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Adding Your Own Journalists and Media Contacts to Meltwater

Import your own journalists to include in media lists.

Blake Corman avatar
Written by Blake Corman
Updated over a week ago

Being successful in your media outreach efforts requires building relationsships with reporters, editors, journalists and other media contacts. If you're new to Meltwater, you should start your journey in Media Relations Search, where you can discover relevant media contacts.

However, there may be times when Meltwater won't have who you're looking for. In this case, you are able to add these people to Meltwater as private contact profiles.

It is possible to add both a single profile at a time, and to import up to 10,000 profiles at a time.

This article will cover:

Let's get started!


Creating a Journalist or Contact Profile

Follow the steps below to add a single journalist or other media contact to Meltwater:

  1. Select the Media Relations drop-down in the left-hand side navigation bar

  2. Select Media Lists

  3. Click the Actions drop-down in the top right-hand corner

  4. Select Create new journalist profile

  5. Fill out the required information, being sure to pay close attention to all fields.

  6. Complete the required fields identified by an asterisk (*)

  7. Select Save

  8. Click OK

  9. You will be navigated to the new profile

  10. To add this journalist to an existing or new Media List

    1. Select Actions in the top right-hand corner

    2. Click Add to media list

    3. Click the check box next to an existing list or select Create list

    4. If creating a new list, enter a name and click Save

    5. Select OK


Importing Profiles or Lists by Uploading a CSV File

Importing existing lists from a spreadsheet is helpful in cases where you have important journalists or media contacts that you want to add quickly to your account and have no additional research to complete. Follow the below steps to import an entire media list.

  1. Select the Media Relations drop-down in the left-hand side navigation bar

  2. Select Media Lists

  3. Click Actions in the top right-hand corner

  4. Select Import journalists from CSV list

  5. Download either the decimal point format or decimal comma format template, depending on the countries in which your contacts reside. Learn more about this here.

  6. Fill out the template accordingly. When complete, save it to your computer and then upload it in the Import CSV file section of the import workflow.

    Note: Please keep all the existing formatting, such as the brief instructions or columns you must fill in.

  7. If you are interested, you can try our Contact matching feature, which will attempt to match the contacts in your CSV file with those in our database. If matches are found, they will be added to a media list created specifically as a result of this action, and you will be able to find that media list, named with a timestamp, in your account.

    Note: Contact matching attempts to find matches based on the email address and name of the contact. The email address must be an exact match, while the name accounts for spelling variations or abbreviations.

  8. If you'd like to include your uploaded contacts in one or more media lists, select the desired media lists in the Add to media lists section of the workflow. Alternatively, you can create a new media list in this workflow as well.

    Note: We do not suggest adding to media lists if your import contains more than 1,000 contacts - or, the amount to which you are limited to emailing in 1 Outreach email.

  9. Click Add contacts

  10. You will receive an in-app alert, as well as an email, when the import is complete.



If your upload fails, please review the use of the template to ensure you've completed the required columns for each row of journalist details.


💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

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