Google has recently added the ability to search news by a journalist’s byline, which could help the savvy PR practitioner improve on his/her message strategy and media relations.

It can be embarrassing to call a reporter about your client’s great new service and find out they covered a similar story in the past week. Not to mention the eye roll you can feel coming over the phone connection as the reporter tells you, “been there, done that.”

Rather than getting caught for not having done your research, you now can search a month’s worth of any journalist’s articles. Doing so enables a savvy PR executive  to craft a story pitch to his/her target reporter – the way it’s supposed to be done.

The takeaway: you’re giving a great story a better chance of seeing the light of day and you’re not annoying a reporter you may need to work with in the future for having wasted his/her time.

In the past, you could research byline history with Google, but now reporters are hyperlinked to each news hit, allowing you to point and click to follow a particular reporter’s published history. You can also type author:”INSERT REPORTER NAME HERE” into your Google News search window to find articles bylined by the same journalist.

Now that you have this handy tool at your disposal, there’s no excuse for pitching the same story that appeared on the 5 o’clock news yesterday.

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