SPEAKER_00: Today's episode of This Week in Startups is brought to you by Moo, an online print and design company that helps you stand out from the crowd. Moo creates premium quality, customizable business cards, and promotional materials. Visit moo.com slash twist for more details and to get 20% off your next order. And by InVision, find out why so many hot startups are using InVision to prototype, present, and collaborate on design in real time. Sign up today for a 90-day free trial at envisionapp.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. It's Jason Calacanis, and this is This Week in Startups. Today on the program, Greg Gallant of Muck Rack. What is Muck Rack? It is an amazing site that allows individual startups, PR companies, to interact with journalists and find the proper journalists to cover their products and services, their startups. And Greg is an expert on how you should interact with journalists to get coverage. And getting coverage for your startup is one of the most important things you need to do as a founder. He's an expert, and he's also bootstrapped his own company to a large amount of revenue. So he's a really smart cat. Stick with us. Important episode.

SPEAKER_04: It's what it's all about, man. They said, money is the root of all evil. What?

SPEAKER_06: Funny how it feeds my people. Yeah. We ain't gonna live like people. So until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you. Yeah. Money is the root of all evil. What? Funny how it feeds my people. Yeah. We ain't gonna live like people.

SPEAKER_09: So until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you.

SPEAKER_11: Hey, everybody. It's Jason Calacanis, and welcome to This Week in Startups. If it's your first time here, we've been doing this program for years.

SPEAKER_13: Where have you been? Well, you've probably been in school or maybe working in a dead-end job, and you probably

SPEAKER_03: are saying to yourself right about now, is this all life has to offer? Am I going to just go to work day in and day out, working for the man, and then retire

SPEAKER_13: with a gold watch in a couple of decades? The answer is no. You don't have to do that. You're opting to do that. There is a whole world out there, a whole world filled with problems. And those problems are opportunities for someone, perhaps you, to go and solve them through a startup company. And that's what we talk about here, startups. That's why it's called This Week in Startups. And we do the show twice a week. And if you watch every episode of this show, all 500 plus of them, you will be so brilliant

SPEAKER_03: and so capable that you can leave that dead-end job working for the man, punching the clock and hating your life and wondering when you put your head on the pillow at night and stare at the ceiling and you have that moment where you say, like, am I going to die having done

SPEAKER_16: nothing with my life? Nothing of purpose. I mean, I don't mean to get heavy on you guys and gals out there, but you're thinking this, aren't you, when you hit that pillow at night? Is there more to life than just this? And that is, you should go watch all these episodes and hear from the people who have gone out there and actually changed the world or even tried to change the world and failed. Better to try and fail than to just sit there night after night staring at the ceiling saying, I hate my job, my life. This is so boring. Startups, problem solving, raising money, technology. That's what this show is about. We talk about all these issues. We do it twice a week. And today on the program, a great entrepreneur who's been grinding away and hasn't chosen to go work for the man. Greg, you've suffered through building startup companies. You're like a true entrepreneur. So Greg Gallant is with us today. I've known Greg for, I don't know, more than a decade. I knew you've, you know me from my first career, which is being the Silicon Valley reporter,

SPEAKER_17: being a journalist. When did we meet first? I don't know. And we actually met in 2005.

SPEAKER_16: 2005? Yeah. Okay. I thought we knew each other longer than that. We met in 2005 when you were doing a podcast.

SPEAKER_24: That's right. Venture Voice, actually one of the first entrepreneurship podcasts. Yeah. My first guest was Dick Costolo. From Feedly.

SPEAKER_27: Feed Burner. Feed Burner. Sorry, not Feedly. Feedly is the author. A obscure little startup. And RSS Analytics, who'd have thought he'd be an interesting guest. Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_13: Now, you're in New York, my old hometown. And we've been talking because you have a very cool company that I love. It's called Muck Rack. Rake? Rack.

SPEAKER_33: Rack. Muck Rack. Yeah, because Muck Rake is the actual word.

SPEAKER_34: That's right. Play on Muck Raker.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah. So tell us, what does this company do?

SPEAKER_24: So Muck Rack is a platform for anyone who wants to communicate with the press and ultimately the public.

SPEAKER_39: Basically, a better way to do PR using software, communicate with journalists, monitor what's said in the news, and then also measure the impact of PR. And on the flip side, it's also a resource for journalists. So rather than just being a nuisance to journalists, we've constructed this site in a way so it's a friend to journalists and helps them maintain their profile, further their career, and manage communications.

SPEAKER_13: So when an entrepreneur wants to get press, they hire a PR firm or they do it themselves. And then if they want to meet a bunch of journalists, how would they do this before your product?

SPEAKER_24: So before the product, it was kind of a really messy problem. And you know what? To get started, you kind of go with what you know. So you read TechCrunch, you look through, hey, who's writing stories of TechCrunch? Yeah. Who wrote something that I want? And you can reach out to that person. And honestly, if all you want is your TechCrunch, you know, hit, you kind of don't need software for that. You can go do it. Right. But at some point, you want to scale that and you want to say, hey, we want to get written about 10 places, 20 places. Or maybe, you know, for a lot of people, TechCrunch isn't the right audience. You make a service for... Health care. Health care. Yeah. You want to get... Get better. The better app that I invested in. That's right. So they probably want to get covered by, you know, personal wellness, calmness. Parenting. Yeah. Magazines, local weeklies, maybe publications you've never even heard of yet.

SPEAKER_49: Right. So that's where it really is advantageous to do something like Muckrack and to scale that effort.

SPEAKER_51: And there have been other services like Cision and Focus.

SPEAKER_13: Focus? I can't focus. Focus and Cision were the two, right? That's right. Now, I know these because when I was a journalist, they would put my name in a database.

SPEAKER_03: They would get my email address. And then I always knew when they would put my email address in because I would start getting spammed with literally a dozen or two dozen or three dozen a day a week press releases. It had nothing to do with what I was doing. And I replied back to the person. I'd say, unsubscribe. They'd say, you're not on a list. I'd say, well, then why are you emailing me? And they said, well, I thought you were interested. I'm like, do you know what publication I wrote for? I'm a Silicon Valley reporter.

SPEAKER_13: It's a biotech company. So what's up with those products? And what was the problem with those products that you had to come in and create a new one?

SPEAKER_55: Do you see?

SPEAKER_24: So it's an interesting history. Cision is a continuation of Bacon's book, which first came out in 1950.

SPEAKER_39: The time was a great idea. Basically compile the names of all the journalists, mail that out to people every year and say, hey, Jason covers technology. And then you look through Bacon's book and look it up. And at the time, it was innovative.

SPEAKER_24: And then it got turned into basically an online version of that with Cision and then very similar services, like you mentioned, that are actually now rolled up into the same company. But basically, they kind of took the book and put it online. And the idea was that you'd go in there, find a list of 1,000 tech journalists, and say, hey, well, I'm launching a tech product. Let me email everybody. But in reality, for 95% of the people on that list, they're probably not actually going to cover you because I'm doing enterprise software and

SPEAKER_49: this guy covers consumer tech. Right.

SPEAKER_45: Or I'm doing an iPhone app and this guy only writes about the Internet of Things, whatever the connection is there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_51: But they also were kind of designed to be shotguns, not snipers, right?

SPEAKER_27: That's right. Yeah. And, you know, the funny thing is, like, it seems like it has no cost to blast 1,000 journalists

SPEAKER_39: to send a message because email is free.

SPEAKER_63: Right. So it doesn't have a physical cost. It doesn't have an actual cost. What is the real cost?

SPEAKER_24: The real cost, yeah, your reputation, where journalists really hate getting spammed just like you and me for whatever we get spammed for.

SPEAKER_65: Yeah.

SPEAKER_64: Actually, I think they kind of hate it more.

SPEAKER_68: They're kind of more sensitive to it, I think, having been a journalist. Yeah. Because they're getting slammed more by nature too.

SPEAKER_27: Many journalists are, you know, rather combative or-

SPEAKER_71: They pick that career.

SPEAKER_24: Exactly. Yeah. So to waste their time hurts you, hurts your reputation, hurts your company, or if someone's spamming on your behalf, that ultimately reflects on you too.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And it's not a targeted approach. What I always tell founders, and I'm really interested in your insights as to how founders and, you know, companies should approach PR, I always tell people, if you are going to contact a journalist, you have the responsibility to have read at least their last five pieces and followed them on Twitter and their blog and social media for at least a month before

SPEAKER_03: you contact them. So you understand how they think, what they've said.

