Media Lists as Free Lunch

I'm not going to talk about food in this post, though I'm pretty hungry so that could explain why I find the "Free Lunch" portion of the title so provocative. No, I'm going to talk about an idea whose business model is so bad, so seemingly flawed as to reduce a Harvard Business School professor to tears, that only someone who's used to connecting with people for free over Twitter, Facebook, etc. could think it interesting: a free media list for nascent nonprofits.

Note: different places may call them different things, but where I work, "media lists" are lists of reporters who write articles relevant to the work our nonprofit does. They are the ones we send press releases to. I just use "media lists" as a shorthand for email distribution lists of germane reporters.

I know what you're going to say: we live in a capitalist society and everyone (as this PC World article notes re: the brain trust at Twitter) expects some sort of return on investment. But aren't nonprofits supposed to be just that: not particularly obsessed with making tons of money? A simple Google search for "free media lists for nonprofits" yields zero relevant hits. I get it. Who wants to spend tons of time compiling media lists only to just turn them over to the dark void of the intertubes without any compensation?

It's a tough one. Maybe you could tie advertising in with it somehow? I'll have to get my Old Man Potter on and try to figure it out. But here's a case in point: I'm volunteering to be the media relations manager for a brand new nonprofit called First(,) Aid Water. They will be placing water filters in developing nations in order to bring clean water to populations who wouldn't otherwise have it. Since they're new, they don't have much moolah to spend (i.e. they'll not be subscribing to any news distribution outlets). How nice would it be, then, to hop online and find a ready-made media list of reporters chomping at the bit to cover emerging nonprofits?

I don't want to sound lazy, because I'm happy to do the legwork (I'm not into just spamming a couple of hundred reporters so that one or two will give me a blurb). It's just that, with reporters' jobs being about as secure as a glass-blowing studio on the San Andreas fault, it would be nice to have someone updating reporters' contact info and keeping track of what beats they're working in their new gigs. Heck, maybe reporters would even pay for this service, especially with so many of them freelancing it these days.

Obviously this is a dream, but one that would save a lot of nonprofit PR folks a lot of headaches. Maybe there is some permutation of this idea in existence, but if so, I haven't found it. As Tavis Smiley always says, I need to "keep the faith."