Use competitor coverage to build journalist target lists

What it means for customers

Several new features are now live across the platform. Google Alerts now automatically identifies the journalist, publication, and story behind each alert, so you can click straight through to write a message, add the journalist to a list, or start a news-track - and any journalist discovered this way is permanently added to the MVPR database. You can also ask Ivy to pull every journalist who has covered your competitors in a given period and add the resulting list in one action. Each Ivy assistant can now have its own independent system prompt, letting you fine-tune AI behaviour for a specific company or workflow without changing the global policy that applies everywhere else.

Why we built it

Google Alerts carried useful existing signals that were locked inside plain text, so we enriched them to unlock the outreach and list-building workflows that depend on knowing who wrote what and where. Independent system prompts came from a clear need: a single global policy cannot accommodate company-specific requirements without creating unintended effects for other workflows. The redesigned Proactive Pitching column, additional merge tags, and Ivy on Thought Leadership and Proactive Pitching pages each remove specific friction points we saw users hitting repeatedly.

Use cases

• A user sees a competitor alert, clicks the auto-identified journalist name, and immediately adds them to a list or drafts an outreach message - all without leaving the alerts view.
• A user asks Ivy to return every journalist who has covered their competitors in the past two weeks and adds the full resulting list to a journalist list in a single action.
• An account manager sets a company-specific system prompt on an Ivy assistant to correct a recurring mis-classification for one client, leaving the global policy and all other workflows untouched.
• A user building a proactive pitch adds multiple journalists one by one; they accumulate in the redesigned right-hand column and can be bulk-emailed with personalised merge tags that include each journalist's full name and publication.

Why it matters

Competitor coverage is one of the fastest ways to find relevant journalists, and these updates turn a previously static alert feed into an actionable workflow - discovering contacts, enriching the database, and opening outreach in a few clicks rather than manual research. Taken together, the changes reduce the steps between spotting an opportunity and acting on it, whether that is pitching, list-building, or generating a sell-in.