Media Outlets

Read time 10 min Level Beginner Prerequisites An active Buzzscribed login

In a nutshell: Media Outlets is your media CRM -- six tabs covering search, top contacts, outlets, outreach groups, syndication groups and housekeeping. Outlets are publications; contacts are people; one contact can sit at several outlets without duplication. The platform never touches your CRM without you asking -- the deduplication wizard runs when you click Discover Duplicates, and your contacts stay tenant-owned throughout.

What you will learn

How the Media Outlets page splits the work across SEARCH, TOP CONTACTS, OUTLETS, OUTREACH GROUPS, SYNDICATION GROUPS and ADMIN.
The relationship between an outlet and a contact -- and how one person sits at multiple outlets.
How to add a single contact, bulk-import a spreadsheet by paste, and keep reception current.
How the engagement history on a contact is built from real events: pitch opens, NewsWire downloads, interview bookings, logged calls.
How the deduplication wizards work and the standing principle that protects your CRM.

The mental model

Two record types live on this page. An outlet is a publication, station or programme -- The Acme Tribune, Widget FM Breakfast. A contact is a person -- Jane Smith, news editor. A contact attaches to one or more outlets: if Jane writes for both The Acme Tribune and a sister title, she is one contact record linked to two outlets, not two duplicate Janes. Acme PR Corp's CRM carries journalists and outlets across UK national, broadcast and trade press -- one curated list, used on every campaign.

Around those records the page wraps three jobs: search and engagement (find people, see their reception, see what they have done with your Stories), grouping (reusable lists and syndication networks), and housekeeping (bulk import, deduplication, blocked emails, missing interests).

Your CRM is yours. The platform never silently merges, dedupes or reshapes your contacts -- every cleanup action runs when you press the button.

The tabs

SEARCH: The default tab -- a Google-style search across name, email, outlet and interest. Matching contacts come back as cards showing outlet(s), reception level, interests and an engagement score. From here you can open a contact, export the result set to CSV, or snooze a contact (temporarily hide them from search and outreach -- useful when someone is on leave).
TOP CONTACTS: Your most-engaged contacts across all outlets, ranked by downloads, interview bookings and email opens. An engagement-type filter (Placements / Bookings / Email Opens) lets you rank by the behaviour you care about, and a Recalculate Engagement Scores action refreshes the leaderboard. The contacts who appear here are the ones already actively engaging with your Stories.
OUTLETS: The publication side of the CRM. Browse and edit outlet records -- name, type (News / Broadcast / Print / Magazine / Blog / Podcast / Social / Trade / Wire), coverage area, size, tier, time zone, logo (with a Wikipedia-API fallback for brand logos), and -- for broadcast outlets -- programme slots and presenters. Each outlet lists the contacts attached to it.
OUTREACH GROUPS: Reusable contact lists. Build a group once ("Acme launch list", "national tech press") and pull it as the recipient source when you assemble a pitch on Email Pitching. Groups are how a repeated set of journalists gets re-used across Stories rather than rebuilt each time.
SYNDICATION GROUPS: Networks of outlets that republish each other's content -- a regional masthead group, a radio network. Useful when coverage in one masthead implies coverage across the chain.
ADMIN: Housekeeping sub-tabs: Bulk Import (paste from spreadsheet), Country Packs (add a country's journalist pool to your CRM -- covered in the Finding Journalists article), Outlet Dedup and Contact Dedup (the deduplication wizards), Blocked Emails (bounced or unsubscribed addresses, with Excel export), and Missing Interests (contacts with no interest tags ready for enrichment).

Adding a single contact

Use the add-contact action on SEARCH, TOP CONTACTS or OUTLETS. The fields:

Contact Name, Email, phone numbers, postal address.
Position -- the job title (news editor, features writer, columnist).
Interests -- topic tags. Worth filling in: interests feed Smart Match and topic-driven pitch recommendations.
Special Notes -- free text for anything that does not fit a column ("prefers email over phone", "covering the Olympics through August").
Bio, Twitter handle, LinkedIn URL, and an email-enabled toggle.

If the contact also works at another outlet, open the contact record and use Add Contact to Additional Outlets -- this links the existing person to the second outlet, keeping the engagement history unified.

Bulk import: paste, do not upload

Bulk import on ADMIN > Bulk Import is a paste-from-spreadsheet flow. Tight and fast:

Open the Bulk Import table. Set the batch-wide fields at the top: Country (required), State (required), Outlet Type, Size, Tier, Time Zone.
Copy the cells from your spreadsheet -- columns in the order Outlet Name, Contact Name, Contact Email, Contact Phone, Position, Interests, Coverage Area, Format, Reach.
Paste into the first cell of the table. The columns map automatically; up to 500 rows per batch.
Country and state normalise for you. The same outlet name across rows adds those journalists to that single outlet. The same outlet name under a different country creates a separate outlet so cross-country teams stay clean. A journalist already in your CRM is reused and mapped to the new outlet rather than duplicated.

The paste-first design skips file-format issues, encoding gotchas and the column-mapping step -- you go straight from a working spreadsheet to a live CRM in seconds.

Reception levels: keep the temperature current

Every interaction with a contact can carry a reception level -- a temperature gauge of how the journalist or outlet responded. The five-step scale runs from Hot through Warm, Luke Warm and Cold to Ice Cold. The exact line between adjacent levels is a judgement call.

