From monitoring news coverage to building meaningful reporter relationships, and securing timely media opportunities, the right platforms empower PR teams to work smarter, respond faster, and demonstrate measurable impact. While everyone has their own set of tricks that work for them, this article highlights some essential tools our PR team uses to stay ahead.
Muck Rack
Muck Rack is one of the most essential tools for PR professionals looking to cultivate and uphold effective media relations. It’s a widespread media directory with journalist profiles comprising of insights like recent coverage, social media profiles, pitching preferences, and most critically, emails. Having a good grasp of a journalist’s current coverage is essential to tailoring your outreach and making sure it lands effectively.
Beyond serving as a media directory, Muck Rack can assist in most of the critical steps of the media relations process. It has capabilities such as building media lists, sending pitches, coverage monitoring, reporting, and automating news alerts. Our PR teams at LEWIS receive custom coverage reports tailored to each client daily to track regional media mentions. We also receive alerts as reporters update their positions or switch news outlets.
Meltwater
Meltwater is another tool for media monitoring that provides a more holistic view of a brand’s online reputation with social, consumer, and media intelligence. Similar to Muck Rack, Meltwater provides a comprehensive database of media contacts, customizable alerts, and reporting, but from a slightly wider lens taking the broad spectrum of online presence into account to populate metrics like share of voice. Every tool is different, but Meltwater helps cut through unnecessary noise to capture what’s important.
This wider view incorporated with analytics and reporting dashboards helps PR teams refine messaging and better demonstrate the tangible value of the team’s work to key stakeholders, which as many PR professionals know, can be a huge obstacle in client retention.
Google Alerts
While many media monitoring tools come with a price, Google alerts are completely free. These alerts offer real-time monitoring capabilities allowing teams to track items like brand mentions, competitors, trends, or key phrases. Alerts can be tailored to specific languages, regions, and sources delivered in real time, daily, or weekly. While this option is not as robust as some other media tools, it is completely free and might be more suitable for PR teams with more limited resources.
PR Newswire
PR Newswire is a leading press release distribution tool with a global reach of over 82,000 media and press release syndication outlets and over 300,000 journalists and influencers, and the newswire most preferred by TEAM LEWIS. It provides global and regionally specific distribution options that we can tailor for our many international clients.
After distributing a release, PR Newswire sends visibility reports right to your inbox with metrics like total pickup and total potential audience, which are valuable insights that we can pass along to our clients.
Qwoted
Qwoted is another favorite tool for media relations at LEWIS. It allows PR teams to connect with journalists that are actively seeking sources. How it works: a journalist can post a source request like, “Seeking CIO to share their predictions for 2026,” which will be sent out to representatives of relevant sources. Users create custom profiles for their thought leaders that can be shared and accessed across teams. These include background on the executive, recent media engagements or quotes, and more. To respond to a request, you add your pitch and attach the profile of the thought leader you’d like to put forward and await a response.
One standout feature of Qwoted is its pitch intelligence which shows how many people have already responded to a query and how many pitches the reporter has engaged with. If 50 people have responded to commentary request from Morning Brew posted an hour ago, it might not be worth the time investment to submit.
Qwoted creates a database for each journalist and their current and previous requests, so some teams have found benefit in sifting through old requests to make new connection that they can message directly though the platform as opposed to sending yet another email to the sometimes seemingly bottomless void of reporter inboxes.
HARO
HARO, or Help a Reporter Out is another method to receive reporter query requests. PR professionals simply enter their email and receive free daily media query newsletters. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Qwoted, HARO is still an effective way to find relevant media opportunities for clients, and most of our teams at LEWIS use both tools in tandem. One major upside to HARO is that it is completely free whereas Qwoted only permits a select number of pitches per organization without a paid membership, which can get used up quickly.
Talking Biz News
Reporters switch roles constantly and Talking Biz News shares key movements. This is an essential site to see the latest media moves across the industry. Reaching out to a reporter that is starting a new role, possibly with a new beat, can be a mutually beneficial way to build and foster key media relationships.
Social Media
LinkedIn, X, and BlueSky are useful platforms to engage with reporters and track real-time conversations to aid in relationship building or gain insight into what they are working on or time of mind trends. For example, reporters will use their platforms to look for story sources or share feedback on how or what they prefer to be pitched. Selectively pitching reporters via social media can be a good way to break through the email inbox blackhole. While some reporters prefer to be pitched this way, unless specified, this should be used selectively so as not to overly spam a reporter through these means.
Browsing a reporter’s social media is also helpful to get to know their personality and potentially, non-work-related topics that can help your communications stand out. For example, if a reporter tweeted about the latest episode of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, you could include a bit in your email or subject line that putting this group of women on a yacht together trapped for days was insane.
Chrome Extensions – Rapid Fire
There are so many useful Chrome extensions for PR professionals, here are a few in our toolbox:
- Hunter.IO: Hail-Mary tool for emails; If Muck Rack doesn’t have an email, Hunter can scan a website to instantly pull predicted source emails.
- Similarweb: Allows you to easily pull website analytics, like unique visitors per month) for news outlets.
- Clearly Reader: Creates a clean PDF of an article that can be shared with teams or clients that might be unable to access a paywalled news site.
Need support selecting or integrating PR tools? Check out our PR services and contact us.
