Building Curated Media Lists
and Targeted Pitching Using AI
A 90-minute working session for PR professionals. Build a verified media list for holiday and affiliate guides, and leave with the tool set up in your own account.
Media lists rot quietly.
An editor gets laid off and the outlet leaves her author page up. A gift guide from last November gets refreshed with new products and a new date, so it looks current, but the person who wrote it left in February. An email address that follows the same pattern as five others turns out to be the only one of the six that was ever published anywhere.
You find out when the pitch bounces.
AI makes this worse before it makes it better. Ask ChatGPT or Claude for a list of commerce editors and you’ll get one. It will look right. It will contain editors who moved a year ago, addresses nobody ever published, and no dates on anything. Nothing in the output tells you which parts to trust.
This session fixes that, and you leave with the fix installed.
- Learn the two settings and the one phrasing change that separate a four-minute answer from a genuinely useful one. This applies to everything you do with AI, not just media lists.
- Build a verified media list for holiday and affiliate guides, where every editor is checked against their live page and every claim carries a link
- Clean up an outdated list: what’s still good, what moved, what’s dead, and what can’t be confirmed either way
- Find the right editor for each initiative, including the guides that run as “editors’ picks” with no named byline, where you’re pitching a desk rather than a person
- Read an editor’s recent published work to shape a simple, specific pitch instead of a generic one
- Set the whole thing up in your own account, during class, so it’s yours when you log off
A working research tool installed in your Claude account, plus a second, simpler skill that drafts pitches in your voice, which we build together from scratch so you can see exactly how these are made. A starter outlet file and a one-page field guide.
Not homework. Not a demo. Not a follow-up purchase.
A Claude Pro account ($20/month). We’ll work primarily in Claude because it handles this particular job best, and I’ll show you how the same moves translate to ChatGPT if that’s where you live. You’ll also set up one free research connector during class. No credit card for it, no coding.
Affiliate and gift guide placements work differently from editorial. Commerce editors are assigned guide lists, not responding to story angles, and affiliate managers swap products in and out of old roundups based on click performance. This session treats those as separate problems, because they are.
Joe Sadler.
Designer. Director. Operator.
Joe Sadler has spent twenty years as a creative director. GQ named him Best New Menswear Designer, his work was carried at Dover Street Market and Bergdorf Goodman, and he has led campaigns for Fender, Headspace, Gray Whale Gin, and Cuyana.
He founded The ii Agency, and he led AI implementation for a 200-person organization across fourteen campuses. He teaches this the way he uses it, on real work.
Two hundred people.
Almost none of them technical.
I led AI implementation for a 200-person organization across fourteen campuses. Communications staff, creative teams, executive leadership. People with full calendars who needed this to work on Monday, not in theory.
We handed Joe a 200-person organization and asked him to change the way it works. He trained our staff, our creative teams, and our executive leadership, and he did it without losing what makes us who we are. I would put him in front of any organization in the country.
Dan Zimbardi · Executive Pastor · Sandals Church
Early-bird code expires August 8
Recording available to all registrants
Enter EARLY30 at checkout to take $30 off, through August 8.
Take a seat.
Submit your questions when you register. I’ll cover as many as I can, and the ones I can’t will shape the follow-up.
You’ll be asked one question at checkout so I can shape the session around what you’re actually stuck on.
Use code EARLY30 at checkout for $30 off, through August 8.
You will be taken to a secure payment page to finish.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026 · 10:00 AM PT · 90 Minutes
Register · $129 →Use code EARLY30 at checkout for $30 off, through August 8.