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Featured alternative · 2026Stop waiting to get picked on Featured. Pitch the journalists you choose, directly.
Featured (formerly Terkel) is a question-and-answer expert marketplace: publishers and journalists post questions, and you answer alongside every other expert who saw the same query, competing in a public queue for inclusion.
FreeMonitor journalist requests from HARO, Connectively, LinkedIn & more with an AI agentFree: let an agent watch journalist requests alongside Featured.
Connect one authenticated MCP feed to Claude, ChatGPT, or another compatible agent. It checks six included request channels every hour, uses zero Medialyst credits, and keeps every response behind human review.
- $0
- 0 credits
- Checks every hour
- Human review before anything sends
All six sources included free
Built by an AI engineer and a working publicist.
Medialyst's co-founders bring both halves of the job into the room: Elvis brings the standard he held at Google, and Carly brings the standard her own clients pay for.


Co-founder
Runs Notably, a boutique PR agency serving 25+ clients, and pitches journalists for a living.
The proof is public. Carly grades our real media lists, and we publish every grade, starting with her first: F, 27.9/100 (latest: B, 81.1). As far as we know, Medialyst is the only AI PR tool that publishes a public, recurring quality benchmark.
The honest comparison.
Pulled from public Featured documentation, customer reviews, and our own product. We update this page when either side ships something new.
| Capability | Medialyst | Featured |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right journalist | ||
| Find journalists for this story | ✓ Story-specific relevance scoring | ~ n/a — you answer questions, not find journalists |
| Understand a journalist's beat | ✓ Reads past articles + recent coverage | ✕ — you read the query, not the journalist's beat |
| Analyze past writing | ✓ Grounded in actual articles | ✕ Not available |
| Per-journalist pitch angles | ✓ Personalized angles + pitch drafts | ~ AI drafts your answer to a posted question |
| Data freshness | ✓ Live news article search in real time | ~ Inbound query feed (HARO/Connectively digests) |
| Refine a list with natural language | ✓ “Remove anyone inactive in 6 months” | ✕ Not available |
| Find more like top performers | ✓ “Find 20 more like the top 5” | ✕ Not available |
| Add custom enrichment columns | ✓ “Research if they use affiliate links” | ✕ Not available |
| Pitching & sending | ||
| Email verification | ✓ Multi-step verification waterfall | ~ n/a — marketplace, no contact data delivered |
| Send from one place | ✓ Built-in sending | ~ Submit answers in-platform; no outbound send/track |
| Pricing & setup | ||
| Time to first pitch | ✓ Minutes | ~ Hours–days waiting for a relevant query to appear |
| Free trial | ✓ First list free | ~ Free tier (3 answers/mo) on Connectively |
| Contract | ✓ None — cancel anytime | ~ Monthly, cancel anytime |
| Price | ✓ from $149/mo | ~ $0–$99/mo (Connectively) |
| Agent-native workflows | ||
| API access | ✓ Public REST API | ~ Premium API (Business tier only) |
| Remote MCP support | ✓ Hosted remote MCP server | ✕ Not available |
| Agent-native workflows | ✓ Usable directly inside Claude, ChatGPT & Cursor | ✕ Not available |
| CSV import / re-enrichment from competitor exports | ✓ Upload any CSV — the agent re-verifies & re-scores | ~ n/a — no media list to upload |
Find your journalists now. No demo. No contract. No credit card.
Start in seconds and see live journalist matches for your first pitch.
Why people switch from Featured.
You're reacting, not reaching out
On Featured you wait for a publisher or journalist to post a question, then answer it. That's a fundamentally reactive motion — success depends on whether a relevant query happens to appear, and how fast you respond. Medialyst flips it: you find your own newsjacking opportunity, identify the journalists who'd cover it, and pitch them directly on your timeline. You're not waiting to be picked; you're making the first move.
Featured research — reverse-marketplace model ↗You're competing in a public queue
Every question on Featured is visible to every other expert who matches it. Popular queries — especially HARO-style ones — draw hundreds of pitches, and reviewers consistently flag low acceptance rates and the grind of monitoring and responding fast enough to be noticed. Medialyst removes the crowd entirely: when you find a story and pitch a journalist directly, you're not one of two hundred answers in a queue.
MentionAgent — HARO review 2026 (competition on queries) ↗Database size, freshness, and verification not disclosed
Featured's journalist-finding features live in its Business tier, but the platform doesn't publicly disclose database size, data freshness, or how (or whether) contacts are verified. Medialyst publishes how it works: journalists are picked from what they published recently for your story, and every email it delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list. You pay 1 credit only when a verified email is delivered, and misses are free.
Featured research — undisclosed media database depth ↗Discovery isn't part of the job
Featured (and the new featured.com AI co-pilot it relaunched as on June 2, 2026) is built to surface inbound opportunities — journalist requests, podcast spots, speaking, awards, GEO — and help you respond. It does not help you proactively search for journalists by beat, outlet, or story. Medialyst owns that outbound lane: describe your announcement in plain language and the agent reads recent articles to find and score the reporters who'd actually write it.
GlobeNewswire — Featured AI co-pilot scope ↗
Where each one wins.
Where Medialyst wins
Proactive discovery, not a waiting game
Instead of waiting for a relevant question to land in a digest, you describe your story and Medialyst reads hundreds of recent articles to find the journalists who'd cover it, scoring each by fit and telling you why. You set the timeline — when news breaks and you have an angle, you pitch now rather than hoping a matching query appears.
Pitch directly, no crowd to beat
On a marketplace you're one expert among many answering the same query. With Medialyst you pitch any number of journalists directly, one-to-one, with a personalized angle for each. There's no public queue, no acceptance lottery — just your story in the right inbox.
Researched journalists with verified contacts