SPEAKER_75: But the whole idea of emailing people without knowing who they are or having read their work to me seems insane. Is it?

SPEAKER_24: That's perfect advice. And, you know, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the journalists. Their articles is their life work. So to email them without even knowing what it is, it's kind of absurd. And we even did a study asking journalists if they prefer to be followed before being pitched. Over 90% of them said yes.

SPEAKER_35: And the reason they said yes is, what would you read into that? Well, there's two angles. One is they just want to build their following.

SPEAKER_39: A lot of journalists who can even, you know, write a game-changing story for your company,

SPEAKER_24: front page of the Wall Street Journal, they might only have like 800 followers. So they notice when people interact with them. And the other is they want to know that you've actually took the time to research them, know what they're about. And it's such a strong signal because you're going to start your pitch with the BS, like I love your work, blah, blah, blah. Right. And then if they see, well, you haven't followed me, you've never tweeted about any of my articles, you didn't reference my article, they know you're full of it then.

SPEAKER_13: Right. So when we get back from this commercial break, can you show me the product a little bit and sort of how you manage not spamming people yet being effective? Because that really is the key issue. I mean, I think people still use those old products because they think on their side it's

SPEAKER_05: effective, but yours doesn't let you reach a group of people. So how do you, uh, how do you work around that? And let me just take a minute to thank our sponsor. Hey everybody.

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SPEAKER_87: He is Gregory on Twitter. You're in the first name club. That's right.

SPEAKER_89: Fellow member. Fellow member. Ryan Block. Veronica Belmont. Kevin Sistrom from Instagram.

SPEAKER_91: I think has Kevin on Twitter. It's a bunch of us in that. Who else is in the first name club? You know any other ones?

SPEAKER_66: Uh, there's a bunch. At Ev, of course. Oh, Ev. Yeah, but that's even, that's even, he's not in the first name club.

SPEAKER_16: He's in the first half of my first name club. That's right. Evan Williams of Twitter. Right. Um, all right. So show me the product here. Let's pull up your screen. You're logged in. I take it, right? That's right. All right. Let's, uh, pull it up on the screen here, guys.

SPEAKER_93: And when I see it, uh, okay, here we go. And make a full screen there. That'd be great. You can go into that view, presentator mode, or whatever that is. Uh, there you go. Boom.

SPEAKER_95: Yeah, go for this guy.

SPEAKER_93: That works too. I'm always giving people little tips on how to do this. And then hit your, um, command plus. Got it. There you go. Boom. Now we can see holy cow.

SPEAKER_97: So here's a search field, find a journalist and content.

SPEAKER_99: Perfect. Okay. So what do I type in here?

SPEAKER_39: So this is just to back up. This is a really powerful part of muck rack.

SPEAKER_24: And it goes straight to that idea that because there's so much more data out there now, there's data on what journalists have written in past and tweeted about in past and shared on social, you can do really rich keywords. So what you don't want to do is type in tech or, and you know, something really general,

SPEAKER_65: what you do want to do is type in something really focused.

SPEAKER_13: Ah, got it. Okay. So if we were talking about, um, get better.com, the better app I invested in, that's healthcare related and mobile.

SPEAKER_103: So I guess I could say healthcare mobile.

SPEAKER_104: Yeah.

SPEAKER_35: You know, even that's a little general. Tell me, tell me more about what it does.

SPEAKER_05: And then it's basically a personal health assistant that will let you, um, talk to, um, you know, like a nurse practitioner over, uh, an app and they'll provide healthcare services for you.

SPEAKER_108: So it's like mobile healthcare services.

SPEAKER_104: Uh, so we could even do like, do you think you'd be targeting like journals who, um, written about iPhone apps before?

SPEAKER_97: Yeah, I would do people who've done apps and people who have done anything in health and fitness.

SPEAKER_111: Okay, cool. Those are the two categories I would think. And actually before we even do that, what's the name of the company again? We can see who's written about it before.

SPEAKER_13: It's better, um, is the name of the company, which is kind of hard to search for, but their app is getbetter.com or better app.

SPEAKER_116: Okay. Let's just do a quick search just to see if there are any easy hits.

SPEAKER_39: I guess they're, uh, at the beginning here. So we'll try something. Try better app. Um, let's see.

SPEAKER_119: Maybe it has to use quotes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_120: Let's do or, uh, yeah, doing a, a Boolean search here or better app. Yeah.

SPEAKER_52: We support full Boolean. All right. Here we go. You might end up getting some people who, uh, just say better app.

SPEAKER_51: Building a better app, right? Yeah. So this happens to be a terrible example. So let's do another investment of mine, which is calm.com, which is a meditation app.

SPEAKER_93: So let's type in meditation or mindfulness. Mindfulness and meditation are the two keywords in that area. Um, sure.

SPEAKER_123: I've actually used that app a couple of times.

SPEAKER_93: Okay.

SPEAKER_47: There you go. Um, I've invested in that app and it's a great app.

SPEAKER_52: You can actually just, just throw in calm.com too. Okay.

SPEAKER_13: So here we go. We're searching for the most relevant, um, and it can appear in any feed, which is tweets

SPEAKER_35: and everything.

SPEAKER_39: Um, that's right. And you can see, we have a lot of options to filter. I generally recommend people do something really general to start with and then narrow it down from there.

SPEAKER_24: And here actually what you're seeing before we even get to the content matches are journals who mentioned mindfulness in their Twitter bios. Oh, great. So that's a super strong. That's like a super targeted hit. And so like, let's say, and you can see really the scale you get with this. So now calm.com has gotten covered in tech crunch. Yeah. They want to reach the masses.

SPEAKER_134: I'm sure. For sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_133: So here I see this is a local news editor in Contra Costa times.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah, exactly. And this is data from our editors. We have a whole team of editors constantly tagging journals, updating their bios and updating

SPEAKER_45: their titles. So you get this really concise metadata. You don't have to kind of wade through their Twitter bios.

SPEAKER_13: And this is really the power of it is that you guys have taken public information and normalized it into a bigger database.

SPEAKER_03: So you have both what you have. It's easy to get like, OK, these are their Twitter handles. But then to know what publication they actually worked for and tie that together, you know, and then their articles as well.

SPEAKER_05: You have to normalize the Twitter handle, that name with an article at a publication. And none of that stuff is like standardized or very well standardized.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah, it's a very complex problem. The web's the messy place, as you know, and you go out and crawl out. So we've had to build a lot of technology and just a lot of human care to pull all this together.

SPEAKER_103: Got it. So now that I have all those people, what do I do with them?

SPEAKER_39: Yeah, so I'm adding a few to a media list. As you can see, we could either pitch them straight off here, but let's just say we're going to go after. I just got a BuzzFeed editor who talks about meditation, maybe a bit snarkily, though.

SPEAKER_24: Here's an Associated Press reporter. He covers crimes.

SPEAKER_97: We want the snarky one. We want them to write a snarky article because then all the people who understand that mindfulness

SPEAKER_17: is very valid will then come defend us and put it in the comments. We want actually a little bit of that rage and debate and, you know, doubters. It leads to more downloads. Doubters equal downloads.

SPEAKER_39: I like that slogan. There it is. I just made it up. Yeah, I found that. You're right, though. It's the more polarizing products always get more press and more users in the end. For sure. Here's one actually by a meditation skeptic. This person tweeted. And here's the co-anchor of Nightline.

SPEAKER_24: So if you want to pitch getting on Nightline, he's talking about meditation skeptics turn preachers. Love it. So let's add this guy to our... Com.com list. Com.com list. And you can go down. Here's another Associated Press. This is another one where when people in the tech world, they don't think, like, if you get mentioned in the AP or Reuters, you get syndicated out to dozens of other places.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I mean, the New York Times, Washington Post will run an AP story from time to time. Exactly. Not all the time, but from time to time. So now you have that huge list. Now we get to spam it.

SPEAKER_51: Now you don't get to spam it. When do I get to spam it? When do I get to annoy journalists with a, you know, shotgun approach? You don't. Hopefully never. Okay.

SPEAKER_82: We can convert you during this meditation session. No, no.

SPEAKER_51: I would absolutely would never do it.

