Pros and Cons of Muck Rack 2024 (2024)

Pros and Cons

• After less than 90 days, we are still trying to understand. Thus far, the jury is out on the quality of their lists, as anecdotal evidence suggests it is barely maintained and updated.

• Unsubscribe needs to be functional

• Quality of journalists within a specific subset of interests needs to be verified more accurately & timely than we are currently experiencing

Pros and Cons

• I love the media tracking and reporting to showcase the ROI for my clients.

• I like the functionality of the pitching service. It keeps my pitches consistent with formatting and provides great feedback on best practices, etc.

• I like how easy it is to search and find reports, whether by name or outlet, it has been super helpful for me.

• The look and feel of the report would be updated a bit. I like the categories, but visually making it more appealing would be nice.

• I would say improving tracking coverage. There are times when articles aren't captured based on my keywords, etc. that I have to load manually.

• The ability to upload media lists to be able to clean, vet, and update. I can do some manually one entry at a time, but not in bulk. At least not from what I've seen

Pros and Cons

• Gather and update journalists' contact information

• Frequently update and share updates on journalists' job moves

• Makes it easy to identify journalists by outlet, topic, area

• The content in monitoring reports could be vetted more to provide more helpful news stories

Pros and Cons

• Provides journalist contact information

• Customer service

• Media monitoring

• Provides details on media outlets and the audience they reach.

• Updates to contact information- but their customer service will fix if you ask.

Pros and Cons

• Muck Rack offers a robust and highly targeted media research tool that allows you to build a customized media list to launch a media relations campaign.

• Muck Rack's customer support team is quite good and is very responsive.

• Muck Rack's sales team does a great job of explaining how their solution will effectively address the needs of the organization.

• When using the media research tool, we found that Muck Rack was missing huge swaths of industries and reporters within those industries.

• Coverage reports suffered from the same issue. Although there's a tool that allows you to manually input coverage you're aware of, Muck Rack missed critical, high-value placements that change the entire results picture.

• There's no way to purchase one tool or the other from Muck Rack. It's sold as an all-or-nothing solution. Prior to using Muck Rack, we had two different vendors who did each of these things really well. Upon signing with Muck Rack we traded two vendors for one and excellence for lackluster performance.

Pros and Cons

• Muck Rack allows us to host releases on our website or client websites and point to them in a pitch email, helping drive further site traffic.

• Muck Rack monitors and keeps us up to date with changes in status for journalists we monitor.

• Muck Rack allows us to monitor unlimited clients and create detailed coverage reports on any business or topic we need.

• Creating coverage reports is time-consuming and it is difficult to filter out unrelated coverage with the Boolean operator-driven functionality

• Muck Rack does not integrate with our other monitoring and reporting tools, so for sharing reports everything needs to be manually exported and added to our reporting software.

• Muck Rack does not include broadcast coverage monitoring in its normal package, and the functionality of the added broadcast tool is limited compared to other coverage monitoring tools.

Pros and Cons

• Muck Rack has a feature to shortlist the most important contacts.

• It enables an organization in keeping a record of almost everyone and one can find the reports of others.

• It is a very effective tool in PR planning.

• Its alert feature is quite useless and doesn’t work well.

• Its pricing is quite outrageous and is unfair as well.

Pros and Cons

• Search features

• Contact Info

• Tracking inquiries

• better keyword exclusion options

Pros and Cons

• Robust media database

• Streamlines pitching

• Keeps you on top of news trends to help with pitching ideas

• Nothing comes to mind

Pros and Cons

• Organize pitches

• Easy for beginners

• Media lists are a wonderful tool

• Use whichever email we want even if the journalist decided to hide it

• Have Muck Rack immediately update email addresses

Pros and Cons

• Identify journalists and influencers not in traditional media databases.

• Understand what journalists are talking about topics relevant to your clients.

• Bios: love being able to search bios, including confirming beats and interests.

• When you export a media list, it does not include the email address so you have to search for it offline or on the journalist's profile. It's annoying.

• Sometimes when you save a list, not all the contacts you marked are saved and you have to do it over.

• There isn't a "click all" button to add all of the contacts to a list. You have to wait until all the people load - which isn't ideal for productivity.

Pros and Cons

• always updates media contacts, moves and changes in the media landscape

• Reporter profiles list contact info, social handles, recent articles and Twitter feed

• UI makes it easy to build media lists

• Main issue is that when you import a media list to Excel, the margins get weird and you have to manually adjust the columns and rows so that the data lines up neatly

Pros and Cons

• Media contacts

• Alerts

• Missing reporter info

• Missing hispanic publications

Pros and Cons

• The media alert function is awesome! Google Alerts can't get the detail I need, nor do they filter just for the media. I can set media alerts for particular selection factors such as everyone with "education" as their beat.

• I am liking the notes ability to log interactions with particular media. This helps me not have to track down conversation chains or actions with media.

• The interface screen is modern. I love that if I am running a search in one screen, when I click on a particular person or outlet, it opens ANOTHER screen so that I don't have use the back button. I can open, say 10 people at once and compare their notes.

• I love the PDF summaries from lists. I love the Who shared feature. I LOVE EVERYTHING in MuckRack!

• There is a weird process in the media lists when you add new names to the list. I know it tracks the date they were entered but the sorting is difficult to manage. ...I have to go into that process to give you specific guidance on what should be changed. I'll do that next time I encounter it.

• I wish that there was a better way to search regionally or by DMA rank. I'd like to see the media outlet's circulation numbers on the first screen in a search or allow me to filter.

• I wish there was a better way to see a real difference between registered media and the giant world of contributors and other wonks. Anyone with a commentary gets pulled into the general list yet many contributors are perfect targets for pitches so I don't want to eliminate them by selecting only registered media.

Pros and Cons

• Build custom lists of key figures at media organizations

• Offer a platform for pitching media contacts

• Monitor social media

• Respond to issues or suggestions as they arise

• Clear, intuitive design

• Building out their list of media contacts at smaller local news outlets

Pros and Cons

• Muck Rack has contact information for a lot of journalists

• It also is easy to use Muck Rack's search feature to find journalists using keywords

• Muck Rack's main area of improvement needed is simply that it lacks contact information for a large chunk of journalists. Anyone from a lesser known publication is usually not included.