Back to Help

Distribution lists

April 15, 2026

How distribution lists work — grouping press contacts so you can send a release to the right people with one click.


A distribution list is a named group of press contacts. Lists exist so you don't have to hand-pick recipients every time you send a release. Set up a list once, and future sends become a one-click audience selection.

Anatomy of a list

  • Name — required. Make it descriptive: "Tech press — North America", "Japanese-language enterprise media", "Launch day — top tier".
  • Description — optional. A sentence on who's on it and why. Future-you will thank present-you.
  • Members — the contacts on the list. A contact can be on many lists.

Creating a list

  1. From the channel's dashboard, click PressLists.
  2. Click New List.
  3. Give it a Name and a Description.
  4. Open the list and start adding contacts. Use the Add Contact action — the list is pre-filtered to the channel's contact book.

Adding and removing contacts

On the list detail page, add any contact with the Add Contact button. Remove them with the × next to their name. Removing a contact from a list doesn't delete the contact — they stay in the contact book and on any other lists they're on.

How to slice your lists

There's no single right answer, but a few patterns work well:

  • By beat. One list per topic area ("Fintech press", "Infrastructure press"). Match the release topic to the list.
  • By geography. One list per market ("North America", "EMEA", "Japan"). Combine with language filtering (see below).
  • By tier. "Top-tier outlets", "Trade press", "Newsletters". Send embargoed releases to top-tier 24 hours ahead, everyone else on release day.
  • By campaign. "Product launch — Q2 2026" is a one-off list for a specific moment. Archive it (delete it) when the campaign's over.

Lists and language

Each press contact has a Preferred Language field. When you send to a list, the send UI shows per-recipient language so you can spot mismatches. If you maintain, say, separate English and Japanese launch announcements as two articles, build two lists (or one list that gets filtered by language at send time).

Combining lists on send

The send flow lets you pick multiple lists at once. Contacts on more than one selected list are de-duplicated — a journalist on both "Tech press" and "Launch day — top tier" receives one email, not two.

Deleting a list

Delete from the list detail page. It removes the list and its membership records, but the contacts themselves stay in the contact book. Historical distributions that used the list still show in Distribution history — the delete doesn't rewrite the past.

press lists distribution organization