Media databases - how we make ours

This is a comment to a post on Sally Whittle's Getting Ink blog, I thought I'd include it here as many of our audience - journalists as well as PR professionals - might find it worth a read. The context was how media database companies go about collecting and disseminating information.

A central theme here is the question 'anybody who gathers data should be ready to explain how they got it what they're going to do with it'.

I can answer that question with regard to how we do things on FeaturesExec.

We have a team of full-time, permanent researchers at our office in Croydon. They represent roughly half of the entire team there. They contact media outlets by phone and email to add or update them on the database. As they do this they explain what the data is for and who will be accessing it. We sometimes send out group emails to media outlets to update their data and we also allow them to post updated data by a form on the site. But all of this is verified by our team of researchers. We aim to check what we have for every media outlet every three months.

We are led by our customers in terms of what media outlets to add. We provide a dedicated email address (researchers@dwpub.com) and phone line (0845 370 7778) for people to contact our research team directly if they spot a gap in our data. We also encourage journalists to contact us if they have any questions about the data we hold (full contact details at http://www.featuresexec.com/contact.php ).

We *do not* buy-in data from third parties. We *do not* ask our customers to do research for us in return for incentives. We *do not* add any data without human verification.

I passionately believe that the only way to get any kind of accuracy in a media database is to use real people to collect and check data. We invest in our researchers, for example we offer journalism training – this helps them understand the needs of the journalists they are talking to every day.
As you can imagine, doing it this way is not cheap. And that is why, generally speaking, media databases are not cheap.

Our Freelance Journalist Directory works in a different way. This is all user-generated content. Freelance journalists submit their details (for free, of course) and commissioning editors can search for journalists and send them messages (for free, of course). We charge PR professionals an annual subscription (much less than a FeaturesExec subscription – it certainly isn’t ‘a few thousand’ as suggested before) to access the data. We try to make it clear to journalists when they add their details which bits will be seen by editors and which bits will be seen by PRs.

One thing that sets us apart from the other PR support service providers is that we put a lot of emphasis on the journalist side of the equation. I am an ex-journalist myself (I think I may be the only ex-journalist running such a company) and I believe strongly that if we look after journalists then we will build a strong business. I’m sure we don’t always get it right, but we strive to be open and responsive at all times. That’s one of the reasons why I work hard to be visible, and why I am writing this comment now.

Comments

[Sally Whittle]

Thanks for the explanation and the link, Daryl.

Of course, one would always hope that media databases spell names correctly - I'm Whittle not Whitte, as it happens! (sorry, couldn't resist)

[Daryl Willcox]

Oops! Sorry Sally. At least my research team were on the ball, one of them just pointed out my mistake! Now corrected.