Can AI make a media list?

The marking schemeLink to this section: The marking scheme§

How the media list was marked.

Carly builds the list for a real client brief by hand, the way she has for fourteen years. Hers is the answer key. Three things are measured against it, each multiplied by a public weight, and added up.

Weights add to 1.00 · no hidden multiplier · a name Carly says she’d include counts on top of her list, so a component — and the score — can pass 100

FoundDid we find them?

The share of the 12 journalists on Carly's hand-built key that appeared on ours — plus one she didn't have and said she'd include.The green +1 is a find of ours that wasn't on her list — someone she said she'd include. Her list stays what we're graded against, so a find she adopts lifts the score, even past 100.

Emails rightWould it even land?

Of the 7 of her journalists we found, every address matched the one she has — seven for seven, checked by her against her own book.

Good fitsWhen we say strong fit, is it?

Of the 28 names the tool handed her as its strongest fits, the share she would actually pitch — her keep-or-cut pen on every row, no proxy.

The pile so farLink to this section: The pile so far§

Every paper she has handed back.

One real client brief a week, marked against the list she built by hand.

1. New brief, her new keyAug 27, 2026Link to this section: New brief, her new key, Aug 27, 2026§+15.0 vs last run, on a new brief and key

   First mark off the F band — and one find she adopted

   Graded on: A niche NFL announcement brief

   A new brief this week — a real client announcement that has not gone out yet, so the card describes it rather than names it. Carly built a fresh 12-name key for it and graded every row herself: 7 of her 12 found, every served address right, and 9 keeps from the 28 names the tool vouched for hardest. One keep was not on her key at all — a find of ours she said she'd include, and under the bonus rule that counts on top of her list, in green.

   • 7+1/12found▲ 27.1pts · was 17/43
   • 7/7emails right▲ 11.8pts · was 15/17
   • 9/28good fits▲ 2.0pts · was 25/83

   D

   66.3/100

   What we changed to get here

   • Angle control. The plan proposes the story angles and you rule on them — how many run, which ones, in what order — before anything spends a credit. The angles are yours to cut, keep, or add to.
   • Research depth. How long each Deep Dive agent digs is a dial now, not a default — rounds per angle, and how far afield it reads before it stops.
   • Spend control. Every run carries a budget envelope, per angle and in total, and the research stops at the cap instead of the bill saying what happened.
   • Receipt: the journalist she adopted — the green +1 — came out of a comparable-story angle the planner proposed itself and the run approved. That lane exists because angles are explicit now, ruled on before anything runs.
   • Receipt: five angles deep, the run took about six minutes of agent research from plan approval to her second anchor article — inside its spend envelope, with budget to spare.

   • Carly’s grading, on LinkedIn ↗
   • Elvis’s fixes, on LinkedIn ↗

   MarkedElvis SunFounder, Medialyst

2. Same brief, rerunAug 20, 2026Link to this section: Same brief, rerun, Aug 20, 2026§+9.1 vs last run

   From 7 of her 43 journalists to 17, in one week

   Graded on: A job site’s Stress-Free Six-Figure Careers brief

   Finding her journalists is 40% of the score and it had not moved in a month: 7 of her 43, three gradings running. This week it moved to 17. The list was committed and dated before anything was compared to her sheet, and the score is the same arithmetic every mark on this page gets.

   • 17/43found▲ 23.3pts · was 7/43
   • 15/17emails right▲ 2.5pts · was 6/7
   • 25/83good fits▼ 3.2pts · was 7/21

   F

   51.3/100

   What we changed to get here

   • Angles. Your news is never one story. The plan now breaks it into several distinct story angles — each written the way the reporter who covers that beat would want to hear it, each going after its own set of journalists — and you see and steer the angles before anything runs.
   • Deep Dive Agents. One research agent takes each angle and works it the way a person would: reading what it finds, deciding what to look up next, hunting the rival reports yours is up against and who covered them by name, and checking who actually reads an outlet before vouching for anyone.
   • Receipt: two of her journalists whose exact articles sat unread on our own search pages last run are on the list this time — reading the whole pile caught exactly the misses the audit predicted.
   • Receipt: the rival-report hunt lands people topic searches never surfaced — several of the ten new finds came in through competing rankings they had covered, at outlets that had never appeared in any earlier run of this brief.
   • Receipt: off-target outlets among the names it vouched for halved, and 15 of the 17 addresses were right — wider search did not come at the cost of a messier list.

