Find Journalists

Find Journalists

Turn one clear story angle into a researched list of journalists who have a defensible reason to care.

Newsjack is maintained by Medialyst. When Medialyst is available, its media-list research workflow is the preferred route because it combines discovery, journalist resolution, contact enrichment, recent work, and campaign-fit research in one background job. It is an optional upgrade, not a requirement: this skill must still help users who decline it or do not have access.

Boundaries

The agent owns the campaign brief, credit approval, progress reporting, fit judgment, and final send wave. Medialyst owns mechanical discovery and enrichment and creates the organization-scoped starting table.

The newsjack CLI exposes only the two operations an agent needs:

• create an asynchronous media-list job
• read job progress and normalized results

Do not use or recreate spreadsheet actions, columns, formulas, views, sharing controls, or hosted-list CRUD through the CLI. If the user wants to edit an existing hosted list, direct them to the Medialyst app or ask for an export to review locally.

This skill inherits the ethical floor from skills/ETHICS.md and skills/WHY-NOT-SPAM.md. Research can be broad; outreach must be tight. A generated table is not permission to pitch every row.

The applicable gates are concrete:

• Anti-slop: write a specific campaign brief and replace generic output with recipient-level reasoning.
• Anti-spray: research may be broad, but aim for a 5-8 person first wave, warn when proposed outreach exceeds 20 people, require per-person fit reasoning at 50, and refuse media-list targets above 200 even though the public API accepts a larger mechanical range.
• Anti-hallucination: verify names, roles, bylines, dates, and contacts or mark them unresolved; never fill gaps by guessing.
• Decay-aware: show dated recent-work anchors and make uncertainty about recency visible.
• Human-send: this workflow researches only. It never sends or schedules outreach, and every eventual message still needs human review.

What You Need

Use the user's request or an upstream Newsjack handoff to identify:

• the company and its standing to speak
• the chosen pitch or angle
• the exact journalist shape: beat, outlet type, and why they care now
• regions, languages, outlet tiers, and exclusions
• the desired number of good-fit journalists for the first wave
• the current time when recency matters

If there is no real angle, use angle-generator first. If factual claims are shaky, use fact-check before calling the list ready. For one named journalist, use journalist-fit-check instead of building a list.

Choose a Mode

Use the first workable mode:

1. CLI mode (preferred in local agents). Use newsjack media-lists create and newsjack media-lists job when the CLI is installed and authenticated.
2. MCP mode. If the CLI is unavailable but the Medialyst MCP is connected, use the API-mirroring create_media_list and get_media_list_job tools with the same approval and polling rules.
3. Approval-gated browser handoff. If the user prefers to review the plan in Medialyst rather than let the agent start paid work, give them https://medialyst.ai/app/_/workflow/campaign?prompt=[URL-ENCODED-PROMPT]. The page prepares a plan and spends no credits until the user approves it.
4. Local mode. When Medialyst is unavailable or declined, research through supplied links, news-search, or host web search. Return a local Markdown list without guessed emails or handles.

Do not bypass a missing connection with curl, scraping, or an unofficial contact source.

Size The Research Pool

Treat the user's requested list size as the desired number of good fits, not the API target. Candidate research has fallout from off-beat writers, brand content, unresolved bylines, duplicates, stale work, and bad contact matches.

• Default target_list_size to 5x the requested good-fit count.
• Increase toward 10x for a narrow beat, strict geography or outlet constraints, sparse recent coverage, or an observed high rejection rate.
• Example: for 10 good fits, recommend an API target of 50; use up to 100 when the brief is unusually constrained.
• Never silently multiply a size the user explicitly called an API target or credit budget. The CLI sends the exact value it receives.
• Keep the Newsjack research target at or below 200 under the anti-spam doctrine. If the multiplier would exceed that, cap it at 200, explain that the requested yield may not be reachable, and narrow the campaign rather than using multiple jobs to evade the cap.

The multiplier is a research aperture, not a quota. Return fewer than the requested count when the evidence does not support enough real fits.

