View all case studies Knight Foundation
The national foundation bolstering journalism leans on Muck Rack for building targeted media lists.
Learn how the Knight Foundation uses Muck Rack to:
- Curate highly-relevant media lists for Knight Foundation initiatives and programs with Muck Rack’s journalist search engine
- Pitch and engage with top-tier media through Muck Rack’s database and pitching platform
Knight Foundation
Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. They invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Their goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which they believe are essential for a healthy democracy.
Anusha Alikhan
Director of Communications
In Their Own Words: Knight Foundation's Favorite Muck Rack Features
Search and Topics
At Knight Foundation, we use Muck Rack’s search feature primarily to identify reporters that are writing about a topic relevant to a given initiative we’re promoting.
We recently did a push around our Gallup Report on free speech on college campuses. The ability of Muck Rack to identify reporters by keyword helped me to build an extremely targeted list. I love Muck Rack’s ability to narrow down a search by verified journalists or by those who wrote bylined articles on a topic -- not just someone who tweeted about a given topic once or twice. Reporters who have actually written about a topic directly are more likely to be interested in picking up stories that align with their focus.
With some of the other media solutions we’ve used in the past, we haven’t been able to narrow down the right list of journalists, leading us to pitch people who might not be the best fit for our story.
We also love Muck Rack’s newly-added Topics feature within search to help identify niche subjects. We released a report on how specific online communities (Black Twitter, Feminist Twitter, Asian American Twitter) interact with the news. It was difficult to narrow that topic through keyword search and find reporters focused on this niche area. Using Muck Rack’s Topics feature, I came across a Black History Month topic, clicked on it and then specifically searched by beat, “technology + media.” The reporters that came up as a result of that Topic search reduced my list from about 600 to 200.
We got a lot of good pickup as a result of our outreach on Muck Rack -- more than 50 outlets covered our research, including the New York Times and Washington Post. If we didn’t have Muck Rack, our media relations and relationship-building efforts would be less effective and have less impact.
—Anusha Alikhan, Director of Communications
In-platform pitching
Since Muck Rack introduced in-platform pitching, we’ve used the platform more than ever over the past six months.
Returning to the Gallup Report on free speech example, a lot of times when we have research that will interest a large group of reporters, I like to pre-pitch the report ahead of time to a select group of reporters at major outlets. Previously, I sent emails one by one from Outlook which was tedious and time consuming. With Muck Rack’s in-platform pitching, I was able to send a personalized pitch to a targeted media list of about 20 journalists. I only had to craft one pitch -- and the emails were sent directly through Muck Rack.
Best of all, I could see on the backend whether or not the journalist had opened the email. Knowing who had or hadn’t opened the email gave me valuable information, and saved the time of guesswork. If a reporter had opened an email, but not responded or not checked at all, I knew to move on to another reporter.
On the day we released the report more widely, we sent the pitch to more than 300 people. Because the search was extremely targeted, we had about a 50 percent open rate, which is huge! We got a lot of good pickup as a result of our outreach on Muck Rack -- more than 50 outlets covered the research, including the New York Times and Washington Post. That was a real success story for us.
In-platform pitching has been a huge timesaver because we aren’t worried about sending the same reporter multiple emails. As an added benefit, we were able to know for next time which reporters are interested in First Amendment topics and build another list for future stories. We know who actually bit, and can target even better further down the line.
Muck Rack is the best at providing targeted lists of journalists that help us achieve our goals.
—Anusha Alikhan, Director of Communications
Five Fast Questions
1. If you had to explain how you use Muck Rack to someone in a 140-character tweet or 10-second SnapChat story, what would you say?
“Muck Rack means finding the reporters that care about your work, sending media pitches with ease and getting a backend view of who's opened and who hasn't. It is not just a time-saver, it's a tool that works hand-in-hand with your media strategy and helps up your game!”
2. What would you tell other companies considering using Muck Rack?
I would tell them that Muck Rack is an easy platform to use, a real time saver and that the price point is great. Muck Rack is cost-effective, compared to other competitors.
3. How has PR changed in the past several years? How has Muck Rack helped you keep up?
Because of information overload and the dwindling resources in newsrooms, journalists often have less time on their hands to read long pitches or dig deeper into topics. What this means for anyone doing media outreach, and trying to get pickup beyond big mainstream stories is that we have to be very targeted about the pitches we’re sending. We have to know the reporters, know their beat and cater stories to their focus areas. If we don’t spell out impact in the pitch or initial email, then we’re not going to get our story placed.
4. How would you describe your experience with Muck Rack in three words?
Efficient, responsive, reliable, or “Lean on Me” because that’s what we do -- we lean on Muck Rack!
5. What has your experience been like working with Muck Rack’s customer success team?
Muck Rack’s customer success team is great -- they’re really responsive, and work to get to the bottom of any issues that arise quickly. I really appreciate the chat feature on the platform as well. When I reached out with an issue, it was resolved in minutes, and didn’t affect the timeliness of my workflow.
