications. Topics covered include business, finance, consumer markets, healthcare, technology and Web media. There is also editorial calendar data on over 90,000 scheduled stories per year. Their MediaMap PR Workflow Software provides a complete set of field-proven productivity tools and services.

Press Access -- Press Access features more than 7,000 contacts and offers weekly updates. Databases include computer trades, business, top 100 news,
in-flights, newsletters, online, interactive, multimedia, telecommunications and industry research firms. Editorial calendar database also available. Press Power, a fully integrated media tracking and contact software system, can be added on.

Bacon's Information Inc. -- Bacon's hard-copy print and broadcast media directories have been the "bible" of the PR industry for many years. The company now also offers MediaSource, a comprehensive digital database and contact management system. MediaSource features 350,000 editorial contacts at 51,000 media outlets. Also offers editorial calendars for 3,100 major magazines

Gebbie Press -- Gebbie's All-in-One Directory features over 23,000 US media listings - TV and radio, daily and weekly newspapers, consumer and trade magazines, ethnic media and news syndicates, networks and bureaus. Available as hard-copy or on computer disks.

Imediafax.com -- This company once published the US All Media E-mail Directory but recently took it off the market. Imediafax.com allows you to reach the same media outlets via their customized fax service. Their database includes 11,000 magazines, 1,500 daily newspapers, 5,700 weekly newspapers, 400 news services and syndicates, 1,300 broadcast TV stations, 1,800 broadcast TV shows, 1200 cable TV stations, 1,050 cable TV shows, 6,200 AM and FM radio stations, and more than 2,700 radio talk shows.

Media Trax offers a database of local (Bay area) and statewide (California) media contacts.

If you cannot afford a media directory, you can use the Web as a research tool to build your own customized media lists. Even if you do have a directory, you should always do this anyway. No resource is 100% complete - there will always be more contacts that you can add.

This is particularly true on the Web. There are thousands of Websites and e-mail publications devoted to just about any topic, many of which post news or editorial content in some form.
A lot of them are considered "second-tier" media outlets, meaning that they are not high-profile online publications.

However, while individual second-tier media outlets do not have a very high profile, collectively they have significant reach. One e-mail newsletter can have anywhere from a couple thousand to a couple hundred thousand subscribers or more - all potential visitors to your site. There is no media directory that effectively covers second-tier online media; you'll have to do that research yourself.

Editor & Publisher Interactive - a worldwide online media directory featuring newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, syndicates and associations.

NewsDirectory.com - a free guide to English language media online.

Newspapers.com - an easy to use tool for referencing the world's newspapers online.

Newspaperlinks.com - hosted by the Newspaper Association of America, this is the "official" gateway to US local newspaper sites.

Free US Newspapers Site - links to all online US newspapers.

Association of Alternative Newsweeklies - information and links to weekly alternative newspapers in the US.

College Press Network - a complete listing of online college newspapers in the US.

Media UK Internet Directory - information on the UK's radio, television, magazines and newspapers.

InfoJump - features information on over 4,000 online publications, 5,000,000 regularly indexed articles and 700,000 web sites.

John Labovitz's E-Zine-List - a directory of e-zines from around the world, accessible via the Web, FTP, email, and other services. The list contains over 4,000 listings is updated approximately monthly.

EzineCenter.com - an e-zine search engine.

The Newsletter Library - information on over 11,000 print newsletters.

High-level media contact directories like MediaMap, Press Access and Bacon's all offer systems to help you manage and maintain your media lists, send pitches individually or as part of a mail merge, and keep a history of your communication with each journalist.

Without one of those services, you'll need to develop your own system for managing your contacts and pitches. Something as simple as creating nicknames in your e-mail program for each list and organizing responses and feedback with the mailboxes in the e-mail program can work very well. Here are some other tools to help with management and/or distribution:

Act! 2000 - an excellent contact management program. It is designed for sales, but works very well for media relations too. Press Access uses a co-branded version of Act! in its system. With Act! you can keep track of all your media contacts, develop custom lists for each client and/or pitch, merge e-mail, fax or hard-copy pitches, set reminders to follow-up with specific journalists, and more.

MailKing - a powerful e-mail merge tool from Revnet. Allows data sharing without importing, filtering for developing custom targeted lists and personalized merging.

UnityMail - a database driven e-mail list server from Revnet. UnityMail is a good tool if you plan to distribute a number of releases, pitches or newsletters on a regular basis. It provides everything you need to manage e-mail lists automatically. An Express version is available for companies with smaller budgets.

EGroups - a free service that allows you to create "groups" to communicate with. The Group Mail function can be used to create and manage e-mail lists. It is not a perfect match for media relations, but it can work and the price is right.

ONElist - a free "e-mail community service" with functionality that can be used for managing e-mail lists and distributing releases and pitches via e-mail.

Cool List - a free e-mail mailing list service.

Now that you've figured out what to include in your press release and how to distribute it, how do you determine if your press release has actually generated media coverage? Let's move on to learn how to uncover media coverage.