Medialyst works globally across major online news sources and many trade publications, picking journalists from what they published recently for your story. Every email it delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list, so you get contacts you can pitch, not a feed of questions to answer.
Right-priced and self-serve
Starter is $149/mo, Pro $299, Scale $800 — published, monthly, no per-seat fees, no contract, and a 14-day money-back guarantee. Your first list is free, with 100 credits and no credit card. You're paying for a research assistant that does outbound, not a subscription to a query feed.
Agent-native end to end
One hosted MCP connection and custom enrichment columns let you run Medialyst directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor — screen the approved request feed, then ask for things a marketplace can't, like "find journalists who use affiliate links" or "who covered this beat in the last 90 days." Upload competitor CSVs and the agent takes it from there.
Where Featured wins
Genuinely good for getting quoted
If your goal is expert citations, bylined-article placements, and backlinks from authoritative outlets, Featured is legitimately useful. Major publications actively source through HARO and Featured's Q&A network, and for thought-leadership exposure and SEO link building the model works — that's a real, different job from proactive media outreach.
MentionAgent — HARO review 2026 ↗A low barrier into the Q&A model
Featured's Q&A platform (now Connectively) lets an expert start answering journalist queries for free — 3 answers a month plus HARO access, with paid plans running roughly $0–$99/mo. As a way to begin building credibility through inbound source requests, that's a genuinely low barrier — and a different on-ramp from proactive outreach, where Medialyst likewise starts free with your first list.
G2 — Featured pricing ↗HARO brand and two-sided network
Featured acquired HARO from Cision in 2025, and the combined platform reports 100,000+ users, 2,500+ publisher partnerships, and over a million answers collected. That two-sided network — and HARO's 15-year brand recognition — means a steady supply of journalist queries flowing in, which is exactly what a reactive model needs.
GlobeNewswire — Featured scale metrics ↗
Pitching the same announcement.
One launch, two tools. Here's what a comms lead actually does to get a story-specific pitch out the door.
Medialyst9 min total
Featuredhours–daysThree places the difference shows up.
01Database quality
This is where the comparison gets honest fast: Featured isn't really a media database, and it doesn't claim to deliver journalist contacts.
Its core motion is a reverse marketplace — publishers and journalists post questions, and verified experts answer, with the best responses curated into content. Even the journalist-finding features in its Business tier come with no public disclosure of database size, data freshness, or verification method, and reviewers note it feels secondary to the Q&A engine. So the "data" you interact with is a stream of inbound queries, not a researched set of reporters to reach. Medialyst takes the opposite stance. It is evidence-first: journalists are picked from what they published recently for your specific story, with the beat confirmed from their actual bylines.
It keeps its own journalist database as well, but every email it delivers was validated within the last 14 days or is re-checked when you build the list. It works globally across major online news sources and many trade publications. Coverage is strongest where articles and bylines are published online; hyper-local, print-only and some regional trade sources can be thinner. The practical difference: Featured tells you which questions to answer; Medialyst tells you which journalists to pitch, and gives you verified contact details to do it.
02Speed
On Featured, speed is about reaction time.
A relevant query has to appear in your digest or alerts first, and then — because the queue is public and popular questions draw hundreds of responses — you have to answer within roughly the first hour to have a real shot at being chosen. You can be fast and still not get picked. Medialyst changes the unit of speed from "how quickly can I respond to someone else's prompt" to "how quickly can I act on my own."
There's no demo gate and no contract — you paste a press release, a URL, or a topic, and the agent goes to work immediately. Going from describing your story to a verified, scored journalist list takes minutes. When a story breaks and you have a timely angle, that means you're pitching the right reporters in minutes, on your schedule — not waiting, possibly for days, for a matching question to surface in someone else's marketplace.
03AI & agent surface
Featured's newest form — the featured.com AI co-pilot it relaunched as on June 2, 2026 — is a chat interface that aggregates inbound opportunities (journalist requests, podcasts, speaking, awards, GEO) and helps you respond, with API access reserved for its Business tier.
Medialyst's hosted MCP gives agents a read-only, normalized feed across six approved sources, then adds proactive journalist discovery and enrichment in the same connection. It works directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, and other MCP clients; custom enrichment columns can answer structured research questions across a whole list.
The feed does not submit responses or promise a complete archive, so a human still reviews each request and replies through the source network.
Two pricing philosophies, side by side.
Ours is public and posted. Here's how it sits next to Featured's own published pricing page and what named third parties report.
- Starterfounders & small teams$97/mo annual
- Proin-house comms & PR teams$194/mo annual
- Scaleagencies & high-volume teams$520/mo annual
- No contract · no per-seat fees · cancel anytime · 14-day money-back guarantee
- Free first list — 100 credits, no credit card
- One unified product — no modules priced separately
- Featured's Q&A platform (now Connectively) runs roughly $0–$99/mo with a real free tier; HARO stays free. Pricing for the new featured.com AI co-pilot, launched June 2, 2026, is not yet public.
- Pricing published online
In the words of Medialyst users.
Real customers, approved for use. Your results depend on your story and your list — these are theirs.
"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. The best thing is it gives a summary of their recent articles before I commit to reading every piece."

