Say you handle PR for a fintech app, and you want your founder mentioned in the finance newsletters your buyers actually open. You open the media database your team pays for, and it is a wall of reporters and outlets, newspapers, trade magazines, TV, radio, sorted by beat. You go looking for newsletters and they are hard to find, filed in with blogs or missing.
Plenty of PR teams pitch newsletters. In Muck Rack's State of PR 2025, 39% of PR pros said they pitch newsletters, more than said they pitch radio. The tools they reach for still center on journalists and traditional outlets.
We build Reletter for the newsletter side of this, so we went through the major PR databases and journalist-request services to see how each one handles newsletters. Most of them barely do.
Key takeaways
- 39% of PR pros pitch newsletters, ahead of the 35% who pitch radio, per Muck Rack's State of PR 2025.
- The big PR databases (Muck Rack, Cision, ResponseSource, Prowly) are built around traditional press outlets, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, sorted by journalist and beat.
- Newsletters get lumped into "blog, website, or other" or left off the media-type list, even writers with tens of thousands of engaged subscribers.
- Muck Rack does list newsletter authors, but as contacts in a journalist database, with no way to filter on subscriber count, engagement or cadence.
- Picking newsletters worth pitching needs newsletter data a press database doesn't hold, like subscriber estimates, engagement and publishing cadence.
- Reletter is built for that job, searching ~7 million newsletters across Substack, LinkedIn, Ghost, beehiiv and Kit, filtering on engagement and cadence, and getting the writer's contact.
Table of Contents
- Key takeaways
- Newsletters are earned media, and PR teams already pitch them
- PR databases are built for the newsroom
- Newsletters get filed under "blog, website, or other"
- Why a contact in a journalist database isn't the same job
- What a tool built for newsletters looks like
- Where the traditional databases still fit
- Final thoughts
Newsletters are earned media, and PR teams already pitch them
In Muck Rack's survey, newsletters sat between podcasts at 54% and radio at 35% on the list of channels PR pros commonly pitch. A mention in the right industry newsletter reaches the inboxes of a few thousand people who chose to hear from that writer, which is a warmer audience than most paid placements reach.
Newsletter issues also get archived as clean, quotable text, and that text is what AI assistants pull from when they answer a question about your category. So a mention can keep earning you AI citations months after the issue runs.
PR databases are built for the newsroom
Muck Rack and Cision, the two biggest, are journalist databases first. You search reporters and outlets across print, broadcast and online, and filter by newspaper, magazine, TV and radio. ResponseSource, the long-running UK enquiry service, sorts requests by national newspaper, regional newspaper, trade, consumer, radio and television. The whole model is the press list a PR team would have kept in a spreadsheet twenty years ago, now searchable.
Podcasts show these tools can add a channel when they want to. Most of them built a dedicated podcast category, and there is a whole database just for podcasts, our sister product Rephonic. Newsletters never got the same treatment, even though they reach just as engaged an audience.
Newsletters get filed under "blog, website, or other"
Where the databases do acknowledge newsletters, they file them next to blogs and generic websites. SourceBottle lumps them into one contributor bucket, "blogs, newsletters, and websites," so a writer with 40,000 engaged subscribers sits next to somebody's hobby blog. ResponseSource has no newsletter media type at all, so a newsletter falls under "branded media" or "blog." Prowly's media-type filter offers blog, newspaper, radio and TV, and stops there. Cision names print, online and broadcast in its filters and does not name newsletters.
Muck Rack is the exception. It added newsletter authors back in 2021, so you can find a Substack writer and drop them into a media list. But they sit there as a contact, sorted by beat and outlet like any reporter. Nothing lets you filter by subscriber count, engagement, or how often the newsletter actually goes out.
Why a contact in a journalist database isn't the same job
Pull up a newsletter writer in one of these databases and you get the same card a reporter gets, a name, an outlet, a beat, an email. What you want from each is different. With a journalist you are angling to be quoted in something they write. A newsletter pitch aims somewhere else, into the issue itself, as a recommended tool, a curated link, a short write-up or a guest slot that reaches the reader directly.
To judge whether a newsletter is worth that pitch, you need things the card doesn't carry:
- how many people actually subscribe
- whether they open and click, or signed up once and drifted
- how often it publishes, and whether it runs recommendations at all
A press database was never built to hold any of that. So the newsletter writer sits in the system as a name and an email, and judging the newsletter is left to you.
What a tool built for newsletters looks like
This is the job we built Reletter to do, so treat the next few lines as us describing our own tool. You search across roughly 7 million newsletters on Substack, LinkedIn, Ghost, beehiiv and Kit by topic, then filter the way you would sort any outlet, by how active a newsletter is, its engagement, its subscriber range, how often it publishes, and platform. Open any newsletter and you get a page with the subscriber estimate, a monthly-visits proxy, an engagement score, its chart rankings, and the contact details. You build a list, read a couple of recent issues to check the fit, and export the list with emails when you are ready to pitch.
Imagine you are the fintech PR lead from the top. You search "personal finance," set the Active and Engagement filters so you only see newsletters that publish and get read, and open the strongest few. One has 8,000 subscribers and a high engagement score. Another has 60,000 and almost no comments or clicks. The small, engaged one is often the better pitch, and you would never tell them apart from a name in a press database. You add six to a list, skim their last two issues, and send.
None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary work of a media database, done for newsletters.
Where the traditional databases still fit
None of this makes Muck Rack or Cision bad tools. They are built for broad media relations across newspapers, magazines, TV and online, and if that is your job they do it well, with newsletter authors included as a bonus. Best for: teams pitching journalists across the traditional press from one platform. The request services, Connectively, Source of Sources and ResponseSource, work a different way, where a reporter posts a request and you answer it. Best for: earning quotes and links by responding to journalists on deadline.
Reletter does a narrower, deeper job. It only does newsletters, with the subscriber, engagement and cadence data you need to tell a live newsletter from a dead one, plus the writer's direct contact. It won't replace a press database, and it won't book the placement for you. It gets you to the writer with what you need to pitch.
Final thoughts
Media databases still center on journalists and the traditional outlets, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. Newsletters have turned into a real channel, pitched by 39% of PR pros, and most of these tools still file them under "blog" or leave them off.
Reletter is the most complete way to find the newsletters worth pitching and reach the writers behind them, across Substack, LinkedIn, Ghost, beehiiv and Kit. Want to find the newsletters your buyers read, and the writer to pitch for each one?
Start your 7-day free trial and build your first newsletter pitch list before your next campaign kicks off.
About the Author
James Potter started Reletter to make the world's email newsletters as searchable as any other media type. It now indexes around 7 million newsletters across Substack, LinkedIn, Ghost, beehiiv and Kit, and PR teams use those numbers to find the right writers and pitch to get featured.