Agent AGT.001 Running in production, on our own outreach first Multi-tenant EU data residency

An autonomous
press desk.

It finds the journalists who would actually write about you — staff correspondents and the freelance layer most media databases miss — reads what each of them has published, and writes them one email about one angle they specifically would run. Then it sends it, watches what comes back, and writes the next one knowing what the last one did.

Last reviewed 7 September 2026 · Engineering guidance, not legal advice.

WHY THIS EXISTS

Coverage is the one thing
you cannot buy a shortcut to.

Every other channel has a price list. You can buy the ad, the placement, the sponsored post and the directory listing, and so can the company competing with you — which is precisely why none of it moves anything permanently. A journalist choosing to write about you is different in kind. It cannot be bought at the same counter, it carries the publication's own credibility rather than yours, and the link inside the article is the single hardest asset in the whole discipline to acquire.

The reason most companies never get it is not that their story is bad. It is that press outreach is a research job disguised as an email job. Doing it properly means knowing which of tens of thousands of working journalists covers your exact subject, reading enough of their recent work to know the angle they would take, noticing that they already covered your idea six weeks ago, and writing them something that is unmistakably for them. Do that for four hundred journalists and it is a full-time role. Do it for four thousand and it is a department nobody has.

So the industry does the other thing. It buys a media list that was accurate last year, writes one press release, and sends it to everybody on it. Journalists receive that by the hundred every day and have become extremely good at deleting it. The reply rate is a rounding error, and the conclusion drawn is usually that press does not work — when what did not work was the mail merge.

An autonomous press desk is that research job, automated properly. Not the sending — the sending was never the hard part.

AT A GLANCE

WHAT IT IS: An autonomous agent that runs press outreach end to end — discovery, qualification, research, writing, sending and learning.
WHAT IT IS FOR: Earned editorial coverage, and the links, authority and citation that follow from it.
WHO IT WRITES TO: Journalists who have published a contact address for pitches — staff and freelance, across national, business, broadcast and trade desks.
WHAT IT WILL NOT DO: Promise coverage, pay for placement, or write to an address a journalist never published.
STATUS: Running in production, on our own outreach first. Available as a managed engagement.

THE PIPELINE

ONE RUN, END TO END

Discover

live bylines, worldwide
Qualify

beat · recency · reachable
Research

reads their recent work
Write

one pitch, one person
Send

warmed domains · throttled
Learn

replies grade the next run

Solid: the run path Learn feeds the next run's writing

Every stage is logged per run, so any email that went out can be traced back to the journalist research that produced it.

DISCOVER

It reads the byline, not a bought list

The press desk works from published journalism. It follows bylines across national desks, broadcast, trade press and the long tail of specialist outlets, and it keeps going — a list bought once is wrong within a quarter, because journalists move, change beat and go freelance. The freelance layer is the part it is unusually good at: the writers who file for four different mastheads and appear on nobody's media database.
QUALIFY

Beat, recency, and whether they take pitches at all

A name is not a target. It scores each writer on whether they actually cover your subject, how recently they filed on it, whether they have already covered the exact thing you were going to pitch, and whether they publish a contact address for pitches. Anyone who does not clear that gate is not written to.
RESEARCH

It reads their work before it writes to them

For each qualified writer the agent reads their recent pieces and builds a short dossier: the angles they take, the sources they favour, the framing they reach for, and what they have visibly declined to cover. That dossier is the input to the email — not a merge field, not a first name in a template.
WRITE

One email, one journalist, one angle

The output is a pitch written for one person about one story that person would plausibly run. It leads with the angle rather than the company, it is short, and it says why this writer and not another. That last part is the difference between a pitch and a press release, and it is the part that cannot be templated.
SEND

Sending is engineering, not a mail merge

Domains warmed, volume throttled per inbox, timing set against the desk's own rhythm, and no two emails sharing a fingerprint. Every send carries an opt-out that is honoured permanently and immediately. A pitch that lands in spam is not a pitch.
LEARN

Every reply is evidence

Replies, forwards, requests for more, polite declines and silence all come back into the loop. We read them ourselves rather than trusting a dashboard, and we grade the agent on real outcomes. Each round of training is scored against the last, and we keep the version that wins.

WHY COVERAGE COMPOUNDS

One article. Then the
link. Then the answer.

A placement does three things at once, and only the first is the one people talk about.

It is read. Somebody in your market sees your name in a context where the publication, not you, is vouching for the claim. That is the part a press release was always trying to buy and could not.

It leaves a link. An editorial link inside a real article, from a domain that has spent decades earning trust, is the highest-quality signal in search — and the one a competitor cannot buy from the same place at any price. Link-building agencies exist entirely to fake this. Coverage produces the genuine article as a by-product.

