Press Pass is a beta interactive directory of journalists organized by the beats they work on, the regions they cover, and the media organizations they work for. The site aims to help people – from local businesses launching new products and services to citizens with newsworthy photos – reach journalists who may be interested in their story. Using Twitter, Press Pass has identified more than 5000 journalists from over 250 media organizations, and is tracking tens of thousands of tweets per month, with each tweet continuing to build and refresh the directory.

Press Pass is a self-funded startup based in Dubai, founded by David Haddad (@daveying99) and co-founded by Valencio Cardoso (@valenciocardoso), both of whom are enthusiasts of participatory communication via technology. Innovation 360 recently spoke with Mr. Cardoso about the inspiration behind the website.

How did you come up with the idea for Press Pass?

Valencio Cardoso

It’s not so much how we came up with the idea, but how we validated the idea. We follow the lean startup concept developed by Eric Ries (@theleanstartup), which is based around the idea that in order to not waste time and build something your customers really want, you should build a minimum viable product, get feedback from your users, iterate the platform based on that feedback, and then repeat the process over and over again.

The main idea that David and I wanted to focus on was creating a place where regular people could develop relationships with journalists. So we came up with a few different concepts that revolved around that idea, developed mockups for each and solicited feedback from our target audience (journalists, people in PR, small business entrepreneurs, etc.). One of the things we learned is that regular people have a hard time finding the right journalists in an efficient manner, and that process was taking up a lot of their time – there was no one location to find the journalist who would be relevant to their story.

On the flip side, journalists were receiving a lot of stories that were irrelevant to the beats they were covering, and this was becoming a real time-waster for them. So it became clear that be most obvious way to enter the space first would be to first create an organized directory of journalists. [Read more...]