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When I was a reporter at Newshub, I could always tell when someone had pitched me off a bought media list. The subject line would reference a beat I hadn't covered in months, the release would be addressed to "Dear Journalist" or, worse, to the person who'd had my desk before me, and the story itself would be so far removed from anything I'd ever written about that I'd wonder whether the sender had confused me with someone at a different network entirely.
Those emails got deleted in under two seconds. Every single one.
The pitches I actually opened, read and responded to came from people who clearly knew what I covered, had read something I'd written recently, and understood that a television news reporter at a Canterbury-based bulletin has different needs from a business editor at the Herald. That knowledge didn't come from a database. It came from someone doing the work of building a proper media list.
A media list is the foundation of every PR campaign, and yet it's the part most people get wrong. Not because it's complicated, but because the temptation to make it big is almost irresistible, and bigger is almost always worse. At Payper, we build a fresh, targeted media list for every single campaign we run, and the discipline of keeping those lists small and specific is one of the reasons our pitches actually get read.
What is a media list (and what isn't one)?
A media list is a curated document of journalists, editors and producers who are genuinely likely to cover your specific story. The emphasis is on "curated" and "specific." It is not a spreadsheet of every journalist in New Zealand. It is not a database export. It is not a list you bought from a service that promises 5,000 media contacts for a monthly subscription.
A good media list for a single PR campaign in New Zealand might have 15 to 40 names on it. That number surprises people, but it reflects a basic reality of our media landscape: there are fewer working journalists in this country than there have been at any point in the last two decades, and the ones who remain are covering narrower, more defined beats than ever before. Scope Communications' 2026 review of the NZ media landscape put it well when they noted that newsrooms are moving faster, editorial thresholds are sharper, and the margin for error in media relations is narrower than it has been in years.
Sending your pitch to 200 people when only 25 of them would ever realistically cover it doesn't increase your chances. It decreases them, because the 175 journalists who receive an irrelevant pitch from you are now less likely to open the next one.
Start with your story, not the list
The most common mistake people make is building a media list before they've figured out what their story actually is. They compile names, then try to retrofit a pitch to fit the list, which is exactly backwards.
Your story determines your list. A funding announcement for an AI startup goes to technology reporters, business editors and a handful of generalist news reporters who cover the startup beat. A new product launch for a consumer brand goes to lifestyle editors, product reviewers and potentially food or fashion writers depending on the category. A community initiative goes to regional reporters and local news editors.
These are different lists with almost no overlap, and the work of building each one starts with a single question: who has written about something like this before?
If you're not sure whether your story is actually newsworthy in the first place, that's a different problem worth solving before you touch a media list at all. We wrote a whole article on how to assess whether your story is genuinely news, and it's worth reading first.
How do you find the right journalists in New Zealand?
There is no shortcut here, and anyone who tells you there is will cost you credibility with the people you most need to impress. The process is manual, it takes time, and it works.
Read the outlets your audience reads. This sounds obvious, but most people skip it. If you want coverage in the New Zealand Herald, spend an hour reading the Herald's business section from the last month. Note which reporters cover which topics, how they frame their stories, what kinds of sources they quote. Do the same for Stuff, for Newsroom, for the NBR if your audience skews corporate, for interest.co.nz if you're in financial services, for your regional paper if local coverage matters to you. The bylines will tell you everything a database can't.
Search for coverage of your competitors or peers. If a journalist has written about a company in your space, they're far more likely to be interested in yours. Search the outlet's website for your industry, your competitors, your category. The journalists whose names keep appearing are the ones who belong on your list.
Check LinkedIn and social media. Most New Zealand journalists are active on LinkedIn, and many describe their current beat in their bio. This is useful for confirming that someone is still at the outlet you think they're at, which changes more often than you'd expect in a market where newsroom restructures happen every few months.
Listen to the radio and watch the news. Broadcast journalists are easy to overlook when you're building a list from behind a screen, but radio interviews and television segments can deliver enormous reach. Morning Report, Nine to Noon, Newstalk ZB and Breakfast all feature regular segments where producers actively look for stories. Identifying those producers is as valuable as identifying print reporters.
When Payper pitched Kea Aerospace, the media list wasn't a generic "tech journalists" export. It was a carefully researched set of reporters who had specifically covered aerospace, drones, deep tech or Canterbury innovation stories. That specificity is what made the difference between mass emails and meaningful coverage.
What should you include for each contact?
A name and email address is a start, but it's not enough. For each journalist on your list, you want to capture their outlet and section, what they typically cover (with links to two or three recent articles that prove it), their preferred contact method if you know it, any previous interaction or coverage of your organisation, and a short note on why this person specifically would care about your story.
