journalist-research
How Rita Liao (Ex-TechCrunch) Used Medialyst
PR consultant and ex-TechCrunch reporter Rita Liao used Medialyst to generate a targeted journalist list with recent-article summaries, then paired it with Simular's Sai for the LinkedIn legwork.
Key results: 30 min manual research per journalist · 25 journalists shortlisted · 13 min linkedin workflow time · 70 automated steps
"Then recently I stumbled upon Elvis Sun's agentic PR tool Medialyst. With a few detailed prompts, the agent comes up with a pretty targeted list of journalists."
— Rita Liao, PR consultant, ex-TechCrunch reporter, and author of Leapfrog
The Result
Rita used Medialyst to replace the hardest part of media outreach: figuring out which journalists were actually worth contacting. Instead of spending 30 minutes on one journalist, she started with a Medialyst-generated shortlist of 25 journalists, each with recent-coverage context, then used Sai to work through the LinkedIn outreach in 13 minutes.
Rita first shared this workflow in her original LinkedIn post →
The Problem
Rita frames the problem from both sides. As a former journalist, she appreciates the effort it takes to track a reporter down, but most outreach is still irrelevant. Once she started helping startups with pitches, she wanted a way to do the research properly without sinking hours into every list.
When she started helping startups with pitches, she did the research the hard way:
- read recent bylines,
- skim tweets,
- look for personal context that might make a message useful,
- and squeeze it into 240 characters on LinkedIn.
That took at least 30 minutes for one journalist. Multiply that by 100 and the job becomes 10 hours a day for a week.
As she put it, she would be "poring over their tweets, studying their recent bylines, finding out their favorite band" just to send one relevant outreach message.
What Medialyst Changed
The shift was not that Medialyst produced a perfect final list with no judgment required. It gave Rita a much stronger starting point.
With a few detailed prompts, Medialyst surfaced a targeted list of journalists and summarized their recent articles before she had to open every piece herself. That meant she could:
- scan the shortlist faster,
- see why each journalist might be relevant,
- and refine the results instead of building the whole list from scratch.
Rita's own verdict was practical: not every name was relevant, but it was "a pretty good start" and she could prompt Medialyst to improve the list.
The Last Mile
Once Medialyst had done the research and shortlisting, Sai by Simular handled the desktop work Rita still hated: clicking profiles, scrolling LinkedIn, switching between tabs, and teeing up invite messages.
In the screen recording, Sai worked through the top 25 journalists from Rita's Medialyst list. After about 70 steps and 13 minutes, it had:
- opened 14 LinkedIn profiles for journalists she was not already connected with,
- left invite messages in the sent box for approval,
- and flagged 2 irrelevant profiles instead of wasting time on them.
The messages still needed polishing. Rita still made the final judgment. But the most repetitive part of the workflow was already gone.
Why It Matters
The real leverage here is upstream. Before any automation touches LinkedIn, someone still has to find the right journalists and understand what they have been writing about. Medialyst compressed that research step into something Rita could review and refine instead of doing from zero.
Sai was useful because Medialyst had already done the harder part: picking the list worth acting on.
Want The Same Workflow?
If you want a faster way to build and refine a journalist list before outreach starts, start with Medialyst.