How to Fact-Check a Media Contact Before You Pitch
A practical guide to verifying email addresses, social profiles and job titles before you pitch, so your...
Anyone who has pitched a story knows the moment. You find the perfect contact, copy the email address, write a careful note, and watch it bounce back within seconds. The pitch was fine. The entry was not. A media directory is only as strong as its weakest record, and the gap between one that gets opened every morning and one that quietly rots comes down to dozens of small editorial decisions about what each entry holds.
The checklist below works whether you maintain a few hundred contacts or a few thousand. Use it entry by entry, or as a scoring framework when you audit a whole database.
Before you assess individual fields, ask a blunt question of every record: could a stranger tell who this refers to? A name alone is not an identity. "J. Whitfield, Editor" tells you almost nothing; it could be a trade magazine in Leeds or a national desk in London, and it gives you no reason to believe the person is still in post.
An entry passes this first test if a reader can answer three things without leaving the page: who the person or outlet is, what they cover, and where they sit in the hierarchy. If any of those require a phone call, the entry is incomplete rather than merely brief.
Directories fail in two directions. Some hold three fields and call it done; others hold twenty and are stale in half of them. The aim is a short set of fields that are genuinely maintained. For a journalist entry, that usually means:
The last item is the one most directories omit and the one that saves the most time. A stated verification date tells a user how much trust to place in everything above it.
Resist collecting personal mobile numbers, home details or anything a contact has not offered for professional use. A directory that is seen as careless with contact details loses access quickly, and once a useful source unsubscribes, the loss is hard to reverse.
Publication records are often treated as a name, a website and a frequency. That is a start, not an entry. A useful publication record explains the readership, the editorial scope, the type of commissioning it does, typical lead times, and who decides what. Someone trying to place a comment piece needs to know whether the outlet takes outside contributions at all, and whether it wants 600 words or 1,500.
Add where the outlet sits geographically and editorially, and note anything that affects submissions — a section that runs only in print, a title that has paused freelance commissioning, or a desk that only responds to exclusive stories.
You do not need a research team to sanity-check a record. Run these three checks on any entry before it goes live, and again on a rolling schedule:
Where a record is uncertain, say so in the entry. A note such as "last confirmed March, title may have changed" is far more useful than false confidence. For anything involving personal data, follow your organisation's own policies and, if the directory is public, take advice on data protection obligations before publishing contact details.
Completeness and accuracy are not enough if the entry is hard to use. Usability is about the two seconds after someone finds the record. Can they see the best contact route immediately? Is the submission guidance in the entry rather than three clicks away? Do they know whether to expect a reply in a day or a fortnight, or not at all?
Consistent formats help more than clever ones. Decide once how you write dates, how you punctuate job titles, and how you describe outlets, then apply it everywhere. A directory that follows its own conventions feels maintained; one that mixes styles feels abandoned, even when the underlying data is good.
Worth auditing alongside the entries themselves. If users cannot filter by beat, outlet type or region, they will end up scrolling — and scrolling is where a directory quietly loses its audience. Check that your category names are the words real users would type, not internal labels.
When you need to audit a batch quickly, score each entry out of four: identity, accuracy, completeness, usability. One point each, no half marks. Anything scoring two or below either gets fixed or gets flagged as unverified. Logging the scores gives you a running picture of database health and a defensible reason to prioritise the worst records first.
One enormous clean-up is less useful than a light, regular pass. Pick a realistic rhythm — a batch a week, or a full review before each big pitch season — and stick to it. Add a visible "last verified" date to every entry and let the oldest records rise to the top of your queue.
Then keep the threshold honest. If a record cannot be confirmed, either label it clearly or remove it. A shorter directory that people trust will always beat a longer one they have learned to doubt.
Photo: RDNE Stock project / Pexels
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