automation.engineer

XWECAN / Research & growth / System 02 of 05

2023–2024Project context

Partner

Media research, audit reports and PR outreach preparation

Research pipelines turned external information into useful reports and more narrowly relevant journalist outreach. The shared pattern was to acquire source material, extract usable evidence and decide what to produce or whom to approach.

Noah’s contribution
Describes designing research acquisition, choosing narrow story angles, separating extraction from composition, deriving journalist interests and applying relevance/value/channel criteria.
Historical stage
Retrospective first-person account of historical working pipelines, supported by separately confirmed operating/outreach history. No fresh runtime verification or final stack reconstruction.
Part of the business
XWECAN overview ↗
Tools across the recorded versions
  • Semrush
  • Ahrefs
  • Google Trends
  • Playwright
  • AI extraction and report composition
  • Programmatic filters
  • Published article research
Inside this system
  1. Workflow
  2. Key records
  3. Start with the information the decision needs
  4. Research the journalist through what they publish
  5. From a story brief to contact-ready research
  6. Choose the next action with explicit criteria
  7. Keep the outcome attached to the team
  8. Other systems in this business

The workflow

The handoffs
inside the work.

Follow the main path and its branches. Select a step for context; the account below explains what was built, tested or planned.

  • Client story and publication context
    Start with the subject seeking coverage and prepared publication-by-industry context.
  • Prospect audit inputs
    Collect website material, SEO research and trend inputs for the separate audit-report pipeline.
  • Story-specific research queries
    Search for published coverage of narrower subjects relevant to the story.
  • Bounded research extraction
    Use smaller models for source-specific work such as dissecting website HTML.
  • Articles, authors and publications
    Retain coverage context with the author and publication relationships.
  • Existing journalist contact context
    Bring prior contact information and past delivery results into the research.
  • Audit-report synthesis
    Use larger models to turn the separate research inputs into the final audit report.
  • Infer narrower coverage interests
    Use article content to identify the themes the journalist has actually covered.
  • Extract and cross-reference contacts
    Connect discovered author/contact data with existing journalist information.
  • Journalist research context
    Keep coverage interests, usable contact context and story fit connected.
  • Assess relevance, value and capacity
    Weigh story fit, potential client value and the outreach capacity available.
  • Adapt the prepared pitch
    Adjust story angle, subject and body to the researched coverage interests.
  • Select a suitable outreach route
    Use available contact information and channel capacity to route the opportunity.

Key records

The information
that carries forward.

How the information connects
RecordInformationPurpose
Client/story inputClient summary, description of the subject seeking press and prepared publication/industry context, described in a self-authored retrospective draft.Generate research queries from the story rather than begin with a generic contact list.
Prospect research inputClient/prospect website, external SEO and trend inputs, extracted website material; exact stored field names unknown.Ground an audit report in information gathered from multiple sources.
Article and publication contextPublished article content, author association and publication context are described. The existing portfolio also describes linked article/publication/journalist records.Retain the evidence behind journalist-interest assessment.
Journalist profileNarrow interests inferred from coverage, relevance to the proposed story, contact information and possible outreach channel. Exact production schema not established.Identify a specific reason to approach a particular journalist.
Outreach decisionRelevance score/criteria, potential client value and channel-capacity considerations are narrated; thresholds and final stored fields are not supplied.Choose where scarce outreach opportunities are best spent.
Generated outputAn audit report or a coverage-informed pitch, depending on the pipeline.Convert collected material into a deliverable or a useful next action.
Contact and delivery contextThe self-authored draft describes extracting names/emails from articles and cross-referencing an existing journalist-contact database and past delivery results. No production schema or deliverability metric is supplied.Inform contact selection and avoid treating every discovered address as equally usable.
Sequence/pitch contextA prepared email sequence with story-specific subject/body adjustments, described in the retrospective application draft.Connect outreach preparation to the researched story and journalist without inventing a new standalone campaign system.

Inside the system / 01

Start with the information the decision needs

In the retrospective account, XWECAN generated audit reports for prospective clients who wanted a review of their website or marketing resources. The pipeline called research tools including Semrush and Ahrefs, looked at Google Trends and collected client website information. When a source did not offer a suitable API, Noah describes using Playwright to obtain the relevant material through the browser.

The research and writing stages had different jobs. Smaller models extracted specific information, such as useful material from a website’s HTML; larger models composed the final report. The account does not specify model versions or measured report-cost savings.

Inside the system / 02

Research the journalist through what they publish

The PR problem was more specific than obtaining a large media list. Noah describes a conventional approach of buying or finding lists for a broad topic and sending the same story widely. His alternative began with the research a person would do to decide whether an individual journalist might actually care about a story.

Published articles supplied the context. The retrospective account describes collecting articles from major publications and using small models to derive the author’s interests within a broader domain. A technology label alone was too coarse. The system looked for the narrower theme that linked the client’s story to something the journalist had already explored.

Another recording describes generating queries for those narrow subjects and incorporating recent coverage into outreach preparation. The value of that workflow was the connection between the research and the pitch: the story angle came from a defensible fit with the journalist’s coverage, rather than from a generic category assigned to the whole publication.

Inside the system / 03

From a story brief to contact-ready research

A self-authored application draft gives additional retrospective detail about the research flow. It describes taking a client summary and the subject seeking press, consulting prepared tables of major publications by industry and generating queries to discover relevant articles and journalists. That makes the story brief an explicit input: the search was intended to find evidence of interest in that particular subject.

The same draft describes downloading articles, extracting author names and contact information, and cross-referencing an existing journalist email database with previous delivery results. It then describes scoring the journalist’s relevance and adapting the subject and body of a prepared email sequence to the research context. These details help explain the intended record relationships and how research informed outreach preparation.

This retrospective account complements the walkthroughs; it is not a new execution test. Exact production configuration, query volumes and measured outreach outcomes have not been reconstructed.

Inside the system / 04

Choose the next action with explicit criteria

The outreach account also describes considering the journalist’s relevance, the potential value to the client of a placement and the capacity available on a channel. Programmatic filters and AI helped choose whether a contact opportunity justified a message or email. Contact information was sourced and the system routed outreach to an appropriate platform.

These retrospective descriptions explain acquisition, extraction, article and author context, relevance assessment and output. They do not establish the complete configuration, scoring thresholds or final approval workflow.

Inside the system / 05

Keep the outcome attached to the team

Noah separately confirms that he set up new outreach systems and that the team secured the authorized Fujitsu CNN coverage shortly afterward. That makes the system relevant to the broader operating story, but it does not prove that one matching rule or generated pitch caused the placement.

Noah set up the research and outreach systems. The team delivered the press coverage. The recordings explain the workflow and its decision logic without establishing a numerical response, cost or placement improvement.

Within XWECAN

Other parts
of the operation.