Is this the beginning of the end of the media database?

Years ago, PR people knew the journalists that they needed to write about their clients. Then we saw massive proliferation of media that meant that there was no real way any PRO could possibly know all the journalists they needed to. (Clearly most PROs still have good media contacts, I’m not suggesting otherwise, but you see my point.) And so, the media database was born. And to start with it worked pretty well. PROs built endless lists of sector specific journalists. En masse PR companies and in-house teams signed up to the media database providers, who made lots of money. However, gradually, things started going, not wrong, but a bit grubby. First of all, because so many PR professionals signed up to media databases and the making of huge journalist lists became so easy, journalists started to be spammed. So PROs were creating a big stick for journalists to bang PR people with. The next thing that happened was that the reputation for the accuracy of many of these media databases suffered. The reason for this is that they would rely on accurate and constant data capture of journalist contact details. And the resources and effort it took the media database companies to retain a decent database became huge. Some companies managed this process better than others. And then there was Twitter.  Many journalists are more responsive to a Tweet than an email. And because Twitter is in the public domain, if a PR spams a journo on Twitter, it’s obvious. So they don’t do it. It seems to me that the days of the email media database, at least as the de facto PR tool, are numbered. Which leads us to their replacement. And there are some interesting products that have come out recently. For example, Precise and Real Wire have launched TweetComms and Lissted respectively. Both of these products enable PR professionals to monitor by sector what journalists are talking about on Twitter and then engage. But because Twitter is in the public domain, I would have thought that engagement is more personal and more intelligent and less one size fits all. I should add that although I have been lucky enough to see both these products work, I haven’t actually used them (because I write about PR, I’m not a PRO). But I’d argue it’s an interesting shift in the world of media relations and one that is probably overdue.