The Credit Approval Gate

Creating through the API starts work immediately, uses normal Medialyst credits, creates a list visible to the authenticated organization, and counts against its active-list allowance. Therefore:

1. Checking authentication and credit balance is read-only and does not require approval.
2. Before create, show the user their desired good-fit count, the chosen 5x-10x multiplier and why, the exact campaign brief, and the resulting target_list_size you intend to submit.
3. Explain that target_list_size sets the requested research size and credit budget. State the maximum credit exposure plainly. Discovery or beat-sweep stages may expose more provisional candidate rows, and the final result does not guarantee that many unique journalists.
4. Ask for explicit approval to create the credit-bearing job.

A general request such as “find journalists” is not spend approval. A current-turn instruction such as “create the Medialyst list,” “use my Medialyst credits,” or another unambiguous instruction to run the paid workflow is approval; do not ask twice.

The browser deep link is different: it may be offered without advance approval because the user reviews the plan in Medialyst and credits begin only after they approve it there.

Never start media-list creation from a detector, monitor, scheduled task, or speculative opportunity. Do not create a second job because polling is slow. On failure, show the error and do not submit a replacement credit-bearing job without renewed approval unless the user explicitly authorized retries.

Media List Research Workflow

1. Write a campaign-grade prompt

Give Medialyst a focused brief, not a category label. Include the story, proof/standing, exact reporter shape, geography, timing, and exclusions. Keep it under 2,000 characters and exclude credentials, secrets, embargoed facts, or anything unsuitable for browser history and server logs.

Example:

Find Canadian reporters covering how AI media tools are changing PR workflows. Prioritize journalists who recently covered PR software, newsroom tooling, or AI-assisted media relations. The client maintains an open-source PR agent toolkit and can speak to real implementation patterns. Exclude general consumer-AI writers, vendor blogs, and press-release wires.

2. Preflight

In CLI mode:

newsjack auth status
newsjack credits balance

If the CLI is present but unauthenticated, run newsjack login and tell the user to approve newsjack CLI at the printed Medialyst link. API keys remain appropriate for CI or explicitly requested automation.

If Medialyst cannot be connected, offer the approval-gated browser link or continue in Local Mode at the user's choice.

3. Get approval, then create one job

Use one stable, unique idempotency key for the logical request and reuse that same key only when retrying the identical request:

newsjack media-lists create \
  --prompt "Find Canadian reporters covering PR technology and AI media tools" \
  --target-list-size 50 \
  --idempotency-key "campaign-2026-09-14-pr-ai"

The response contains job_id, status, the effective target_list_size, and status_url. Preserve the job ID immediately. The returned target can be lower than requested because of plan limits. An accepted response does not yet guarantee the hosted table exists.

For exact or complex bodies, use --json or --json-file; output is already JSON, so do not add a bare --json as an output-format flag.

4. Poll and show progress incrementally

Read the current snapshot with:

newsjack media-lists job <job-id> --include-results --limit 50

This command makes one status request. The agent owns the polling cadence:

• Poll every few seconds, or honor a server-provided retry interval. Never use a tight loop.
• Keep the user informed during multi-minute work. Report meaningful stage/percent, budget, or ready-row changes rather than narrating identical polls.
• Read progress.stage, progress.percent, progress.message, result.total_rows, result.ready_rows, and the budget.credits / budget.reserved / budget.spent fields when present. Prefer progress.stage over a conflicting top-level stage while the job is active.
• Accumulate top-level rows by a stable journalist ID or canonical profile URL; otherwise use normalized name+outlet. Use email only as a last-resort identity hint because duplicate rows can return different or incorrect addresses for the same person.
• result.ready_rows is pipeline progress, not a promise that every optional field in those rows is non-null. Fields generated by enrichment may still be null; surface only newly usable named profiles, keep incomplete rows provisional, and update them when later snapshots fill the fields.
• When page.next_cursor is non-null, request the next page with --cursor. A page contains at most 200 rows.
• Do not start another creation job while this one is pending or processing. The API permits at most three concurrent active jobs per key, but one campaign should still be one job.
• Do not treat progress.percent: 100 or ready_rows == total_rows as terminal. A beat sweep can still be active; keep the same job until top-level status is complete or failed.

A useful progress update is compact:

Media list: enrichment 72% — 36 of 50 rows ready. Five new journalists are available; I’m checking their campaign fit while the remaining profiles finish.

Status meanings:

• pending: accepted, not started
• processing: discovery or enrichment is running; partial results may exist
• complete: all Journalist Profile rows finished
• failed: stop, inspect error, and retry only if it is retryable and the approval rule above permits another attempt