It teaches the machines who you are. This is the part that changed recently and that most of the industry has not adjusted to. Published journalism is disproportionately represented in what language models were trained on, and it is what they reach for when they retrieve sources to answer a question now. When somebody asks an assistant who the serious companies in your field are, the answer is assembled largely from what has been written about you — not from what you wrote about yourself. Your own website makes claims. An article is evidence.

So the second and third effects keep working long after the article stops being read. That is what makes earned coverage the compounding asset in a marketing stack where almost nothing else compounds: the ad stops the day you stop paying, and the article is still there in three years, still linking, still being cited.

This exists because that asset was previously gated behind a retainer and a person's rolodex. It is the same job, running every day, for the cost of a system rather than a department.

Mechanism, not a promise. We are describing why coverage is worth pursuing, not attaching a figure to what it will do for you — that figure would depend on your sector, your story and your starting authority, and anyone quoting you one before a campaign has run is guessing.

THE CHAIN

EFFECT 01

Reach

Your market reads about you somewhere that is not your own site, framed by someone with no stake in flattering you.

EFFECT 02

Authority

The editorial link. Search engines have spent twenty years learning to trust exactly this kind, and exactly this kind is the one that cannot be bought.

EFFECT 03

Citation

You become part of what a model retrieves when someone asks it a question about your field. Being written about is how you get named in the answer.

EFFECT 04

Permanence

It does not stop when the budget does. That is the whole difference between earned and paid.

WHO IT WRITES TO

Every desk that covers
your subject. Including
the ones no list has.

The press desk does not work from a fixed universe of outlets. It works from published bylines, which means its reach is whatever the world's journalists are currently writing — the national masthead and the eight-hundred-subscriber trade title alike, in whatever language and whatever market the story belongs to.

DESK.01

National press

The daily and weekly desks — the mastheads a board recognises without being told why they matter.

DESK.02

Business and finance

Where a funding round, a hire or a number becomes a story rather than an announcement.

DESK.03

Broadcast and network news

Producers and correspondents, who want a person who can talk rather than a paragraph.

DESK.04

Technology and trade

The narrower titles that a buyer in your sector actually reads, and that rank for the terms you want.

DESK.05

Freelance correspondents

The writers filing across several of the above at once. The highest-yield group, and the one a bought media list is worst at.

EXAMPLES OF THE KIND OF DESK — NOT A LIST OF PLACEMENTS

The Times · Forbes · NBC News · Reuters · The Guardian · Bloomberg · Wired · TechCrunch · Financial Times · El País · Handelsblatt · Le Monde · Sifted · and the several thousand trade and specialist titles that never appear on a slide like this one.

Read that as the universe the agent works, and nothing else. Naming a publication here is not a claim that we have appeared in it. When a placement lands it goes in the section below, with a headline, a date and a link you can open — and until there is one, that section renders nothing at all.

BUILT FOR MORE THAN ONE COMPANY

One system. Separate
everything that should be.

Multi-tenancy in an outreach system is not a scaling feature, it is a safety feature. Two clients receiving the same target list, or sharing a sending reputation, is how one campaign quietly ruins another. This was built with that separation from the first version rather than retrofitted when a second client arrived.

TEN.01

Separate lists

Each company gets its own qualified list, built against its own subject. Two clients in one sector never receive the same target set, and a journalist is never pitched twice in a window by two of our senders.

TEN.02

Separate identities

Its own sending domains, its own from-address, its own voice. Nothing about an outbound pitch says it came from a shared system.

TEN.03

Separate sending

Volume, cadence and warming are per identity, so one company's campaign cannot affect another's deliverability.

TEN.04

One suppression list

The single thing deliberately shared. A journalist who opts out is out everywhere, immediately.

HOW IT STAYS LAWFUL

It writes to people who
published an address
asking to be written to.

That sentence is the whole compliance posture, and it is also the whole quality posture — the two turn out to be the same rule. A journalist who publishes a pitch address on their masthead page or in their own bio is inviting pitches. That invitation is what makes contacting them lawful on a legitimate-interest basis, and it is also what makes them worth contacting. An address guessed from a name-and-domain pattern fails both tests at once.

So it does not guess addresses, does not buy scraped consumer data, and does not enrich a journalist's record with anything from their personal life. It holds byline, outlet, beat, published work and the published contact address, because that is what writing a relevant pitch requires and nothing further is needed.

Unsolicited commercial email is governed country by country under the ePrivacy rules as well as by the GDPR — Article 21 of Spain's LSSI, PECR in the UK, CAN-SPAM in the United States. Press contact on a legitimate-interest basis is the well-trodden path through those, but the basis is yours to hold as the data controller, so your counsel should confirm it before the first send. We will give them the balancing test and the processing description they need to do that.

