“Hey Press is a search engine for people instead of webpages”, is how hey.press co-founder Ed Moyse explained it via Skype.

I’m impressed by this new service that allows you to find the name of journalists to pitch to in seconds. Just type in the search bar.

It works at the speed and ease of Google, with the same logic that we used to build the Expertise Finder Network for journalists to find experts.

Solving a Problem

I spoke with hey.press co-founder Ed Moyse who was in London.

It started out to solve a problem they were having. They wanted to find a journalist at TechCrunch to pitch about a new iOS 8 keyboard they had developed.

“We ended up getting featured in TechCrunch, and we thought perhaps we should spend more time building out the tool we’d made so others could use it.”

Ed went into some detail about the thinking behind the tool.

Google News brings up recent articles, but doesn’t tell you who writes the most about specific things like iOS 8 keyboards. Just because a journalist has written one story does that mean they write about this frequently? Maybe there’s a more appropriate journalist to contact if you have this greater information.

For those interested in a bit more of how it works in the back-end, they index articles that journalists have written then match these articles with the journalists who wrote them. As newer articles are more relevant than old ones they factor this into the results.

In just a few months they launched this new product. It shot up to number three on Product Hunt one day. (Product Hunt is the new leader in learning about new tools online). Their single largest group of users are tech startups.

The same company has also developed Journo Requests, a daily email alerts on what expert requests journalists post on Twitter.

Reach out to Ed at @edmoyse or email him at ed |a| journorequests.com.