Out of the Fog Marketing

If you are looking to pitch journalists or publications for public relations efforts and need to know who has been covering your areas of interest, check out the Google News Timeline. Enter a search term into this Google Labs web application and the tool will display news, press releases and other data sources related to your phrase. If you click on the "Add more queries" option, you can select to view results from blogs or specific newspapers or magazines.

It's also a great way to check out what your competitors have been releasing in the news realm.

Labels: google news, journalists, marketing, online public relations, publicity, timeline

MatchPoint, a search-based application for finding journalists, launched this week. MatchPoint's contact management application spiders a massive proprietary database of online and print editorial content to produce a list of journalists ranked on how closely the journalists' bodies of work match the search query.
To create the list, the user enters keywords, a pitch letter, or the lead paragraphs of a news release into a search box. To ensure greater accuracy, the user can modify the search algorithm by adjusting the relative weight of four parameters: article relevance, how recently the article was written, media outlet reach, and frequency of articles.
We've signed up for a free 10-day trial, so we'll report back with findings in a couple of weeks.

Labels: journalists, matchpoint, new products, online public relations, public relations