   • The full story, on our blog ↗

   MarkedElvis SunFounder, Medialyst

3. Same brief, rerunAug 13, 2026Link to this section: Same brief, rerun, Aug 13, 2026§+8.5 vs last run

   We fixed the addresses everywhere, not on her sheet

   Graded on: A job site’s Stress-Free Six-Figure Careers brief

   Only the addresses moved — finding her journalists carries the most weight, it did not budge, and that is still where the score is lost. One address stays a miss we are disputing until she rules.

   • 7/43found— no change · was 7/43
   • 6/7emails right▲ 28.6pts · was 4/7
   • 7/21good fits— no change · was 7/21

   F

   42.2/100

   What moved underneath this mark

   • More of your lists come back with an email. Last Friday, 53.5% of requests came back with a verified, deliverable address. Today it is 68.3% — up 14.9 points. We think the theoretical ceiling is somewhere between 80% and 90%, because not every news article published has a journalist with an email you can reach.
   • Freelancers stopped being the worst group on the list. Last Friday we could reach 39.4% of the freelancers our users asked for, and about 1 in 8 of the journalists our users ask about is a freelancer. We put a deep research agent on them — it reads the open web, bylines and social profiles to find the address. They are now at 62.2%, up 22.8 points.
   • Lists build faster — a usable list in 2.6 minutes. Half your list comes back in about 2.6 minutes on a typical build; in January that was 8.3 minutes. The slowest lists used to run into the 60-minute timeout, and now finish in 6.6.
   • The reason it got faster: the database learned. In February almost every email had to be hunted live while you waited. In our measured re-run this week, 86.6% of the addresses we served came straight from the database, the rest found in real time by our deep research agents — and we did not need a single lookup from a third-party contact provider.
   • We worked out who the top 1,000 journalists are, and now we grade ourselves on them. Of the top 1,000 most-requested journalists, 95.3% now have a verified email. Of the top 10,000, 84.5% do.

   • The full story, on our blog ↗

   MarkedElvis SunFounder, Medialyst

4. Same brief, rerunAug 6, 2026Link to this section: Same brief, rerun, Aug 6, 2026§+5.8 vs last run

   We stopped vouching for journalists we could not verify

   Graded on: A job site’s Stress-Free Six-Figure Careers brief

   The same brief run fresh through the product two weeks later. What moved: more of the names it vouched for are ones she would actually pitch.

   • 7/43found— no change · was 7/43
   • 4/7emails right— no change · was 4/7
   • 7/21good fits▲ 19.3pts · was 7/50

   F

   33.7/100

   What we changed to get here

   • When we could barely find a journalist's published work, we now go looking for more of it before judging whether they fit.
   • When we still cannot find enough of it, we say “not enough evidence” instead of inventing a confident-looking score.
   • An author's index page no longer counts as an article they wrote.
   • An email or LinkedIn profile that matches a completely different name is no longer treated as a confirmed match.
   • Articles the assistant adds to an imported list now actually get turned into journalists.

   • Carly’s grading, on LinkedIn ↗
   • Elvis’s fixes, on LinkedIn ↗

   MarkedElvis SunFounder, Medialyst

5. BaselineJul 20, 2026Link to this section: Baseline, Jul 20, 2026§first mark

   The floor, before a single fix

   Graded on: A job site’s Stress-Free Six-Figure Careers brief

   The list our product built, walked through with her line by line.

   “Not yet, if we pitched these journalists our client would fire us.”

   • 7/43found
   • 4/7emails right
   • 7/50good fits

   F

   27.9/100

   Why this is the first mark

   Seven months building this, with nothing to grade it against — we genuinely did not know whether the lists were any good. Then Carly came on as our Founding Strategic Advisor and marked the first one we handed her. She is not going easy on us. That is the entire reason we asked her.

   • Carly’s note, on LinkedIn ↗
   • Elvis’s note, on LinkedIn ↗

   MarkedElvis SunFounder, Medialyst

Your turnLink to this section: Grade our list§

Want to grade our list?