"It's 100% customizable to you & your clients. It's affordable. It's built by someone who gets back to you quickly & truly wants to give the people what they want — MORE time."

"What came back was a working list with real journalists, current coverage, and contact information I could use the same day. No cross-referencing. No digging through three different tabs. One prompt and I was pitching."

"Medialyst makes it super easy to narrow down and create dedicated PR lists to reach out to the journalists that actually want to hear what you have to say. The timeline from chatting to the agent about what you have to promote to actually launching the campaign goes down to mere 1-2 hours instead of days worth of research and prospecting."

"Medialyst is the only tool that keeps up with the pace our firm needs to move at across our High Growth B2B Tech clients. The journalist targeting is sharp as well as accurate, and Elvis actually ships when you give him feedback."

"Medialyst takes the guesswork out of journalist outreach. It vets your pitch for suitability, matches it to the right journalists, and hands you their most accurate contact details — so instead of firing off cold emails into the void, you're landing in the right inboxes. The result? Fewer emails sent, more stories published."

"This is a must-have if you work in media, it's easy to use and saves you a lot of time! The customer service has been some of the best I have experienced."

"The big media database platforms are built for agencies with full teams and retainers to match. For a boutique practice like mine, the economics just do not work. Medialyst fits the model. Beyond contact discovery, it helps me stay on top of what reporters are actually covering: the beats, the patterns, the recent angles. That is the real work of pitching well these days. Spray and pray is over, and Medialyst is built for how modern media relations actually works, at a price point that makes sense for the way I operate."

"This new company is a terrific idea—and helps PR people in ways they didn't know they needed it. The team really 'gets' this business and so many businesses just don't. Jump in. The agents are ready!"

"I needed a tool built for speed: finding the journalists who are on a story right now, in the moment, while it's still news. For how fast our world moves, this service is genuinely a big deal."

"I love Medialyst. It follows the workflow I already use, which, if I may say so myself, is the right workflow. I don't keep old Excel documents full of old emails and blast things to people. I hate the spray and pray. I like to make sure reporters are writing about the things I'm talking about, and to find new people who are. Muck Rack, Cision, all of those are basically very expensive static databases. I already know the major trade reporters. What Medialyst has helped me uncover are the people at Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal who cover packaging, and the freelancers I can get on the radar of. Muck Rack just doesn't help with that. Now when I tell Claude 'here's the person,' it pulls them through Medialyst, onto my list there, and starts gathering information about them. I haven't gotten a bounced email yet. I'd rather send a smaller list I can defend. And I'm never afraid to share it with clients, because it has everything in there. It proves its worth. My first job, as an intern, was photocopying Bacon's books into an Excel database every year. So I'm acutely aware of how hard it is to keep track of all this. This is how I would approach it myself."

"As most of us in the PR business know, media database services can be expensive, cumbersome, and too often imperfect. We pay a premium for access to AI and out-of-the-box features. We still spend significant time verifying whether a journalist is still covering the same beat, whether contact information is current, whether a reporter is truly relevant to a story, and whether outreach is actually reaching the right person. And that is only one part of the problem. Media relations itself has become increasingly fragmented. Research happens in one place, list building in another, monitoring somewhere else, and outreach through email —with PR teams constantly stitching the workflow together manually. This can leave teams overwhelmed and unsure how efficient they are. At Trier and Company, we’re excited to endorse Medialyst because it is tackling that workflow from a different direction - with AI top of mind. It's 'pitch-driven' in real time with bona fide speaking points. It's an entirely new experience. … It’s time for a change — and Medialyst is building in exactly the right direction. We’re pleased to support the team - Elvis Sun and Carly Martinetti. Excited to see where they take it from here. Count us in!"

"This is awesome and I just want to say I LOVE Medialyst! It’s well into my workflow. Landed an AP and WashPo interview today for a newsjack for two different clients. Cut down HOURS of work and enabled me to move so quickly! What a great tool!"

Common questions about switching from Featured.
How much does Featured cost?
What is the best Featured alternative?
Is Featured.com worth it?
Featured vs Medialyst — what's the difference?
Does Featured help you find and pitch journalists directly?
Can I switch from Featured to Medialyst?
Stop waiting to get picked. Build your own list.
Paste a press release, your website URL, or a one-line description of your news. Medialyst finds reporters who actually cover it, scores them by fit, and checks every email before you get it.