That last field is the one that matters most. If you can't articulate in a sentence why a particular journalist would want to cover your story, they probably shouldn't be on the list. Cision's 2026 State of the Media report, which surveyed more than 1,800 journalists globally, found that 82% said misalignment with their audience or coverage area was the primary reason they rejected a pitch. That's not a surprising number, but it's a useful one to keep in mind when you're tempted to add "just one more" contact who doesn't quite fit.
The same report found that 66% of journalists rely on PR-provided content as their top source for story ideas. The opportunity is enormous if you get the targeting right, and the penalty for getting it wrong is that your email becomes part of the noise that 88% of journalists delete without reading.
New Zealand is small, and that's your advantage
In most countries, building a media list is an exercise in navigating a vast and anonymous landscape. In New Zealand, it's more like mapping a village.
We have a handful of major outlets, a small but dedicated group of specialist trade publications, a strong regional press network, and a broadcast sector that, despite significant contraction since the closure of Newshub's news division, still reaches hundreds of thousands of people daily. The total number of journalists actively covering any given beat can often be counted on two hands.
This sounds like a limitation, but it's actually a significant strategic advantage for anyone willing to invest in relationships rather than volume. A journalist who covers you well once is far more likely to take your call next time. The editor who sees your name come through with a relevant, well-packaged story develops a mental shortcut that says "this person sends me things worth reading." In a market where journalists might receive 50 or more pitches a day, much of it now AI-generated, that kind of trust is genuinely rare and correspondingly valuable.
This is something we see consistently at Payper. Our strongest coverage results don't come from casting a wide net, they come from journalists who already know us, trust the quality of what we send them, and are willing to engage with a story because the relationship is already established. That compounding effect is one of the most powerful things about working with a results-based PR agency in a small market.
How often should you update your media list?
A media list that isn't maintained is worse than no list at all, because it gives you false confidence. You think you're reaching the right people when you're actually emailing outdated addresses, journalists who've moved beats, or people who left the industry six months ago.
Research suggests that media contact data has a shelf life of roughly six months before a significant portion becomes outdated. In New Zealand, where newsroom restructures have been particularly frequent in recent years, that timeline can be even shorter. A reporter who was covering technology for Stuff in January might be freelancing by June, or covering an entirely different beat, or working in communications.
The maintenance doesn't need to be onerous. Before every campaign, spend 30 minutes verifying your key contacts: check that they're still at the outlet, look at their most recent bylines to confirm they're still covering your beat, and update your notes with anything new you've learned about their preferences or recent coverage. This is the kind of unglamorous, invisible work that separates PR that lands from PR that bounces.
The mistakes that cost you
Some of these are obvious, but they happen constantly, so they're worth stating plainly.
Buying a list. Pre-made media lists are almost always outdated, poorly categorised and too broad to be useful. More importantly, they signal to journalists that you haven't done your homework. If a journalist receives a pitch that was clearly sent to a purchased list, you've communicated that you don't value their time or their specific expertise, and that impression is very difficult to undo.
Sending to everyone at once. Mass-emailing your entire list on the same story might feel efficient, but it eliminates the possibility of offering exclusives, which remain one of the most effective tools in media relations. A well-placed exclusive with a single journalist who covers your beat will almost always outperform a mass pitch to 100 contacts, particularly in New Zealand where outlets compete fiercely for original stories.
Never updating it. As covered above, a stale list actively works against you.
Confusing reach with relevance. Having a contact at every outlet in the country is less valuable than having strong, well-researched contacts at the five outlets your audience actually reads. The goal is coverage that reaches the right people, not coverage that reaches the most people.
Forgetting broadcast and online-only outlets. Many first-time PR efforts focus exclusively on print and ignore radio, television and digital-native outlets like Newsroom, The Spinoff or interest.co.nz. These outlets often have different story preferences, different lead times and different formats, which means they need different approaches on your list.
When to get help
If all of this sounds like a lot of work, that's because it is. Building and maintaining a high-quality media list is one of the most time-intensive parts of PR, and it's the part that's hardest to shortcut without consequences.
For founders who are bootstrapping and doing their own PR (we wrote a guide for exactly that situation), building a focused list of 15-20 journalists and maintaining it carefully will get you further than you might expect. But if you're running a business and don't have the hours to research bylines, verify contacts and build relationships with individual journalists, that's one of the things Payper brings to the table from day one. Media list building is, honestly, one of the things that's hardest to replicate with AI tools, because the judgement calls about who belongs on a list and who doesn't come from experience, relationships and an understanding of the New Zealand media landscape that no database can fully capture.
The best media list you'll ever build is the one where every single name on it makes you think, "yes, this person would genuinely want to know about this story." If you can't say that about every entry, the list isn't finished yet.
Get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.