Our mission

We help people make the news

We exist to help PR teams make the news. We do this by providing the tools they need to get results.

We built MediaHQ’s PR software so we could give professionals more contacts, with more accuracy, in less time.

More about our values

Our Story

In 2006 we started MediaHQ with a simple idea

“To take the grunt work out of PR”

Back then public relations was an endless collection of tedious jobs: Data entry of hundreds of journalists' emails, fixing bounced emails, filing physical newspapers cuttings. How did we all do that?

Our founder Jack Murray had spent years working in busy political press office and media relations jobs. He felt the pain – he did the grunt work. He was determined to change how it was done. Everyday he felt like a swiss army knife – trying to get 10 things done at once. He wanted to make PR jobs simpler, faster and more purposeful. He imagined a day when all the time consuming toil was eliminated.

We started by taking over an established printed media directory – remember when media intelligence was done on dead trees? Pure mad. At the start it was a struggle and a very difficult way to enter the media contacts business. Sales were sluggish, at best, and we weren’t solving the problem. We were adding to it. People still had to data entry all the details.

The Epiphany

Then one day when it all seemed hopeless we got a call from a tech savvy customer who told us that he hated the book and implored us to start an online version. He promised he would be its first customer.

A light bulb went off.

Building great PR software

Going online and going digital was the obvious answer. An online service would make it easier to give PR and communications people much more contacts, and more depth. It would also be possible to make live changes, as a book was outdated the minute it was published.

It was at that point we realised what the true mission of the business was. It wasn’t selling books, it was something much more important – it was to help people to make the news.

We decided to dedicate all of the work of MediaHQ to this simple mission:

“Make the News.”

We also decided that the only way to achieve this was by continually disrupting the PR industry by delivering innovative software to solve nagging and persistent problems like:

Making journalists easy to find.

Reducing how long it takes to build a media list from hours to just minutes.
Giving PR access to the largest ever collection of journalists, media outlets, newspapers, broadcasters, and online news than they ever had access to before with game changing PR software.
Fixing the nagging email bounces when they occur so that they don’t keep building up.
Giving PR people access to their email lists from anywhere.
Delivering up to date research on contacts. Live – not in a static book.

The first prototype of MediaHQ.com software was produced in February 2009. Very soon after launching the revenues started to outstrip the book – after six months it was the company’s largest earner.

Our Ethos

We believe in helping people and the power of conversation

Above all, we love the media – it’s essential to know how the world works. Sure, the media keeps changing, but that’s part of the joy of it. It’s our job to reflect those changes and communicate them to our users.

Even after all this time, it feels like our journey is only starting. We have spent the last year using our experience to build some of the most dynamic software in the PR industry.

We are obsessed with eliminating headaches and making journalists easy to find. Our media contacts database now has media intelligence on every journalist working in the UK and Ireland with almost 60,000+ individual profiles.

Our simple search function is unrivalled in the market with the ability to find the right journalist for your story and build a media list in seconds.