In a sleepy corner of Brooklyn, a technological revolution is taking place.  DUMBO is now home to over a dozen of New York’s hottest startups.  Among them is Sawhorse Media, the company behind Muckrack.com, which took a big step today towards revolutionizing the modern press release.

Early this morning Muckrack began selling “one line press releases” (1lpr anyone?) — twitter-style short form press announcements.  Muckrack.com is a site that aggregates and categorizes the tweets of hundreds of journalists.  Among its loyal visitors are journalists using the site to keep tabs on their colleagues.  By purchasing a 1lpr, you essentially get your message in front of journalists in a form they’ll actually read.

In its current implementation, these are basically sponsored advertisements.  However I see today’s product as part of the first move in a series that will forever change the world of PR.

I first took an interest in PR trying to learn how best to do the press outreach effort for Exit Strategy NYC.  I attended Internet Week’s PR for Startups event and quickly got it:  journalists are drowning with information overload.  As Allen Stern said that night, journalists get pitched hundreds of times each day.  The vast majority of the pitches are misguided and border on spam.  To the startup struggling to get their announcement noticed, relationships are golden.  Second best is identifying the exact journalists who cover your niche and then writing them short, personally tailored emails which are easily scannable.

A few weeks later, I saw a company called MatchPoint present at New York Tech Meetup.  The audience couldn’t have cared less about this product.  But to the people who *got it* and understood the core problem that MatchPoint is attempting to solve – PR professionals struggling to identify the right journalists, and journalists struggling with the information overload caused by mismatched PR pitches — the presentation was revolutionary.  MatchPoint is a communications tool designed for the PR Professional to “help identify and interact with the journalists and bloggers who may actually care about what you have to say.”  Given a press release or several keywords, the software engine produces a list of journalists, ranked by relevance based on a large database of their past news sources.

What I find fascinating and revolutionary about both Muck Rack and Matchpoint is they’re two different solutions to the same signal-to-noise issue plaguing the world of press releases.  Matchpoint solves it with a smarter matching engine.  Muck Rack solves it with bite sized pitches (reinforced by their pricing model: $1 per character with a $50 minimum) — ie constraint and smart pricing.

Right now, both companies are only halfway there in their attempts to solve information overload.  Their products currently give PR professionals a better way to get their message out.  But the real value will come from getting the journalists on board too.  When journalists start trusting these services as reliable sources of personally relevant information, they will become extremely valuable. Once the journalists get on board, there’s a nice network effect and lock-in that will make these services worth millions.

Silicon Alley Insider calls 1lprs the “smartest development in public relations since the canned quote.”  I couldn’t agree more.