35.9% of Journalist Records Include a Phone Number. Almost Nobody Uses Them

The finding

35.9% of the 38,872 journalist records in our database carry a phone number, and 49.2% carry a LinkedIn profile. Nearly every PR campaign uses exactly one of the three available channels, and it is the one with the most competition.

What is actually available

Email is also the channel where deliverability is weakest at exactly the outlets people most want to reach — 42.9% at newsrooms of 200 or more. The alternative channels do not have that problem.

How to use the other two without being a nuisance

Calling a journalist has a poor reputation, and it is deserved when the call is a pitch. Cold-calling to read out a press release wastes their time and ends the relationship in about eleven seconds.

It works in one narrow case: when they are already working on something and you have the thing they need — a source who can speak today, a figure nobody else will give them. That is a service call, not a pitch call, and it lands very differently.

LinkedIn is lower risk and works better as a slow channel. Following a journalist and responding usefully to what they publish, over weeks, means your name is not cold when the email eventually arrives. It also shows whether they still work where your list says they do — which matters given that a third of addresses cannot be verified.

What to do about it

• Reserve the phone for time-critical offers, never for reading out an announcement.
• Use LinkedIn to check the contact is current before a large send.
• Warm the top of your list on LinkedIn before you email it.
• Do not use all three at once on the same person in the same week. That is not multi-channel, it is pressure.

What a usable contact block looks like

Most contact blocks fail in one of three predictable ways, and all three are visible at a glance.

The first is the anonymous block: a department name and a shared inbox, with no individual named. It answers the form field without answering the reporter's question, which is who picks up.

The second is the agency-only block, listing the PR firm but nobody at the company. This works when the agency genuinely has authority to comment and fails badly when it becomes a relay, adding a day to every question at exactly the moment a day is not available.

The third is the stale block, naming somebody who left. Nothing bounces, because the address usually still accepts mail, and nobody discovers the problem until an opportunity has already passed.

A working block names one person, gives their direct line and their direct address, states their role, and includes a second name for when the first is unreachable. It takes four lines and it is the highest-leverage part of the document.

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.

Why the field stays mostly unused

Every record on this set has an email address, 49.2 percent carry a LinkedIn profile and 35.9 percent carry a phone number, so the phone field is there on about a third of them. It stays unused because the people it belongs to have said what they prefer. In the 2025 State of the Media survey of more than 3,000 journalists, 85 percent said an email introduction is the best way to build a relationship. A cold call interrupts someone on a deadline and leaves nothing behind to forward to an editor.

The number earns its place in two situations. One is a story that is genuinely breaking, where a reporter you already know would rather hear it now. The other is a correction. Neither is a first contact.