Gorkana is a comprehensive database of journalist contact details. For us, as a PR agency, it’s therefore a vital tool in our day-to-day work.
Whether you ought to pay for a subscription to Gorkana depends on how you intend to use the service.
If you’re intending to handle all your proactive PR initiatives in-house, we’d recommend focusing developing relationships with a relatively small number of journalists. You probably won’t have the bandwidth or resources to properly engage with more than 10 or 15.
Is PR necessary?
With this in mind, a subscription to Gorkana will probably prove an unnecessary expense for most startups.
However, if you are planning on running multiple in-house PR campaigns, across multiple media types, Gorkana can make the task of identifying the right journalist to target significantly more efficient.
A word of warning though – media databases like Gorkana should never be used to effectively indiscriminately spam the press with your news and announcements. This won’t win you any friends, and will serve only to alienate journalists.