SPEAKER_148: But here you go. You got that list. What do I do with the list? So you just put some people together.

SPEAKER_39: And you can see just the act of putting the list together is already doing much more than the

SPEAKER_24: kind of old method, because you're seeing not only that this person might cover mindfulness or meditation, but why? With each one, before we added them, we were saying, why is this person good?

SPEAKER_49: What have they talked about before that's relevant? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: You've indexed their stories and their tweets. So it's really two different corpuses that you've put together and the bio of their Twitter bio. So they have three different really unique ways to find people. And I don't have to leave the site. And I can put all their contact information on one place. So those are like five or six steps that have really been put into one.

SPEAKER_05: And people will be doing that in Excel, whatever. So you basically studied how people were doing this before you built your product and just built something that makes it go faster.

SPEAKER_39: Very much. And, you know, I've been through it too. As an entrepreneur, I've launched a bunch of things. Some of them have worked and gotten a lot of attention.

SPEAKER_24: Other things have fallen on deaf ears. So I learned myself how to do it and then working with other companies too, saw how they do it. And it turns out, you know, there's a few different methods, but it's a pretty standard

SPEAKER_49: practice in any company, how you should do PR right or how not to do it.

SPEAKER_13: Now that you have all of those, I see it says contact journalist. So do I pitch the journalist right there through that button on the search results? Or do I go to the media list?

SPEAKER_44: What would be the next step here?

SPEAKER_104: Let me show you. So you could either pitch them right through the search result or you could go to the media list.

SPEAKER_39: Let me show you the media list first, just because oftentimes what you'll want to do is get a bunch of people together. Here's the com.com media list we just created. Right. Lists everybody out. You can see not only goes their Muckrack profile.

SPEAKER_156: CloudScore, LinkedIn, Facebook.

SPEAKER_27: Yes. Maybe you can want to connect with them on Foursquare and stalk them in a big way. Probably not the best.

SPEAKER_140: And the only people who can have profiles in Muckrack are journalists.

SPEAKER_27: Just journalists.

SPEAKER_24: It includes professional bloggers who are in essence journalists, people who have kind of cropped into there. The definition of a journalist is a tricky thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_103: I wonder where I would fall on that as a presenter on a show. Would I be in there or maybe or maybe not because I stopped blogging?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. You know, our editors would kind of go through a list of criteria. They'd say like, well, is he doing it professionally? What's his reach? Yeah. Is it editorial? So if you were running a blog and it was just kind of you're scouting out your opinions

SPEAKER_39: versus doing it as an editorial product, it would adjust it. Got it.

SPEAKER_63: Okay. So what do I do with the list now?

SPEAKER_39: Oh, and let me just show you actually before we contact, let's say with Tom, before we even think about contacting him, if I go to his profile on Muckrack, it shows all his latest articles right here. Got it. And start reading his last few articles. It also shows you the shares for all his last articles. So you can see not only is he able to write an article in BuzzFeed.

SPEAKER_68: He's able to amplify it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_148: I mean, BuzzFeed is the master at that social stuff. Great.

SPEAKER_55: And so now with any person, I can go and pitch them right through here.

SPEAKER_166: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_39: And then with each person, we'll give you their email address. In this case, he opted to just give a more general community at BuzzFeed. Right.

SPEAKER_51: And some journalists do not want to be contacted by email. That's right. They come up with their own story ideas.

SPEAKER_05: But sometimes you'll actually have their email address in there like Dan Harris has his in there. Exactly.

SPEAKER_93: So he doesn't mind if you're a Muckrack member going and pitching him directly by email.

SPEAKER_68: That's right. And that's the journalist's choice. Yeah. It's up to the journalist so they can log in.

SPEAKER_24: We have editors where they'll proactively add people, but then we'll list their email address if it's publicly available on the web. Right. But either way, the journalists can either claim their profile or create a profile, say if they want their email on here or not. Sure. And then they can also use an internal messaging system that we have. But most journalists are fine with giving their email under the conditions that it's

SPEAKER_171: going to be a one-to-one communication.

SPEAKER_13: I would say half the people, half the journalists I see out there are putting their email address at the end of their stories. Obviously, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, they all have their emails exposed because they want to get tips now. If they don't get tips, they're going to miss the next story.

SPEAKER_65: They're putting in their Twitter bio now, like Brian Stelter did that famously early on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: He's like, just email me because he doesn't think people are going to abuse him. He might have two email addresses, one that's the inbound and one that's for internal communication.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. And you bring up a good point. Like the flip side to what you were saying at the beginning with that you were getting annoyed as a journalist by lots of pitches, that's a reality.

SPEAKER_39: But the other challenge is every journalist wakes up in the morning, they're starting from zero. They have to write an interesting story. They're only as good as their last byline. So if you help them, if you drop them an email that actually gives them a good story idea, they will love you.

SPEAKER_65: It's just unfortunate that 99% of the people aren't doing that. But that's what we're trying to change.

SPEAKER_93: All right. When we get back from commercial break, I want you to tell me how journalists think about

SPEAKER_16: startups and what are the winningest strategies for actually getting them to cover you, i.e. when you're trying to get your own startup covered, what does Greg do? How do you get it done? What are the secrets and tips to getting them to even reply when we get back on this week of startups?

SPEAKER_02: Oh, my God. I want to tell you about a great product I use all the time. It's called Envision App. And what is Envision App? What is it? It is the product that you need to use to develop your startup. It lets a designer make designs and then get comments and do revisions with the rest of the team. Now, previously, you're saying, hey, I do this already, Jason. I use a chat room. I use email. I use SMS. That's all fine. Trust me. I've gotten screenshots that way, too. It's just not the optimal way. I'm kicking your ass because I use Envision.

SPEAKER_03: And let me show you why. Here, look how organized my screen is. Here, you're seeing the inside Web 2.0 feed. Up on the top, you see all my staff members. And you can even see which ones are online right now. Now, hey, listen. I'm taping this. It's off hours right now. But even some of my people are at work. And I can click on any of these and see the designs that my team is working on. I can also see a feed. So I can see, hey, here's the project's history. Well, this was a project we did in Q3. It was our Web 2.0 site. And you can see that it had this many views, then less views, then less views, and less views. I can see there were 98 comments. I can see who the viewers were. I can see who was commenting. So I know which members of my team are actually looking at the designs. Not just, you know, getting the designs from the designer, but actually looking at them and considering them and commenting and then resolving those comments. So we get this beautiful, automatically created dashboard. Nothing is lost. I have everything captured. So if, God forbid, my designer, Chad, were to leave, I'd be brokenhearted. But at least the next designer could come in and see, oh, my God, here's the trail. Here's the conversations that occurred. Oh, we add another designer to the team? Great. Inside's crushing it. Now we put them in the system. They can go catch up. They can see what were the discussions. How did we come to this point? Inside 3.0. You can make all of these things clickable. So I can send this, and I did send it to Roloff Botha, my board member from Sequoia. I send him an InVision link. He opens it up on his iPhone 6, and he sees the app and what it's going to feel like. That's inspiring for an investor. You know what? I had a couple of great partners. I send them the mock-up. And as you may have read, a prototype is worth a million PowerPoint slides. If you want to raise money, if you want to get partners, and if you want your startup to be high-functioning, you need to use InVision app.

SPEAKER_05: Go to InVisionApp.com slash twist, and they're going to give you a great deal. Actually, a ridiculous deal. You get the startup plan for free for 90 days. But here's what's interesting. I can just click through the 38 screens my designers made for me. I'm clicking through them here. For those of you listening, you can't see it. But I can quickly click through them.

SPEAKER_03: And then if there's comments, I can click on the comments. Or if I want to draw on it, I can draw on it. I can do all the stuff where I say, like, hey, you know what? I click on it, and then it says, let me start a conversation. I put in a comment. I say, who do I want to be CC'd on this discussion? It's for everybody or it's just for these two people. And I say, hey, can we try one more time and keep working on this? Because this doesn't look as good as I think it should be. Or maybe this is misspelled. Or maybe this looks a little bit too small. Anyway, I'm doing, like, literally a seminar. And then up here, I can see all the unread comments on my project. They believe this would be a public user profile. Oh, maybe it based on topics. Slide to dismiss. Miss all people talking about what could be better in the app. This has made us so much more effective. I would say our design process is now at least twice as fast. And I would say it's at least five times better because we don't lose stuff. And you know what? It's a hundred times less annoying than having these conversations in email and chat rooms. Listen, email has a place in the world. Chat rooms have a place in the world. I love both of those mediums.

