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Before Muck Rack: Spreadsheets, Word docs and mental notes

Before Muck Rack, GBH didn’t have a centralized online system to track their PR efforts. They used Cision to research journalists, spreadsheets to manage media lists, and kept mental notes about contact preferences.

When I joined back in 2018 as the assistant director of media relations, I knew we needed a public relations management platform. I recalled my predecessor mentioning her interest in Muck Rack in the office transfer notes she left behind.

I was already familiar with the platform thanks to a case study featuring Mother Jones, another large media outlet. As I read it, I remember thinking, “Wow, this is exactly what we do.”

With Muck Rack: Enhancing day-to-day PR functions

The GBH PR team has been using Muck Rack for 3 years now. If I had to describe the platform in three words, it’d be intuitive, collaborative and powerful.

In addition to its stand-out features,Muck Rack makes me feel more engaged with the day-to-day functions of my job overall.

Media research & list building with a ‘living’ database

Our team uses Muck Rack to find external media outlets interested in telling the stories about the content we’re producing.

We cover a wide range of subjects — from journalism to history to science to drama to arts and culture. On any given day, the range of topical outreach is large. We might be amplifying the reach of a local news story or delivering a powerful archival clip to top tier national outlets. Some of my colleagues use Muck Rack to promote ground-breaking journalism on “FRONTLINE” and others to promote programs airing on the WORLD Channel or the priorities of GBH Education. That means we have to contact a range of journalists.

We’ve established strong relationships with local reporters here in Boston. But on a more national level, we’re often unearthing journalists in new niches to pitch — and we use Muck Rack to help us do that.

Muck Rack makes it easy to narrow our search by location, topic, beat, media types and more. When you find a journalists’ profile, you can easily browse their past articles — and even recent tweets — to help us better understand what they cover.

I have faith in Muck Rack because it is truly a living database. Rather than having contacts live in a static spreadsheet that requires manual changes, the Muck Rack team works behind the scenes to ensure information is up to date. I also like that we can go in and update a journalists’ contact preferences or information.

Overall, Muck Rack makes it easier to capture and manage the information we need to do our job.

Creating custom pitches with ease

Muck Rack saves us a ton of time when pitching.

The biggest game-changer is we no longer have to copy and paste dozens of pitches, personalizing each one for each contact. Instead, we can easily customize them within Muck Rack, even setting up different pitches for different audiences.

Because this saves so much time, our communication with reporters is just more authentic and valuable versus adding them to a mass email blast.

We can also schedule our pitches, based on journalists’ contact preferences as noted on their Muck Rack profiles. This is helpful for reaching journalists in different time zones or those who like to be contacted at certain times of day.

Muck Rack keeps track of our teams’ communication, meaning we can see who pitches whom — and when. So if someone reached out to a journalist a day ago, I know we don’t want to pitch them again just yet. Overall, it provides a strong sense of transparency on our team.

Finally, the pitches sync up to our email inbox, which is convenient, and it is helpful to see when someone opens your pitch. Overall, it’s a great, intuitive workflow.

Monitoring and backlink tracking

Muck Rack makes it easy to monitor keywords and we’ve saved alerts for all of our key personalities and programs. These keywords are also helpful when we start working on a new campaign and want to get up to speed about a specific space.

For example, when we promoted GBH News coverage of the Boston mayor's historic race, I set up alerts for the Boston mayor's race in national publications. This helped me understand how the race was viewed nationally and helped to open up entry points for joining our coverage into this conversation.

The keywords and alerts allow us to narrow in on coverage that is already taking place and can open up coverage opportunities in unexpected outlets. As someone representing a media organization, I appreciate that we can exclude our own coverage in alerts and searches so that we can focus our attention on how external outlets are discussing us.

Muck Rack recently added a new feature that allows us to track backlinks, which are really valuable these days. For instance, if the New York Times links to us in one of their articles — they don’t even have to mention us by name — we’ll get notified. This can help boost our web traffic and just as importantly give that third party stamp of approval on our content.