Hi, reporters. We’re holding the first Hacks/Hackers meetup in New Orleans tomorrow (tell your friends!), so I wanted to send out quite a few invites over the weekend. It reminded me of something Melody Kramer taught me when I worked at NPR:
There’s a thing called Mail Merge that lets you not just send emails to tons of people, but personalize it with their names. I’ve done it to reach out to literally hundreds of sources in one fell click.
I admit, mass-emailing sources is kind of a brute force journalism technique. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I don’t have Microsoft Office, so the best Mail Merge option for me was a Google Sheets add-on called GSM Mail Merge.
Due to Google’s term limits, you can only mass-send 100 emails a day, unfortunately. If you’ve got more than that, you need to do it over multiple days or use another email client. Good luck!