SPEAKER_05: But for discussing mock-ups and building great product, there is only one product you need to use. And that's Envision App. Go ahead and go to envisionapp.com slash twist. They have over 300 designers using it, including Airbnb, Evernote, MTV, Adobe Box, and Zendesk. And, of course, inside.com is using it. No more email chains. No more nonsense. It's a great product. I love it. It will save you so much time. It's well worth it. I'm sorry to do a three-minute commercial for them, but I love the product that much. Okay. Let's get back to this amazing episode. I love you guys at Envision. Thank you.

SPEAKER_97: Hey, thanks to our sponsors for making this week in startups so awesome. Really couldn't do it without you guys and gals. And so my guest today, Greg Gallant, not Gallant.

SPEAKER_17: No, Gallant. Gallant, not Gallant. Right. Gallant. You mostly got a lot of those jokes about Goofus and Gallant or Gallant when you were a kid, right?

SPEAKER_27: I got a fair amount of those, plus Mitsubishi, Gallant, which is pronounced the other way. Not a great car.

SPEAKER_183: Right?

SPEAKER_39: No, although it declined over time. My parents actually had one when I was a kid. Really? I was very confused why our name was on the car.

SPEAKER_49: I thought everybody's name would be on their car.

SPEAKER_189: That must have been your dad's decision.

SPEAKER_66: That's a weird thing to do. I never got the full backstory. You never got the full backstory.

SPEAKER_190: Obviously, somebody's got a sense of humor with that. But people don't know Goofus and Gallant or Gallant.

SPEAKER_02: Was it Goofus and Gallant? How do they say it in the highlights?

SPEAKER_104: I believe it was Goofus and Gallant. That was actually even a little before my time. So that was in the magazine called Highlight Magazine.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, I do remember that magazine.

SPEAKER_05: Highlight Magazine was a magazine that public schools and I guess other schools, you'd be able to buy or Dentist Office had them too. And you just had a bunch of like little activities in it. It was sort of like an app with a bunch of activities in it. But they had a cartoon on the back of Highlight,

SPEAKER_16: which was Goofus does these bad things. Gallant does these good things. It was very, it was charming. All right.

SPEAKER_03: So when we left you, we were talking about the best practices in actually getting a journalist to respond.

SPEAKER_87: Now, they want to be pitched in the morning.

SPEAKER_24: You did a survey, right? We did. Yeah. We surveyed thousands of journalists. The results were fascinating. That's the majority in the morning. And the majority of the ones in the morning.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah, 43% want to be pitched between 9 and 11 a.m. Which I find is a morning person terrifying. And then the next largest chunk wanted to be pitched before that.

SPEAKER_202: Oh, you're kidding. Yeah. Before 9.

SPEAKER_49: That's right. Oh my God. And if you add them together, it's a majority want to be pitched before 11 a.m.

SPEAKER_51: Wow. Because they have to file. They want to get something done that day. That's right.

SPEAKER_13: And then, this is very interesting, 79% said this is the most valuable social network. Which social network? Twitter. Fascinating. Twitter is a fifth of the size of the Facebook, yet 79% say Twitter is the most valuable.

SPEAKER_207: What do you attribute that to?

SPEAKER_39: There's a few different elements.

SPEAKER_24: Twitter was really revolutionary for journalists. It was the first time a journalist could write anything without an editor looking at it. And it used to be before Twitter, if you wrote your own blog and didn't tell your editor, you got fired. Yeah, that would be a little dicey. It was this great outlet for journalists. And for them, Twitter is very clean because people are following them on Twitter because they want to know their information. It's real time, so it's perfect for news. And it's very clear that just anything you do on Twitter is public. Whereas for them, Facebook, they're all on Facebook, but they use it for their job, or the vast majority don't. Some have figured out, like, I'll take subscribers on Facebook and I'll post stuff. But for most of them, they haven't figured out how to turn on the subscriber option. You know, they flood their high school friends with their articles about the oil and gas industry or whatever they cover. So Facebook's been much more challenging for journalists, whereas Twitter is just this perfect breaking news medium. They can tweet about what they cover. They see what their competition is saying about it. They're trying to find story ideas. Everything's public.

SPEAKER_27: It's really like a journalist's dream.

SPEAKER_03: Now, why does Facebook suck so much for journalists and news? Because Facebook seems to be really jealous of Twitter's success in getting journalists. And all the journalists I know spend no time on Facebook, and they certainly don't do anything professional on there. If they're there, it's limited to, you know, liking each other's kids and stuff like that. You never see anybody posting, you know, stuff there. But I mean, some people do get some traffic from there because there's a billion plus people. But why does Facebook not work for news?

SPEAKER_24: The challenge is when you want, I think for any web app, it's hard to do more than one thing. And Facebook is really good at letting you connect with your friends. Twitter is really good with letting you connect with people interested in the same topic as you. So I think for either of them to go in the other direction makes it challenging. And you see it on Facebook now just because if you want to have content at varying levels of privacy and, you know, send certain content to certain people and to others, but it just has to be really complicated. Yeah. And not through any fault of Facebook's, I think they have the best product people in the world working at Facebook, but to do five different things with one app means you have to have a lot of options, gets really complicated.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. And then for, you know, anyone who's not, you know, a techie like you and me, they're not going to sit there for an hour and figure out how to set these settings.

SPEAKER_24: So as a result, Facebook just got really complicated for this. And for most journalists, it's much easier to just think, I go to Facebook to communicate

SPEAKER_65: with my friends. I go to Twitter to do my job.

SPEAKER_11: Now, Facebook has a group that is specifically trying to get news people to engage the platform.

SPEAKER_13: Facebook tried to get publishers to make these pages previously. Publishers invested a bunch.

SPEAKER_05: And then publishers woke up one day and could only reach 5% of the followers on their, you know, if the New York Times had a million people and they posted something there, they used to reach a million and they probably paid to get a bunch of those. Now, if they post, they only get, you know, whatever, you know, 25,000 or 50,000. And that's kind of pissed off the publishers, I think. There's a lot of, you know, writing about that. Like, hey, you took away our ability to reach the audience we paid to build here. Can Facebook ever re-engage journalists and get them to move over, do you think? And what do you hear about them on the street trying to convince publications and journalists to join? Because they're in the middle of doing this right now.

SPEAKER_24: It's fascinating. I mean, and I should say that news organizations still pay a lot of attention to Facebook in terms of how their stories get shared on Facebook. And most of them get more traffic from Facebook than Twitter.

SPEAKER_39: Right. So there's this kind of dichotomy where, on one hand, they're thinking about how do I just get traffic to my site overall? They're very focused on Facebook. As you said, you know, similar to the relationship that Google always had with webmasters. Yeah. Algorithms change. People get burned. People get pissed. But you can't ignore something that provides 30 percent, 50 percent of your traffic.

SPEAKER_24: Right. But that's a totally different story than for journalists when it comes to maintaining their personal identity, following their sources, getting followed. That's kind of a completely different decision. And that's where I think it's not so much that the average journalist has been burned by Facebook, but they've just never thought to use Facebook in this way.

SPEAKER_227: It also feels like when the whole Ferguson thing was going down, because Facebook picks

SPEAKER_93: what you see, right?

SPEAKER_42: They do this like sort of edge ranking, news ranking on your news feed. You would see all the ice bucket challenge stuff and not Ferguson. And on Twitter, you wouldn't see the ice bucket stuff. It would go by really quick.

SPEAKER_11: Like you'd see, wow, the Ferguson stuff in real time was super compelling.

SPEAKER_03: Now Twitter is talking about adding like when you were gone and maybe these are the most liked things, sort of what's on the discover tab and put it out on the main tab. Should Twitter do that to appeal, to broaden its appeal and make it more Facebook-like?

SPEAKER_13: And if they do, what would that do to the journalistic real-time nature of Twitter?

SPEAKER_27: It's always been a fascinating thing to watch each social network kind of want to be like the other, or at least that's how it seems from the outside.

SPEAKER_39: It's tough to say.