Update reception after each call or email. A current reception field steers the team toward the right journalists first; a stale field steers them toward the wrong ones.

CRM hygiene: the practice that pays off

A media CRM is only as useful as the discipline behind it. Three habits separate agencies whose CRM steers them at the right journalists from agencies whose CRM steers them at the wrong ones:

Update reception after every touch. A journalist who passed on the last Story is not necessarily cold on the next angle. Reception that reflects the last conversation steers the team correctly; reception that is six months old steers them wrong.
Quarterly dedup, calendared. Put a quarterly recurring slot in the team's diary for ADMIN > Contact Dedup and Outlet Dedup. Run Discover Duplicates, work through the clusters, merge the duplicates that have grown over the quarter. Half a day every three months keeps the CRM sharp.
Triage Missing Interests monthly. ADMIN > Missing Interests surfaces contacts with no interest tags -- the contacts Smart Match will rank weakly because it has no topical signal to work with. Twenty contacts a month gets the agency back to full topic coverage in a year.

The wider principle: your media CRM is a team asset, not a personal address book. Two hours a week of distributed maintenance -- updating reception, adding interest tags, snoozing journalists on holiday -- compounds into a list that wins pitches the team would otherwise lose. The platform never auto-touches the data; the team's discipline is what makes the CRM trustworthy.

On GDPR: the CRM is tenant-owned and never auto-merged. Deletions are logged, dedup runs on user click, and the audit trail is owned by the tenant.

Engagement history on a contact

Open a contact and the engagement history shows what they have done with the Story assets, not just what was sent to them. The history is built from events the platform captures automatically:

Pitch opens -- emails sent via Email Pitching that the contact opened.
NewsWire downloads -- assets they pulled from a Story's NewsWire page, every download fingerprinted back to the campaign.
Interview bookings -- interviews booked with your talent, logged in Bookings & Coverage.
Logged calls and emails -- the touches recorded against the contact, each with reception and notes.

That history is what the engagement score on the card aggregates -- and what TOP CONTACTS ranks on.

[Screenshot placeholder -- a contact card on the SEARCH tab: name, Position, outlet badges, reception level, interest tags, an engagement score, and expandable history rows.]

A contact card with engagement history. Download and interview counts expand to show the trail behind them.

Deduplication: only when you ask

Near-duplicates accumulate over time -- "Acme Tribune" and "The Acme Tribune", or the same journalist entered twice during onboarding. The ADMIN tab carries Outlet Dedup and Contact Dedup sub-tabs, each driving a wizard with two modes: Discover Duplicates (the wizard scans your CRM and clusters likely matches for you to review) or Merge Specific Outlets (you nominate the records to merge). Review the clusters, preview the merge, execute -- or back out untouched at any step.

The wizard runs only when clicked. CRM contacts are tenant-owned data and the platform leaves them alone unless a cleanup is explicitly triggered. A quarterly dedup cadence keeps the CRM tidy if duplicates accumulate.

Where outreach actually happens

This page builds and maintains the contact database. Outbound pitching runs from Email Pitching (one-to-many journalist outreach for a Story) or Client EDM (newsletters to your clients), and from there you pick recipients -- a saved Outreach Group, a media-database search, or Smart Match. The CSV export on SEARCH is for taking a list to an external tool, not for feeding a pitch -- pitches assemble straight from groups, search or Smart Match.

Try this: Open ADMIN > Missing Interests. Pick three contacts with no interest tags and add tags based on their recent bylines -- two minutes per contact. Then switch to TOP CONTACTS, set the engagement filter to Bookings, and read the list of contacts who have actually done interviews with your talent. Those are the names to lead with on the next launch.

Frequently asked

The page title says "Media Contacts" but the menu says "Media Outlets". Which is it?: Same page, two labels. The navigation entry is Media Outlets; the on-page heading is Media Contacts because the page holds both contact and outlet records.
Do I need to be an Admin to manage the CRM?: CRM management is open to all roles -- Admin, Power and User can add, edit, group and dedupe contacts and outlets. Data quality is everyone's job.
How do I import a list from Excel?: ADMIN > Bulk Import > Open Bulk Import Table. Set the batch-wide fields, then copy the spreadsheet cells and paste into the first cell of the table. The columns map themselves and you are done in seconds.
A journalist moved outlets -- do I create a new record?: Update the existing contact, or use Add Contact to Additional Outlets to link them to the new outlet. One person stays one contact, and their engagement history follows them.
Will the platform merge our duplicate contacts for us?: Only when you ask. The dedup wizard (ADMIN > Outlet Dedup / Contact Dedup, Discover Duplicates) runs on your click -- your CRM contacts are tenant-owned and protected from background scans.
Where do I see what a journalist has done with my Stories?: Open the contact. The engagement history shows pitch opens, NewsWire downloads, interview bookings and your logged calls and emails, with the reception level current on each touch.

Key takeaways

Two record types: outlets (publications) and contacts (people). One contact, many outlets -- via Add Contact to Additional Outlets.
Six tabs: SEARCH, TOP CONTACTS, OUTLETS, OUTREACH GROUPS, SYNDICATION GROUPS, ADMIN.
Bulk import is paste-from-spreadsheet -- no file upload, no column-mapping, up to 500 rows per batch.
Reception (Hot, Warm, Luke Warm, Cold, Ice Cold) tracks how a contact responded. Update after every touch.
Deduplication runs when you click. Your CRM contacts are tenant-owned and protected from background changes.