THE RULES IT OPERATES UNDER

Who is written to: Professional contact addresses that the journalist has published for exactly this purpose — a masthead pitch address, a contact line on their own site, an address in their bio. No personal addresses, no guessed patterns, no addresses inferred from a name and a domain.
The lawful basis: Legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) — the recognised basis for business-to-business press contact — with a balancing test recorded per campaign rather than assumed. A journalist who publishes a pitch address has a reasonable expectation of receiving pitches; one who has not, has not, and is not contacted.
Opt-out: Every message carries one, it is honoured permanently and across every company the system sends for, and it takes effect before the next send rather than at the end of a cycle. Suppression is global, not per-client.
Data minimisation: What is held is what is needed to write a relevant pitch: byline, outlet, beat, published work, published contact address. No enrichment sweeps, no personal data scraped from social profiles, and a retention window rather than an archive kept forever.
Where it runs: EU data residency by default, which is the same default the rest of our infrastructure work carries.

DESIGN TARGETS

EMAILS TO AN UNPUBLISHED ADDRESS

JOURNALIST PER EMAIL WRITTEN

100%

SENDS TRACEABLE TO THEIR RESEARCH

SUPPRESSION LIST ACROSS ALL TENANTS

Properties we design and build to, not measured client outcomes. Figures from real campaigns appear in the MEASURED section above, with a date and a method, once there are campaigns whose figures we can publish.

THE BOUNDARY

WHAT IT DOES NOT PROMISE

The press desk does not guarantee coverage, and no honest system can: a journalist decides what to write. What it changes is how many of the right journalists see a pitch that was worth their attention, and how consistently that happens without a person doing it by hand. It does not write the story, it does not place the story, and it does not pay for placement — a paid link is not what this is for and would defeat the point of it.

Every page in this portfolio carries one of these. The claim a page refuses to make is the reason to believe the ones it does — see our work.

WHAT IT RUNS ON

Agent runtime

Multi-step tool use
Scheduled autonomous runs
Per-run trace log

Research

Live web retrieval
Published-work corpus
Per-journalist dossier store

Delivery

Per-tenant sending identities
Domain warming
Global suppression list

Chosen for this agent. Model selection is per task and reviewed as the families move — see /technology/models.

QUESTIONS

QUESTIONS — 7

It runs the outreach half of a press campaign without a person driving it. It finds journalists whose beat matches what you do, researches each one against their own published work, writes them an individual pitch, sends it under your own identity, and learns from what comes back. You set the subject and approve the angle; it does the rest continuously rather than in bursts when someone has time.

An editorial link inside a real article is the one link a competitor cannot buy from the same place, and it is the kind search engines have spent twenty years learning to trust. There is a second effect now: the same publications are heavily represented in what language models were trained on and what they retrieve when answering. Being written about is increasingly how you get named in an answer rather than a results page. We would rather state that as the mechanism than attach a number to it we could not defend.

No, and be careful with anyone who does. A journalist decides what to write, and the honest answer is that most pitches are declined — that is true of the best human PR teams too. What it changes is the number of well-matched journalists who see a pitch worth reading, and the consistency of that happening every week rather than when someone gets round to it.

It is built to be. The press desk writes only to professional contact addresses that journalists have published for pitches, on a legitimate-interest basis under Article 6(1)(f) with a balancing test recorded per campaign, with an opt-out on every message that is honoured permanently and across every company the system sends for. Data held is minimised to what a relevant pitch needs, and it runs with EU data residency. Unsolicited commercial email is also governed by ePrivacy rules implemented country by country, so your counsel should confirm the basis before the first send. This is engineering guidance, not legal advice.

A media database is a list that was true once. This is a process that keeps running: it rebuilds the list from live bylines, so it catches the reporter who moved desk last month and the freelance who files for four titles and appears in no database. And a merge field is not research — the agent reads the writer's recent work before it writes, so the pitch can say why this story is for this person. That sentence is the entire difference between a reply and a delete.

Yes — it is built multi-tenant. Separate lists, separate sending identities, separate domains and separate cadence per company, so one campaign cannot affect another's deliverability and two clients never get handed the same target set. The one thing shared on purpose is the suppression list: a journalist who opts out is out everywhere.

In production, on our own outreach first. We would rather point at an agent we live with every day than sell one we had only demonstrated. It is available as a managed engagement — we run it, you approve the angles and see everything that goes out.

Keep reading

Algorithmic Marketing

30-minute call · no deck · we will say if the answer is no

Put a press desk
on your story.

Tell us what you have built and who ought to know about it. We will tell you whether there is a story a journalist would run, and what the press desk would do with it.

BOOK A CALL ABOUT THIS AGENTS WE RUN

An autonomous
press desk.

Coverage is the one thing
you cannot buy a shortcut to.

It reads the byline, not a bought list

Beat, recency, and whether they take pitches at all

It reads their work before it writes to them

One email, one journalist, one angle

Sending is engineering, not a mail merge

Every reply is evidence