SPEAKER_24: You know, I think on one hand, there's the magic to Twitter that you have like that kind of unfiltered real-time feed. But then their challenge has always been that to get only some of us see that magic moment, only some of us see the light. And for, you know, every one of you and me, there are a lot of people who don't get that

SPEAKER_39: into Twitter.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, my favorite example is, you know, being in New York, I have a lot of friends who work in finance and are not tech savvy at all. And they all got obsessed with Goldman Sachs Elevator.

SPEAKER_24: So they told me, I don't use Twitter. What they would do is every morning, they'd go twitter.com slash Goldman Sachs Elevator, find a good tweet, send the link around through the Bloomberg terminal to all their friends. And that's how they'd use Twitter. Without even having an account. They wouldn't even log in. That's right. Yeah. That's fascinating. I think it's actually smart of Twitter now to make that point that we're more than just our logged in users if you have something that impacts everybody.

SPEAKER_39: Like what if you judge, you know, the New York Times by how many people actually log into NYTimes.com?

SPEAKER_27: It would be a much smaller number than their unique. Ridiculous.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah. All right. So let's talk about best practices.

SPEAKER_05: around journalists today because journalism is a little bit different today than it was when I sort of came up 20 years ago in that journalists seem in most organizations to be

SPEAKER_13: responsible not only for telling the story as truthfully as possible, as thoroughly as possible, but they also seem to be responsible for the distribution and how much traffic the story winds up getting. So what percentage of a journalist's time in different organizations is spent at telling the story versus marketing the story in your mind?

SPEAKER_24: It's actually fascinating. We just released a survey, a newer survey yesterday in partnership with Edelman. They didn't have a chance to send your producer, but we asked them that question.

SPEAKER_39: How many journalists, uh, ask every journalist, do you feel pressured to get your story shared on social media?

SPEAKER_24: Over 75% said, yes, they do need to get it shared. Why? As you point out, that was not the responsibility of a journalist whatsoever 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_237: It was the opposite. It was a paper voice job to go bring the newspaper to someone.

SPEAKER_103: Yeah. Or somebody in, you know, there was a publisher who got on newsstands, who got distribution,

SPEAKER_42: circulation, whatever. How has that impacted what we're actually reading in your mind?

SPEAKER_104: Well, it's definitely had an effect because journalists have this feedback loop.

SPEAKER_35: And as we know, as entrepreneurs, anytime you can get metrics on something, you want to optimize it and you want to win. Okay. So now it's become a race. There's a leaderboard.

SPEAKER_42: And what they're being scored on is page views and retweets and Facebook likes, stars, this

SPEAKER_68: kind of stuff, correct? Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: You know, internally within a paper, it's often page views. New York Times does its most emailed list, which is fascinating. They just released for 2014, none of the most emailed were typical journalistic stories. Yeah. And then now the social shares, which is a big part of what we do with Muckrack, really matters because social share accounts, you know, the number of times an article is shared on social media, it's the first time we've ever had a public universal metric for journalism or anything on the web. So even though for 20 years we've had web analytics, no publisher shares their web analytics. Right. They all lie about it. A lot of times they don't even let their own journal see the analytics for their own stories. Whereas with social share accounts, it's not a perfect, you know, metric. We can talk about lots of, yeah, lots of downsides, but it is just the first time there's been a single metric that's universal. So we could say this story in the New York Times, this story, Wall Street Journal, this story, TechCrunch, this story, Launch.co, let's see how many times they were all shared on all these social platforms and that's public.

SPEAKER_03: Why do people share the story though? And what impact does that have on the writing of the headline and the angle of the story?

SPEAKER_39: There are many reasons people want to share. And, you know, there's always like, you know, people always joke, you know, if you write

SPEAKER_27: a story about what to do if you have herpes, that's not going to get shared by anybody. Generally speaking, no. Right. But then if you write a story about, you know, I just read one about why people who drink

SPEAKER_24: live longer, that's going to get shared a lot because it's a, you know, it's a very fun story. So there's some degree to where people have to find the right headline. I remember Arianna Huffington wrote this great story about the importance of getting enough sleep. Sure.

SPEAKER_39: And so, you know, the average journalist might've thought to just title that why sleep's important to a healthy lifestyle. Right.

SPEAKER_27: She wrote, she titled it how I slept my way to the top. Right. And of course, got a lot more shares that way.

SPEAKER_16: Absolutely. Because people assume she's talking about, yes, having sex with people for career advancement.

SPEAKER_13: Now, what has this done to this next generation of journalists? Because now we're sort of seeing 75, more than 75% of them or whatever are under pressure and think they're being judged by this.

SPEAKER_11: We know that a simple headline, factually correct, easily stated, accurate, does not drive traffic. But deception, lying, playing with words, bending the truth increases the number of tweets.

SPEAKER_03: What's the impact on actual journalism? I mean, is this sending us in the wrong direction? I guess is what I'm trying to ask you.

SPEAKER_24: You know, I'm an optimist about it. I think it's always important to compare it to what came before. Right. So, you know, I mean, obviously, like, yeah, if we didn't have misleading headlines, world would be a better place. But look at, you know, newspaper headlines over the past several decades, magazine headlines.

SPEAKER_125: You remember when there was that article about Kevin Rose, how this kid made $100 million when reality. Yeah, the Sarah Lacey story.

David Friedberg: He had never sold his company. Yeah. But Sarah didn't write the headline.

SPEAKER_27: Somebody had the magazine. She didn't write the headline. So, you know, now if the journalists are writing the headline, maybe it's better because it's not the copy editor.

SPEAKER_03: But they're not writing them, are they? Now you have people, I mean, the state of the art is writing 10 headlines, testing them on Facebook, figuring out which one gets the most likes, and then deploying that headline after you've tested.

SPEAKER_13: That's what firms are doing now, right? Like the BuzzFeeds of the world.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. I mean, Upworthy pioneered that. And I think, yeah, more and more people go to that model.

SPEAKER_24: But, you know, still, before it was, you know, 10 editors sitting around in a room arguing what the cover story is going to be, and they would make a decision somehow based on what it was all the most.

SPEAKER_39: I mean, they wanted to be truthful, but they also wanted to sell papers. And if they didn't sell enough papers the next day, they got fired.

SPEAKER_03: But I will say, having been there for those discussions, that there always was a – there was time for a discussion, and there was a debate.

SPEAKER_16: And you'd be in a room, and sure, there'd be one or two people who really want to, like, increase the sell-through of the cover and the magazine. But it was always, always came back to, is this accurate? Are we really doing our service? I mean, with the exception of maybe being at a tabloid. But really, you know, any real publication was like, what's the long-term ramification if we say something that is not exactly accurate?

SPEAKER_93: And now today, what I see on a lot of the blogs and a lot of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeeds is they get a tip. They get some information.

SPEAKER_13: They're like, we – if we call the source and we find out this isn't true, we lose the chance at publishing this. Therefore, we should publish and do what TechCrunch would call process journalism, which basically means don't use your job, don't do your job. They would publish stuff first, then go find out if it's true or not because you get the pages immediately and you're first.

SPEAKER_42: And the more salacious, the better, and the crazier the headline, the better. I mean, I'm not an optimist at all. I think this is a disaster. What do you think?

SPEAKER_39: Well, I think there's good and there's bad with all this. I mean, I do think one of the checks is going to be, at least so far on all these social networks, you know the URL that that link is shared from. Yeah. So, ultimately, I think there'll be accountability that, you know, if you see a site, you know, like a viral Nova or something, every time you click on their article, you find it's not really what the headline promised.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. Or some other site.

SPEAKER_258: BuzzFeed was dipping into that area and now they've added a bunch of real journalists and they're kind of doing both, aren't they?

SPEAKER_39: I mean, they've staffed up a lot on journalists and, yeah, both on the very high end, but they still do fun things, you know.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, they always liken it to a newspaper that even the New York Times, you know, you're going to have your serious stories, but then you're going to have your...

SPEAKER_49: Lifestyle or whatever.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah, lifestyle, you know, you know, mustache, trend story or whatever.

SPEAKER_13: So, do you think, net, net, net, that we are doing better journalism today than 20 years ago or worse journalism today?

SPEAKER_24: Well, 20 years ago, from my assessment, is a 12-year-old at the time. Yeah. Harder. All right, whatever. 15 years ago. Yeah, 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_137: 10, 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_13: Let's say pre the pre-social science driving stories, before Gawker and Knitson and all these people really made it into a science, BuzzFeed made it into science. Do you think journalism was better before we had all this?

