Meet Pitching Notes – a new online platform that lets PR pros rate and share personal experiences working with journalists, and in turn view others’ experiences. Think RateMyProfessors.com, but for journalists – or as a recent article in PR Daily puts it, the Yelp of the PR industry.

After a fellow staffer passed along the news, I knew I had to check it out for myself.

How it works: Once you set-up your free profile, you can instantly add your own experiences with journalists and access others’ experiences via the “Reporters” tab. When adding a new contact, you’re able to rate a reporter out of five stars in four categories: responsiveness, professionalism, amicability and overall rating. From there, you can see other PR pros’ similar ratings of a wide variety of journalists, and even search by most recent, highest rated or most popular reporters.

The good: Pitching Notes connects PR pros across all disciplines, giving you access to a wealth of knowledge and experience. How many times have you tapped a colleague for their contacts at a specific publication, or added someone to an agency-wide “Do Not Contact List?” Now with Pitching Notes, you can do the same with PR pros worldwide.

For example, let’s say one of a client’s target media outlets is Family Circle magazine. Instead of digging through Cision or FamilyCircle.com to find the best contacts to pitch based on your pitching angle, you can use Pitching Notes to see which contacts other PR pros have had luck with and which contacts you should stay away from. Thus, giving you a good starting point based on others’ experiences.

The bad: In general, the platform is extremely new and still working out a few obvious kinks. In addition to technical difficulties (like a random “ERROR” message here and there), the search functionality isn’t that great. However, I anticipate this only getting better with time as more contacts are uploaded into the system and the creators adapt the platform with increased functionality.

Overall, the concept is great and this is definitely a platform to keep an eye on. I look forward to Pitching Notes continuing to evolve as it really picks up steam.

After recently entering the world of smartphone apps via my new Android device, I was overwhelmed at the sheer amount of apps out there. Between password keepers, movie review platforms and the ever-popular Words with Friends games, I had no idea where to begin.

Especially as a PR pro, I found myself asking: what are the top go-to apps I should have on my phone? After a little digging and trials of my own, I’ve compiled the top five must-have apps for every PR pro:

1. TweetDeck – Link your Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and Foursquare pages all in one place. The best part? You can add multiple Twitter accounts! So, for example, if you’re responsible for updating your agency’s Twitter handle, you can have everything in one place.

2. Bump – Available for iPhone and Android, this app lets you to swap contact info, calendar, pictures, social profiles, apps and more by literally “bumping” your phone with another person’s. The information automatically transfers and is stored in your phone.

3. CardMunch – Although not yet in Android, this free app via LinkedIn lets you snap a photo of a business card and then automatically adds to your list of contacts.

4. Foodspotting – You’re on a business trip in an unfamiliar city and your client wants pasta for dinner – but not just any pasta, something unique like pumpkin ravioli. Lucky for you, Foodspotting gives you images of nearby restaurants’ dishes and rates them based on what other users have liked. Before you know it, you’ll be on your way to restaurant recommendation you feel confident they’ll love.

5. USA Today – It’s easy, it’s free and it will keeps us updated on the latest news and world happenings outside of our PR caves.

In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying my new Android Instagram app.

Happy app’ing!