PR practitioners are always looking to get in front of relevant journalists. What better way can there be than to target media placements where beat reporters are most likely to see them? According to a recent survey of over 2,000 journalists conducted by Bulldog Reporter, your best bet is online.  

The ability to access corporate news and contact information online 24 hours a day was cited as the biggest change in the last year. Nearly half of all journalists report visiting a corporate website or online newsroom at least once a week, while almost 87 percent visit at least once a month. 

More than 37 percent of journalists report general agreement with the statement that "I cannot easily find information I need on corporate websites," showing that more work needs to be done to eliminate confusion. 

An overwhelming majority of journalists-74.8 percent - prefer to receive information about corporate, not-for-profit and government news by email. Commercial newswires were a distant second choice, with only 8.1percent of respondents indicating that preference. 

More journalists this year indicated that they prefer to receive targeted emails from a corporate online newsroom (7.3%) compared with last year (4.5%), indicating a preference for information targeted to them, as opposed to "shot-gunned" messages. 

Social networking sites also receive a lot of attention. Today, more than three-fourths of journalists use social media to research stories, compared with about 67percent last year. Almost 38 percent of journalists now say they visit a social media site at least once a week as part of their reporting, compared with only 28 percent last year. 

A large majority (76.4%) of journalists report that they use local newspapers to follow news, while nearly 63 percent check the New York Times, 51percent run through Google News, and about 32 percent employ Yahoo! News to stay abreast. There was a small increase in the use of "push" technology, with nearly 19 percent of journalists reporting that they receive five or more RSS feeds of news services, blogs, podcasts or videocasts every week. This was only a gain of about three percentage points over last year, and a total of about 41percent receive at least one regular RSS feed, a gain of over four percentage points. 

PR professionals may do well to recognize that nearly all journalists generally believe PR people don't understand their media or the subjects they cover. Indeed, almost 50 percent of journalists generally believe that PR professionals do not "understand which subjects I cover," and 46 percent generally agree that PR pros are not sufficiently familiar with their media outlets, both indicators holding strong compared with last year. It would behoove PR executives to do more basic research on their media contacts before pitching or providing materials.