SPEAKER_24: I think, overall, the output of journalism is now better. You might argue about this story or that story or, you know, these edge cases, but, you know, think about any of these major stories that have broken recently. It used to be that you had to wait hours and hours, maybe you get one AP story of the crime scene hours after it happened to get reactions of people on the street. You know, only a few papers could spend a tremendous amount of money to have a local bureau in every city in the world. Now, you know, either one of us sitting here with our laptop, the moment the story breaks, we could be getting reactions on Twitter, getting lots of photos to use from Instagram, reaching out to people we know who are reputable in that city, researching them using, you know, Twitter, Facebook, many other services.

SPEAKER_85: Being open means there's going to be more information shared.

SPEAKER_13: The counter to that is that so many times the information, especially in these early tragedies, is wrong. So much so that, was it the New York Post or the Daily News that put people from the, who read it or they felt were the Boston Bombers and weren't on the cover?

SPEAKER_42: Who is that? Daily News or Post, do you remember?

SPEAKER_274: I don't remember which one.

SPEAKER_42: We'll have to fact check. It was one of the New York papers that's not New York Times. I do remember that incident. So, you know, there's a definitely, people are arguing that maybe we need to wait a little bit longer and maybe be a little more thorough and maybe have more boots on the ground. What's your response to that?

SPEAKER_24: I mean, I think more resources are always better, but even so, no matter how many boots on the ground you have, if an event happens and imagine, let's put it this way, you know, if you had a publication where for some reason you had no access to Twitter, social media, all the tools have been invented in the last 20 years, and you have 10 journalists. And I have an organization and I have five journalists, but I have access to all the research, you know, all the latest technology to be able to source images, research sources, et cetera. I think my organization would beat yours. I think that we would have this.

David Friedberg: Beat it to the truth or beat it to pages? Both. Okay. I don't necessarily disagree with that.

SPEAKER_17: But journalists are, it was in New York Post, by the way, we're checking right now. Thank you, producer Jackie. Emmy award-winning producer Jackie.

SPEAKER_13: Where do you think this will all be in 10 years? Because right now I look at it as, my gosh, what a state of flux we're in. And journalists today are not really doing fact-checking in a lot of cases.

SPEAKER_05: They're just publishing stuff. In a lot of cases, publications don't have editors anymore. People write something, they post it. They write something, they post it. Where do you see us in 10 years? You know, if we fast forward, BuzzFeed, you know, Business Insider, these things keep growing and New York Times keeps shrinking. What's the best case, worst case?

SPEAKER_24: I think the best case in 10 years, I mean, I think the optimistic outlook that I see is that this all, we look back at all these incidents you're pointing out today, which are all very valid and big problems. And we look back and we see this was the state of flux, this was the messiness you get with innovation, that, you know, for a year or two, people could get ahead by being misleading, by, you know, posting unconfirmed stories. And that because the public hadn't yet necessarily had enough time with it to discern, like, hey, a link shared from this URL, here's what it means, here's a level of trustworthiness, that they were able to get away with it. And that the kind of market of attention, people get smarter about how they read their news, they put on more filters in terms of what they're willing to look at, they become more skeptical of bad sources.

SPEAKER_27: And what's the worst case? That the quality rises to the top.

SPEAKER_159: What's the worst case?

SPEAKER_93: You know, if this keeps going, the New York Times can't figure out how to out-buzz BuzzFeed and out, you know, slideshow, blodge it over a Business Insider and, you know, out short rewrites on Huffington Post for SEO and social. So, what if, like, New York Times just keeps getting smaller and smaller? What's the worst case?

SPEAKER_03: And these people keep getting rewarded for, you know, doing schlocky stuff.

SPEAKER_82: Well, democracy falls apart and we have an apocalypse.

SPEAKER_51: Okay, well, there you have it, folks. Greg says apocalypse is on the way.

SPEAKER_108: No, he doesn't. Unless you use tools like muckrack. Exactly. If you use muckrack, it's going to get better. Smarter communication with the media.

SPEAKER_03: I have to say, it's really interesting because I get very depressed about it sometimes, being a journalist, and seeing this, you know, young group of journalists coming up with zero mentorship and they're under pressure to publish faster and they're under pressure to get performance.

SPEAKER_16: That, to me, seems like a recipe for disaster. And then you have the Rolling Stone magazine, which was known, the Rolling Stone, for having the greatest feature stories, the most in-depth, you know, just really high-quality journalism. And they do this story about this horrible rape instance at a college campus without actually maybe talking to the accused people, something the New York Times would never publish a story without talking to the accused people.

SPEAKER_42: Then they throw the victim or potential victim under the bus and say, we've had our, you know, we don't know if we can trust her or something like that.

SPEAKER_93: Whereas they just didn't even do their job. They should have checked it. What do you think of those instances now where we see the big publications maybe falling down and losing their, like, sort of best practices?

SPEAKER_97: Certainly that was, like, one of the most talked about things in the last couple of months on muckrack.

SPEAKER_24: Very much, yeah. I mean, you know, Rolling Stone, if we were talking about this example two months ago, we would have probably listed them as the one who that wouldn't happen to.

SPEAKER_03: Amazing, right? So what is going on? Is it just a young journalist now just don't have mentorship? Or, I mean, how do they make that level of mistake?

SPEAKER_68: Remember, there was the Jason Blair scandal. And what was that? That was in 99 to 2000-something around that time. I mean, I knew him. I met him. Before social media. Wow.

SPEAKER_97: Well, you know, his first beat was Silicon Alley, the technology space. And I was a Silicon Alley reporter. He called me on his first or second day of work.

SPEAKER_05: And I remember it like it was yesterday because the thing he said to me that I found very odd was he said, hey, I've got the same beat as you.

SPEAKER_16: I know that, you know, you've got your magazine and you're covered and you've got a bunch of journalists working on just that. But I was hoping, you know, you could just help me out as I, you know, cover these stories and I'll make sure I get you a bunch of mentions and, you know, links back. And not links back. Get you a bunch of mentions and, you know, stuff like that. And I was like, the New York Times just call me and ask me for help and then quid pro quo.

SPEAKER_05: Like it's just like, you know, Amy Harmon or Saul Hansel who were at the New York Times at that time would never offer me anything. It would be quite the opposite, you know. Like if I asked for something, I'd be like, why are you asking for something, you know, just totally flipped. But in that case, it was like this one person out of thousands and they were like, oh, my God, this is terrible. Now we've got a whole generation where whole publications are based on these techniques of go light, go fast, go loose, go fast.

SPEAKER_303: That's, I think, the challenge.

SPEAKER_27: Well, still, though, I wonder, I mean, I brought that up, you know, because that was when the Times was at its height in terms of profitability. Yeah.

SPEAKER_39: But he was a sociopath. Best practice. Right.

SPEAKER_85: Like the guy from, was it the. I mean, that's the extreme example, right? But he was a sociopath. He wasn't doing it intentionally.

SPEAKER_51: You know, like he was just didn't, we're talking about like a crazy person, liar or whatever, just like the Stephen Glass kid, the Shattered Glass movie.

SPEAKER_93: If you remember that one, was that the Atlantic? No, that was the New Republic, whatever it was, where he had just lied on a bunch of stories.

SPEAKER_42: I mean, those are just like psychotic, weird, compulsive liars. Like this is actually strategy where like people are like, I'm going to not do fact checking.

SPEAKER_05: I'm not going to do this stuff because maybe if I do fact check, I can't publish the story. It doesn't add up.

SPEAKER_24: But I think that's one of those flux moments. I think the journalists that are doing this will profit in the short term and then ultimately that'll catch up with them. And like you said, you know, you remember their names. You know who does that. Yeah. And next time you have a scoop or you're advising a company, that'll be kept in mind. And I think, you know, similar to any kind of market where you have a change, people who do these things in flux can get ahead for some amounts of time because things have changed. People haven't caught up to it yet.

SPEAKER_39: And then at some point it gets to a new level, you know, a new kind of even playing field where people know if you do this, watch out for that.

SPEAKER_17: It's certainly going to put the spotlight on some people.

SPEAKER_120: Like Rolling Stone magazine is now doing double blind fact-checking again, like the New Yorker.

SPEAKER_39: And you know what, I mean, that is a good example.