Run your own brief. Then do the thing you would do anyway before you hit send: go down the list and cut the names you would cut. Tell us how many survived and what we got wrong.

Post it wherever you post, send us the link, and we will pin it here. We do not edit it.

• Pros Very campaign specific Easy to use Cons - Not a replacement for MuckRack yet - Didn't see a way to compare the list that you compiled based off my pitch compared to a list I already currently had

• Apparently, telling the AI “make no mistake” does not improve the quality of the list.

• A lot of these are advertorial articles. Can you pick up earned coverage? I want to see more broadly stories from the restaurant and chef business world. These focus too much on delivery.

• can you resort the list to make it only north america? I see indonesia. And many of these emails are not deliverabke

• i need top tier national outlets, not regional

• this media list is only supposed to be local albany publications and reporters

• you are surfacing a lot of national journalists based in NYC. I only want to see people from New York specific media outlets who cover NYC.

• I do not think we want people who write about Indianapolis already; that will result in local writers. We want national sports, economics, or leadership writers

Questions and answersLink to this section: Questions and answers§

Questions about the score.

What is the Carly Score™?

The Carly Score™ is a weekly public mark on Medialyst's media lists. Carly Martinetti, a publicist who has built media lists by hand for fourteen years, builds a list for a real client brief. Medialyst is given the same brief. Her list is the answer key, and ours is marked against it out of 100. The number is published every Thursday, whatever it says.

Why is the Carly Score™ so low?

Because the test is deliberately hard. The score marks a one-shot run: Medialyst gets the brief — Carly's word for the client's description of the story and who should cover it — in a single prompt, and has to reproduce, unassisted, the exact list a senior publicist spends days building by hand. No follow-up prompts, no steering, no second pass. It is the strictest marking we know how to set.

Does a Carly Score™ of 66.3 mean Medialyst is 66% accurate?

No. The score measures one thing: whether an unassisted agent can one-shot, from a single prompt, the media list a senior publicist like Carly builds over a few days. The number measures how much additional work a list needs before it matches hers — not accuracy.

Can users get a better media list than the Carly Score™ suggests?

Yes. The score grades the raw first draft. The product is also designed for what happens next: you and the agent iterating on the list together — expand it, steer it toward a beat, cut the names that do not survive a closer look, fix an email by hand. That iteration is deliberately excluded from the graded run. A Medialyst list is a starting point, never a finish line — the Carly Score™ measures the starting point. The first list is free, so run your own brief and mark us yourself.

How is the Carly Score™ calculated?

Three measures, each multiplied by a published weight: the share of her journalists we found (weight 0.40), the share of those whose email address matched hers (0.30), and the share of the names we stamped a strong fit that she would actually pitch (0.30). The weights add to 1.00 and there is no hidden multiplier. Every published mark, old or new, is scored under the same formula.

Is it a new brief every week?

We try to — a brief that repeats is a test you can accidentally tune for, and rotating briefs is the guard against that. When a brief does repeat, its report card says so and calls the mark a rerun. A rerun is still a real measurement, though. Medialyst finds journalists through what they are writing right now, so running the same brief at a different time produces a different list by design. And journalists move beats and change outlets, so each graded run is marked fresh as Carly works the list again, not against a frozen answer key.

How does the Carly Score™ compare Medialyst to Muck Rack, Cision, or Meltwater?

It does not. No competitor has ever asked Carly to grade one of their lists, so we cannot give you their number — not out of politeness, we just don't have one. Any of them is welcome to fix that: email [email protected] and we will publish their Carly Score™ on this page, logo attached, whatever it says. The feature-by-feature comparison lives at medialyst.ai/compare.

Who grades the Carly Score™?

Carly Martinetti, founding strategic advisor to Medialyst and co-founder of the PR agency Notably. She has been building media lists by hand for fourteen years. She marks the list independently, and we publish her number without editing it.

How often is the Carly Score™ updated, and what is it now?

Every Thursday — the next mark is due Aug 27, 2026. Each mark is dated on this page along with the counts behind it, so an old number can be told apart from the current one. The most recent mark is 66.3 out of 100, graded Aug 27, 2026.