The Scenario
You're building a media list. Your PR manager dropped 40 journalist names into column A on Monday and asked for their outlet, coverage beat, and Twitter handle in columns B, C, and D by Wednesday's pitch review.
You open the first name in column A. You search LinkedIn. You search Twitter. You find a profile that might be the right person. You're not sure. You paste what you found and move to row 2.
Forty minutes later you're on row 6. The Wednesday review is in two days and you have 34 rows left.
The bad version:
- Search each journalist name in a browser, scan profiles across multiple platforms, guess which result is the right person.
- Fill in what you find manually — sometimes all three fields, sometimes just one or two because the rest aren't findable in under two minutes.
- End up with a media list where 15 rows are complete, 18 are partial, and 7 are marked "couldn't find."
A media list with 18 partial rows doesn't get used in a pitch review. It gets handed back to you with a comment that says "please complete."
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your sheet, understands the column layout, and through its built-in Linkup integration it can issue a structured-output search per journalist and write the extracted fields directly into columns B, C, and D.
For each journalist in column A, search Linkup with structured output to extract their outlet, beat, and Twitter handle into columns B, C, and D.
SheetXAI runs a structured Linkup query for each name, asks Linkup to return the result as named fields, and maps those fields into the right columns. Rows where a field isn't findable are written as "not found" rather than left blank.
What You Get
- Column B: the journalist's primary outlet or publication.
- Column C: their listed coverage beat or topic area.
- Column D: their Twitter/X handle, formatted as @handle.
- Rows where Linkup can't confirm the identity with confidence are flagged in column E as "low confidence" rather than written with a guess.
- The full 40-row list processed in a single pass.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some names in column A are common and Linkup returns multiple possible matches
"Chris Johnson" could be five different journalists. Linkup may return a low-confidence result.
For each journalist in column A, search Linkup for their outlet, beat, and Twitter handle. Where the result confidence is low or multiple matches are found, write "ambiguous" in column E and flag the row for manual review rather than guessing.
The sheet also has a "Publication" column (column B) that you want to use as a disambiguation hint
You already know which outlet each journalist writes for — use that to narrow the Linkup search.
For each journalist in column A, search Linkup using both the name in column A and the publication in column B as context for the query. Extract the coverage beat into column C and the Twitter handle into column D.
You need four fields instead of three — add "email format" from the outlet's known pattern
Some pitching tools need an email address. You don't have the emails but you know the outlet's email format.
For each journalist in column A, search Linkup for their outlet, beat, and Twitter handle into columns B, C, and D. Then search Linkup for the outlet's known journalist email format and write it into column E (e.g., firstname@outlet.com).
You want the full media list enriched plus a one-sentence "why pitch them" note — all in one structured pass
The pitch review needs context beyond just the fields. Each journalist entry should include a brief rationale.
For each journalist in column A, use Linkup structured search to extract their outlet into column B, their beat into column C, their Twitter handle into column D, and write a one-sentence note in column E explaining why they'd be relevant to a [your topic] pitch — all from a single Linkup query per row.
Combining the field extraction and the editorial context in one prompt means the media list comes out ready to use, not ready to finish.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a Google Sheet with journalist names, software products, or any entities in column A, then ask SheetXAI to run Linkup structured-output lookups and populate the named fields into the adjacent columns. For related articles, see Build a Date-Filtered News Briefing Sheet With Linkup in Google Sheets and the Linkup integration overview.