SPEAKER_24: The fact, I mean, the fact that we were outraged about it and that Rolling Stone was deeply embarrassed about it shows our hearts are still in the same place they were 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. It's just unfortunate. It's not like they just said, hey, guys, we don't, we're just a platform.

SPEAKER_27: We don't take responsibility for what this journalist did. Exactly. Which is what some other people might do.

SPEAKER_93: Like when you saw, I mean, and really, you know, wrapping up on that case, the really horrible thing about it is, is it's such a sensitive, important story because it is possible the person was attacked.

SPEAKER_42: Quite possible. It is possible that being falsely accused, probably not as possible because that happens at a lower rate, but still possible.

SPEAKER_13: And now we're all left wondering whose lives have been ruined, the accused or the accuser, you know, the victim or the victimizers.

SPEAKER_85: We trust news sources to figure this out for us on our behalf, and they're just failing. They're not even putting the work in, and we thought they were doing the work. Now I think nobody thinks these publications are doing the work from top to bottom.

SPEAKER_290: Except for Serial. Is Serial doing the work?

SPEAKER_24: Well, they spent a year prepping for that podcast, doing the research, and they didn't even get to a 100% conclusion because it's hard to know who committed a crime, you know, if it's falling margin. That is one of the –

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. But they did do the work, and they illuminated a lot of that story that was not previously ever covered or in some cases even thought about by the prosecutor or the judge.

SPEAKER_63: So that's the counter example is we'll just spend a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars, thousands of hours, and do such an amazing job that is undeniable how good it is.

SPEAKER_42: And we'll get that much attention.

SPEAKER_92: Yeah, and funded by podcast revenue. It is true.

SPEAKER_68: MailChimp, actually, I think, sponsored the whole thing. That's right. Or MailChimp as they came to be known. MailChimp. What was that? Did somebody mispronounced it?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. They were interviewing people to say the word MailChimp. One person mispronounced it MailChimp, and then MailChimp smartly bought the domain MailChimp.com and redirected it.

SPEAKER_85: So you can start reading it that way. Okay.

SPEAKER_93: Tell me the examples of people doing brilliant PR and working with journalists, and tell me the things, as we wrap up here, that are just horrible and stupid and you have to avoid. You see all the examples. Give me some of the anonymized examples of people doing slick stuff and dumb stuff.

SPEAKER_39: So good PR moves. One is just to be extremely fast and responsive.

SPEAKER_24: Okay. You have to remember that journalists are under a deadline all the time. You know, they might be writing a story, and they have a deadline in two hours. So if they know they can count on you, both to be responsive, so they ask you for something, they know you're going to get back to them in 10 minutes, and this other guy is going to get back to them in three hours. This 10-minute guy is going to win. Got it. And on the flip side, they're always giving cues about what they're going to cover on Twitter and in their past articles. So if you stay on top of that and can be just instantly writing back, hey, they say that they're at CES, you're at CES, let's meet up. They say that they're looking to talk to someone who knows about this topic. You know someone who talks about that topic. Reach out to them immediately. So that speed really matters.

SPEAKER_39: Got it. Now, what are the don'ts?

SPEAKER_24: The don'ts. So, of course, we talked about don't spam journalists. Another thing is don't send them a long pitch email. I see so many people get this wrong where they read some, you know, 10-year-old piece of advice on PR.

SPEAKER_39: They're told they've got to write this press release that's 700 words where they quote themselves and it's really awkward and they use 50 buzzwords in it. And they just email this press release to the journalist. Here's the story. That is a completely wrong way to go. Journalist doesn't have time to read it. The press release is dead, right? Press release, I think it's pretty much dead.

SPEAKER_02: Is there any circumstance under which you put out a press release? Like quarterly earnings come to mind or something?

SPEAKER_39: To make your boss happy is the number one reason we hear from people. If they have a boss or some executive where, like, they grew up, whenever you had an accomplishment, you made a press release.

SPEAKER_24: So you put it out. Sometimes I think the only usefulness of a press release is, and you're still probably better off doing a blog post, sometimes it's a good way to, if you're a bigger company, force everybody to get on the same page about a message. I'd say still don't send it to anybody or put it out there. Right. But just to, like, say internally what's our story.

SPEAKER_68: It's almost like talking points, like here is who we are and what we stand for.

SPEAKER_27: That's right. And you're probably better off writing it as talking points or some other format. But, you know, if you can use it as a phrase to get your boss to go along with it, then do it.

SPEAKER_45: But don't send it to a journalist and don't expect anybody to see the actual press release.

SPEAKER_93: What else is dumb for people to do in your mind? Do people want to be called on the phone anymore or not called on the phone?

SPEAKER_24: That's fascinating. We actually surveyed journalists about that because we did one survey asking if journalists mind being followed up with. So you email them. You don't hear a response. And everyone always wondered, do I email them again? Right. It turns out over 70% are okay with being followed up with. Got it. And so that's a really good sign. And I think a lot of people go wrong. And we've seen this because, you know, we pitch to the press too. And we'll see. We'll email somebody. No response. Email them again. You get it. Same when reaching out to investors or even friends or business partners, et cetera. So following up is good. Then we, that prompted a follow-up survey question. Is it okay to call on the phone? Vast majority of journalists did not want to be called on the phone. Interestingly, though, I've talked to journalists who do want it. I think it sometimes depends, sometimes depends how in demand the journalist is. You know, if they write an obscure beat, maybe they don't mind getting a call on the phone every now and then. It could depend on the nature of the journalist. If they're the kind of person where, you know, they're young, they don't, they've never made a phone, they've never used the phone app on their iPhone. Right. They probably don't like it. They probably want to text. Yeah.

SPEAKER_116: So I'd say wait a while before doing the call and start to build a relationship first.

SPEAKER_16: That was the most annoying thing to me is when people would send a press list and call to ask me if I got the press release. And that was always like, you know, whatever. Just, I'd be like, please take this number out of your phone.

SPEAKER_13: Because what happened was Scission or Vocus at one point got my phone number. Put it in there.

SPEAKER_348: You're cooked.

SPEAKER_13: And it was over. I had to basically change the number. It was over. I couldn't, you know. And then basically I had to move to a don't pick up the phone unless I knew the number kind of mode.

SPEAKER_331: And then to the witness protection program.

SPEAKER_11: Essentially. Yeah. Now, what about PR people? I know a lot of PR people buy your product, I assume, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: So you can't speak poorly about PR people because they are your clients in a way. But I can tell you, I don't know, in my mind, 60, 70% of PR people are absolutely hated by journalists in my estimation.

SPEAKER_13: And I think maybe 20% are dealt with and maybe 5% are liked, right?

SPEAKER_42: Why is PR so hated by journalists? And what are the PR people doing wrong? And what are the ones, the few who get it right, what are they doing right in your mind?

SPEAKER_39: You think, well, I think the bad PR people out amplify the good ones for sure. For sure. Because they're the ones clogging up your inbox. And it's unfortunate too.

SPEAKER_52: And, you know, you see the firms they're with and often it's with reputable firms. And they just haven't trained the person enough or didn't institute the right kind of guidelines for them.

SPEAKER_24: But I think what really can change it on, you know, it's like you talk to any journalist, right? If you say, do you like or hate PR people? We've never surveyed this, but I'm going to guess. Yeah. Most of them are going to say we hate PR people. And then you say, well, who's your favorite PR person? They probably have like 5 or 10 or maybe 20 PR people. They love, you know. I mean, they get drinks with. They're helped out by them all the time. Yeah, they'll be friendly by 10 of them or something, yeah. That's right. And, you know, the real difference is that there are two kinds of PR people to journalists. They're the ones that are helpful and not helpful. Okay.

SPEAKER_39: And so if you have the majority of them are probably not helpful because they're just sending you that blast over, you know, email. And they're clogging up and they're making your life harder because you have to go through all this crap to get to a real story.

SPEAKER_24: But in the minority of PR people that are known as being helpful where they go the extra mile. They, first of all, they research the journalists. They understand what they cover, what they don't cover. So they're only going to pitch them good stuff. And not everything is going to get covered. But at least they'll know, like, hey, if Joe is pitching me something, it's at least something I might cover. So I'll take the time to read it. But then I see the really good ones go out of their way and they see, like, the journalist has a problem. They need a source. They'll find that journalist a source even if it's not their client. Got it.

