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How much is a media contact worth?

For those of you in PR, you know that the one thing that is essential to your job is your list of media contacts. Over the years my media list has grown to thousands of names.

Personally I've always enjoyed Marketwire's service which is reasonably priced (I won't state cost as I don't want to define their market offering for them as I know prices can fluctuate).

Recently, as I typically do to stay up-to-date, I was checking out what other PR services were out there and stumbled across a really interesting offering from Cision

Basically when it comes to contact databases you pay an annual fee. What Cision has done though is allowed you to build a media list and pay a one time fee. What I found interesting was the cost per contact, which was 70 cents.

So a media list of say 200 names would be 140 dollars.

It's an interesting model. I think it's still more convenient and cost effective to sign on to an annual service myself - and from past experience I know that you need that 24/7 access to be efficient in your job.  But for those people who only reach out to the media once or twice a year this pay-per-use model would actually be more cost effective.

The big question though is how you verify the list contains what you need prior to buying it. Because if you could see the list prior to purchasing it, then you could just take down the information and not proceed with the purchase. If you can't see the list prior to purchasing it, then you could end up with a list half-filled with names that you don't really need.

If anyone actually tries this service, let me know how it goes.

So there you have it, the telephone and email address of a reporter is worth about 70 cents. Pretty expensive when you think about the fact that most PR people concern themselves with hundreds of media contacts. 

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