The Bigger the Newsroom, the Worse Its Contact Data

The finding

At outlets with a single journalist, 78.1% of email addresses verify as deliverable. At outlets with 200 or more, that falls to 56.0%, while the share flagged risky rises from 15.9% to 43.9%. 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 — that produces a risky flag whether the person is there or not. Small outlets on standard business mail hosting answer the question honestly.

So risky at a major title often means unverifiable rather than dead. It is still a reason to expect a lower response rate, because some of those addresses genuinely are dead.

What to do about it

• Do not read risky as invalid at large outlets — read it as unconfirmed.
• 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 29,083 published journalist records in the Media List database, spread across 2,993 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.