SPEAKER_39: Because they know if they become a resource, then they'll always get their email opened. They can always at least get a fair shot at pitching a story.

SPEAKER_94: Right. So they're just super helpful independent of getting their clients press.

SPEAKER_93: You know, there's a handful like Brooke Hammerling who, you know, I've become friends with and were delightful. But they also, like, Brooke gets to work with the best clients, right? Or Brandy Barker. Like, they just have the best clients. Therefore, you know, it's delightful to work with them.

SPEAKER_13: Then there's the other ones who have the worst clients. Now, should startups be hiring these PR firms or are you in the school that the CEO should do it? Because I've heard this, you know, 50-50 from people. Myself, I never hire PR. I just do it myself.

SPEAKER_05: I email people myself. Literally, like, I wanted to have somebody take a look at what Angelist syndicates and what I'm doing in Angel Investing. So in December, I just emailed one person at the journal who I know covers this. And I said, listen, I've been doing this syndicate thing. It's going pretty well. You should take a look at it. And have breakfast in the twice. And they're going to write an article. That's how I do it.

SPEAKER_85: Only when I have something of substance and only like a laser. Is that the best way to do it or should I have a PR firm? And who should and who shouldn't?

SPEAKER_55: I'd say that there, first of all, the answer, should the CEO be doing PR, is always yes.

SPEAKER_24: Right. And you can look at Dick Costolo. He's still tweeting with journalists. Big time. If you read the Steve Jobs book, it's fascinating. When he came back to Apple, he'd call Walt Mossberg, the gadgets editor at the time of the Wall Street Journal, every Sunday for an hour. When he first, because he realized personally, and he had, you know, God knows how many PR people and agencies they had. Yeah. In fact, he still realized it's the CEO's job to communicate the vision to the public. Right. You should do that through the media. And it matters. Like any, any journalist prefers talking to a CEO over anybody else. Of course. So I think the answer is, should the CEO do it? Always yes. And then there's the question, should you layer things on top of the CEO do it to get more leverage? So I'd say the first thing you should do, I'd say actually before hiring an agency, you probably just want to hire someone in-house to hustle and get more press and do this research for you. Because you could be, and you know, that's a great example where you were happy getting your story in the Wall Street Journal.

SPEAKER_39: But if you were building a consumer brand, you probably want to be getting press hits every week, every day. Yeah, it's too much work. All over the country.

SPEAKER_24: It needs some support. Or, yeah, like any other function, it's going to be too much work. So I'd say first, hire someone just to really focus on and on hustle. And then I think there's a real question if you should hire a PR firm or not.

SPEAKER_49: Sometimes you think press can be advantageous enough and you can find a firm that can leapfrog it. Do it. If not, keep it in-house.

SPEAKER_05: Got it. All right. Listen, let me end there because we're in an hour and 10 minutes. We're going to talk about press all day. Everybody go to muckrack.com and sign up. It's like a couple hundred bucks a month if you're a startup that wants PR stuff. Is there like a rate for startups, like a startup rate if you're like small or unlisted?

SPEAKER_24: It starts at $199 a month, which is, of course, a fraction of what you'd spend on a PR firm. That's right.

SPEAKER_272: A PR firm would start at like probably $5,000 to $10,000 a month. So it's a fraction. And you're probably getting- That's right.

SPEAKER_24: And you're using the same tool that PR firms use. Yeah. So you're probably halfway there. Et cetera.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I advise everybody to do it. Yeah. Oh, and yeah, you do the Shorty Awards too.

SPEAKER_11: I know that's coming up. I'll give you a plug for that. Go check out the shortyawards.com, is it? Yeah, shortyawards.com or shorty.com will take you there too.

SPEAKER_05: I'll play Will Ferrell accepting a Shorty Award on the way out. And you can follow Gregory and at muckrack on the Twitter. Great, great product. Great information today. Thank you for that. And let me just take a moment to tell everybody, because at the end of the show, you get a little stinger, like you're going to watch a Marvel movie, right? There's a little stinger at the end after the credits. And today's stinger is for my friends at Better. And if you go to twist, T-W-I-S-T dot getbetter.com, you'll get one month of free service and 50% off your first paid month. Why did I invest in this company? Better. It's pretty easy. I have health insurance that costs me like $15,000 a year for my family. And we use it, or we were using it, a third as much as we probably wanted to.

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SPEAKER_13: That one looks awesome, but I have a four-month wait. That one looks good. And they have a two-week wait. I'll take that one. Then they sent me the documents I had to fill out ahead of time so I could docu-sign them. Then they told the place, hey, I got to get out of there in and out really quick. I'll definitely be on time. It would be really helpful if I could get in and out quickly. They did just that. And then they follow up if I need anything. If I got a prescription or something, they make sure it's at the place, the pharmacy. And then they pick it back. And if you need advice on something, like I needed to get a Z-Pak, they were authorized

SPEAKER_05: to talk to my primary care physician and explain to the primary care physician what my symptoms were, da-da-da-da. Then scheduled a call for me, for him to call me. I talked to my Dr. Kirishawa. So he then got the Z-Pak for me. Boom. It just saves me like hours a month and probably tens of hours a year for like 20 bucks a month or 10 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month. It's really de minimis. I loved it so much. I bought it as a Christmas present for everybody on my staff. They all have it now. It's a great product. And here you go. Twist list. Our Twist members are going to get the first month for you 5% off. And I, you know, I put 250 dimes, 250 dimes into Better because I love the product so much.

SPEAKER_11: And the last time, Greg, you know what happened when I put 250 dimes into an app?

SPEAKER_376: Guessing it ended well?

SPEAKER_11: Got bought by Apple. Swell. I put 250. Boop. Just put a little boop. 250 in. Boop. Five months later, bought by Apple. Now, better, don't sell in five months to anybody. Let's grow it for five years. And I, if you want to pull it up. I need a unicorn.

SPEAKER_27: I just pulled a muck rack search for dermatologist. So, if you want to tell your story about dermatologists. No, I don't. Oh, I see what you're saying.

SPEAKER_379: Yes, we should do that. That's a great idea.

SPEAKER_27: All right. You can do your case study and that's value added as an investor.

SPEAKER_380: See, there you go. You're smart. That is so smart. Muck rack is great. That's it.

SPEAKER_308: I got to invest in muck rack next.

David Friedberg: This business is doing pretty good. You got 10 people in it. But you bootstrapped it. We bootstrapped it.

SPEAKER_16: See, I got respect for you. That's what I respect most is I love somebody who bootstrapped their business. I did that with Silicon Air Force.

SPEAKER_207: A lot of my business, I bootstrapped them off of clients, my own money, credit cards, whatever. People don't do that enough. It's hard.

SPEAKER_39: It's definitely, it's harder, but it is awfully, I mean, it was just, you know, a very intense period of building where our only source of funding is the customer. So, we had to make them happy.

SPEAKER_384: Which makes it pure, super pure.

SPEAKER_05: All right, listen. And by the way, congratulations on the Shorty Awards. I know that's a big thing you do. But here is Will Farrell accepting his Shorty Award on the way out. Here we go. Boom.

SPEAKER_385: And awards out there, meaningless awards, awards that no one has heard of.

SPEAKER_387: The Shorties are by far the most prestigious. And so I want to thank you for this. I want to thank my mom and my dad who are in the audience. I also want to thank and dedicate this award to T-Pain and Plies for their song, Shorty. Without their song, this award wouldn't be possible. And because of their song, because of what they do, there'll be Shorty Awards for future generations. I also want to thank all the people with no jobs and just endless amounts of time on their hands to create fake Twitter accounts for me. It's really a great skill that you possess. Thank you again.

SPEAKER_13: That's pretty genius. How do you wind up getting him? Sorry, I was supposed to play it out. But how did you get him to do that?

SPEAKER_39: You know, we've gotten lots of celebrities involved with the Shorty Awards.

SPEAKER_24: And the fundamental trick of it has always been that everyone wants more followers. You want more followers. I want more followers. And we started, Shorty Awards now recognize all of social media, but started on Twitter. When we launched, it became the top trending term on Twitter. So anyone who is on Twitter saw the Shorties, got to know the name, and we've just been leveraging it since then. Yeah, get more followers. Got it.

SPEAKER_189: All right. All right. We'll see you next time on this week's service. Bye-bye.