How to Automate Muck Rack

The whole job starts with knowing which reporter to call

Communications teams work from Muck Rack, a journalist database and a media monitoring platform in one. Its core is a set of reporter profiles kept current by an editorial team: who the person is, which outlet they are at, what beat they cover, and the pieces they have actually published lately.

That last part is why it gets used. Anyone can buy a list of email addresses. What a publicist needs before writing a word is evidence that this reporter covers this subject and has not just run the same story about a competitor.

Agencies use it across a roster of clients and in-house teams use it for one brand, and both are also monitoring: what ran about us, what ran about them, and where. Muck Rack watches digital news, print through LexisNexis, broadcast through TVEyes, podcasts and the social platforms, and turns the results into alerts and reports.

The output is a media list, a pitch, a coverage report, and a relationship that took years.

The pitch is twenty minutes of reading before it is written

A good pitch is not a good paragraph. It is a good paragraph aimed at somebody it actually fits.

Getting there means reading. The reporter's last five pieces, to find the angle they already took. Whether they covered the competitor's funding round in March. Whether the outlet has run a version of this story recently, which kills it. Whether the person is still there, because bylines move and a list from last spring is partly fiction.

The rest of the week goes on accounting for what happened. Overnight coverage swept and read. Clips logged against the right client. A monthly report built out of what ran and where. Inbound queries from reporters read and matched to a client who can actually answer, inside the few hours the reporter gave you.

None of that is strategy. It is reading and copying, and it happens around the two hours a day that are the job.

Muck Rack

A media list checked name by name Still at that outlet, still on that beat, what they published on the subject recently, and whether a rival got there first.

Overnight coverage read before the morning call What ran about the client and about the competitors, gathered into one summary rather than four alert emails nobody opens.

Deadlines that live on other people's sites Awards entries, speaking submissions and embargo dates collected off organiser sites, which is the calendar most likely to be missed.

Alerts tell you what ran, not what to do about it

Muck Rack removes a lot of that, and an agency that has not set it up properly is doing hours it need not do.

The media database searches by topic, outlet type, location and keyword, and each profile shows the reporter's beat, outlet and recent coverage, so relevance can be judged before anyone writes. Alerts run off saved searches and arrive in real time or as a scheduled digest, by email or into a Slack channel, so nobody sits refreshing a search page. Reporting turns those same saved searches into coverage dashboards and client reports, and Pitching sends from the platform and tracks what happened next.

The limit is that the platform sees the media, and a campaign is not made only of media.

It does not know what your client actually shipped this week, whether the executive is free on Thursday, that an awards deadline closes on Friday, that the analyst note everyone will cite came out this morning behind a paywall, or that the retailer's product page still shows the price the release contradicts. Nor does it read a reporter's last five pieces for you. It shows you the pieces. A person still reads them.

A media list that stays true between campaigns

Preparation is the half that can be handed over, and there is a great deal of it.

Before an announcement, every name on the list checked: still at that outlet, still on that beat, what they published on the subject lately, and whether they already covered a rival. What comes out is a short list where each entry carries a reason somebody can read in ten seconds.

Around a launch, the wider sweep. Overnight coverage of the client and the three competitors, in one summary before the morning call. The reporter query that arrived at eleven at night, matched to the client who can answer it and put in front of an account lead in time to matter. Awards and speaking deadlines gathered off the organisers' own sites, the most reliably forgotten calendar in the business.

For reporting, the clips pulled together with what Muck Rack cannot see: the traffic the client's own analytics recorded that day and the retailer page that went live.

Then the discipline that makes any of it worth doing. Every message to a journalist is drafted and read by the person whose name is on it. Volume is what turns a pitch into spam, and a reporter who blocks the agency stays blocked.

A person still presses send

The line sits at the send button. Everything before it can be prepared while the office is closed, and nothing after it should be.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Muck Rack, the outlet, the analytics dashboard, the awards site or the client's own systems, reads what is there, and hands back a briefed list, a coverage summary or a draft with the research attached to it.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, limited to the sites you name. Pitches, press releases and client reports are drafted and wait for approval. Reputation work is the wrong place for an unattended send.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.