The Bigger the Newsroom, the Worse Its Contact Data

The finding

At outlets with a single journalist, 20.0% of email addresses verify as deliverable. At outlets with 200 or more, that falls to 42.9%, while the share our checks couldn't confirm rises from 15.9% to 55.7%. Contact quality degrades as newsroom size increases, consistently, across every size band.

This is the opposite of what most people assume. Large organisations are supposed to have the reliable infrastructure.

The gradient

The break is sharp and sits between nine and ten. Below it, roughly four in five addresses verify cleanly. Above it, closer to three in five.

Why large newsrooms verify worse

Two mechanisms explain most of it, and neither means the address is wrong.

The first is turnover. Large newsrooms restructure, and staff move between titles within the same group. An address that was correct last quarter can point at a departed reporter this quarter while still technically accepting mail.

The second is infrastructure. Big media companies run aggressive spam filtering, catch-all domains and greylisting. A catch-all domain accepts everything, so verification cannot confirm the individual mailbox exists, and the check comes back unconfirmed whether the person is there or not. Small outlets on standard business mail hosting answer the question honestly.

So an address at a major title without a verified mark is often perfectly good. It is still a reason to expect a lower response rate, because some of those addresses genuinely are dead.

What to do about it

• Don't read a missing verified mark as invalid at large outlets. It often just means the server won't say.
• Verify large-outlet contacts closer to send, since they decay fastest.
• Lean on small and mid-size outlets for reliable delivery, and treat major titles as a targeted list.
• Expect a lower ceiling on any campaign weighted toward national newsrooms, and plan volume accordingly.

How to check this on your own list

The pattern is straightforward to verify against whatever data you already hold, and worth verifying before you act on it.

Group your contacts by their email domain, count how many contacts share each domain, and then compare bounce rates between the domains with one or two contacts and those with dozens. If your list resembles the wider industry, the large domains will bounce and soft-fail noticeably more often.

What you do with that depends on your sending setup. The important operational point is sequencing: if a campaign opens with a block of large-newsroom addresses, the early bounce rate is at its worst exactly when your sending reputation is most exposed, and mailbox providers weight recent behaviour heavily.

Leading with clean small-outlet contacts and mixing large newsrooms through the campaign spreads that risk. It costs nothing and it is the single cheapest deliverability improvement available to most PR teams.

Methodology

These figures come from the 38,872 published journalist records in the Media List database, spread across 10,639 news outlets, measured on 15 August 2026.

Only published records are counted — the ones a customer can actually reach. Deliverability states are supplied by third-party address verification and reflect the most recent check on each address. Outlet size means the number of journalists we hold at that outlet, which is a floor on its real newsroom headcount rather than an exact count.

You are welcome to cite these findings with attribution to Media List.

Source for the figures on this page: Media List media database statistics, which is generated from the live database and carries the date each figure was last read.

How this was measured, and when

Every figure on this page was re-run against the live database on October 20, 2026. The counts move as the database grows and as addresses are rechecked, so a figure here is a reading on a date rather than a fixed fact. When this study was first published the same set was smaller, which is why these percentages differ from the ones it originally carried. Each one is reproducible from the filters described above.

The numbers behind it

Confirmed deliverable rate by newsroom size, on the set described below. 1 journalist: 53.4 percent across 1,296 outlets, 2 to 4: 54.5 percent across 988 outlets, 5 to 9: 43.2 percent across 384 outlets, 10 to 24: 40.4 percent across 337 outlets, 25 or more: 41.8 percent across 257 outlets. The pattern holds above four journalists, where the rate falls from 54.5 percent to around 41.8 percent. Single journalist outlets sit mid table rather than at the top, which is the one part of the original finding the recheck softened.

The mechanism is not mystery. Large newsrooms rotate desks, publish role addresses that route to a queue, and lose people faster than a directory can follow. A small outlet has one address and it belongs to one person who has had it for years.