About the paper
Muck Rack’s State of PR 2024 is an original survey study examining PR professionals’ working conditions, priorities, media relations practices, social media use, budgets, measurement and expectations for the profession.
It is based on 1,116 PR professionals surveyed online, primarily by email, between 4 April and 10 May 2024; 75% of respondents were based in the United States, with smaller groups from Europe, Canada and Asia.
The report states a conservative margin of error of approximately 3%, but the sample is not geographically representative of the global PR profession.
Length: 51 pages
More information / download: https://media.muckrack.com/documents/Muck_Rack_-_State_of_PR_2024.pdf
Core Insights
1. What are the most pressing challenges facing PR professionals in 2024?
The report presents PR as a profession caught between persistent operational pressure and growing expectations.
The leading challenge is insufficient resources, selected by 49% of respondents. This includes both budget and staffing constraints. The problem is particularly pronounced among in-house practitioners: 58% of respondents at brands identified resources as a top concern, compared with 43% at agencies.
The second major challenge is getting responses from journalists, cited by 46%. This challenge is more acute for agencies, where 54% selected it, compared with 42% of brand-side respondents. Other prominent concerns include managing stakeholder expectations, demonstrating the value of PR and finding relevant journalists.
These pressures are reinforced by the findings on workload:
- 51% worked more than 40 hours during the preceding week.
- 76% had worked outside normal hours at least once.
- 26% had worked after hours on three or more occasions during the week.
The findings suggest that PR teams are expected to deliver across a widening range of responsibilities without a corresponding expansion in capacity. Although many respondents expect budgets to remain stable or rise, resource scarcity remains their most immediate practical concern. The difficulty may therefore concern not only total budget levels, but also the scale of expectations, staffing levels and the number of functions assigned to PR.
2. How central is media relations to PR work, and how are pitching practices changing?
Media relations remains the dominant activity in the profession. Seventy-nine per cent say it constitutes at least a quarter of their job, considerably ahead of content creation, thought leadership, measurement and corporate communications.
However, the report also depicts earned media as increasingly difficult:
- 72% expect securing earned coverage to become more difficult over the next five years.
- 46% identify getting journalist responses as one of their organisation’s main PR challenges.
- More than half of agency respondents pitch journalists at least three days per week.
The findings strongly support relevance, research and personalisation as the foundations of successful pitching. Respondents consider subject relevance to the journalist the most important factor in securing coverage, followed by personalisation and an existing relationship. Eighty-five per cent say they always or usually research journalists before pitching them, while 75% say they personalise pitches always or usually.
Yet the report also reveals a gap between stated best practice and actual behaviour. Although 83% regard individual email as the most effective pitching channel, only 38% typically pitch one journalist per email. Twenty-three per cent pitch 15 or more reporters in a single email. Similarly, nearly half of those who personalise pitches change only a few sentences, while only 7% personalise the entire pitch.
The report therefore suggests that PR professionals broadly understand what effective media relations requires, but workload, volume targets or limited resources may prevent them from applying that standard consistently.
3. What does the report reveal about PR’s value and standing within organisations?
Most respondents believe that organisational leadership has at least some understanding of PR. Eighty-eight per cent say leadership understands their work at least somewhat well, and a majority feel that the function is valued.
However, the results expose a considerable difference between agencies and brands. At agencies, 52% say they feel “very valued”, compared with only 22% among brand-side respondents. A further 40% of brand respondents feel “valued”, but the disparity at the highest level suggests that in-house PR teams may have greater difficulty demonstrating their strategic contribution.
Respondents identify three principal ways of increasing PR’s value:
- Producing measurable results — 66%.
- Connecting PR activity with important business initiatives — 60%.
- Generating more media coverage or strengthening media relationships — 55%.
This is an important combination. Respondents do not believe that coverage alone is sufficient. They see value as being created when communication activity produces evidence, aligns with organisational priorities and contributes to business-relevant outcomes.
Nevertheless, the report’s own measurement findings show that practice remains relatively output-focused. The four metrics respondents rate most highly are:
- number of stories placed;
- reach or impressions;
- key-message inclusion;
- website impact.
The first three are largely communication outputs or intermediate effects rather than evidence of organisational or stakeholder outcomes. The report therefore indicates a tension: practitioners recognise that PR must demonstrate measurable business value, but many still depend on conventional media metrics that may not establish that value convincingly.
4. How are social platforms and digital priorities shifting?
LinkedIn has become the dominant social platform for PR professionals.
Half of respondents identify it as the most valuable social network for their work. It is also included in 84% of organisations’ social media and communication strategies, and 61% of respondents expect to use it more. This gives LinkedIn a considerably stronger position than any other platform in the survey.
By contrast, X/Twitter is losing importance as an active communication and pitching platform:
- Only 16% regard it as their most valuable platform.
- Its inclusion in communication strategies fell by 15 percentage points from 2023.
- More respondents plan to reduce their use of X than increase it.
- It has declined markedly as a preferred pitching channel.
The report contains some inconsistencies between chart labels and accompanying prose on individual percentages, but the direction is clear: LinkedIn is rising, while X is declining for active PR use.
X nevertheless remains important for monitoring and listening. Forty-nine per cent still regard it as important for social listening, behind LinkedIn at 56% but ahead of most other platforms. This distinction suggests that a platform may remain valuable as an information environment even when it becomes less attractive for relationship-building or content distribution.
TikTok and YouTube also show signs of growing strategic relevance, although from lower starting points. The broader implication is that PR social strategies are becoming less dependent on a single real-time public platform and more distributed across professional, visual and video-based channels.
5. What does the report suggest about the future direction of PR?
The report portrays a profession becoming more integrated with marketing, more technologically dependent and more analytically demanding, while still retaining media relations as a core capability.
Seventy-two per cent believe the relationship between PR and marketing will become more important during the next five years. This indicates increasing organisational integration and potentially greater overlap in planning, content, digital channels, data and measurement.
The most important future capability is strategic planning, selected by 46%. Integrating artificial-intelligence tools follows closely at 44%, rising from 31% in the previous year and narrowly exceeding media relations at 43%. Data and analytics ranks fourth at 37%.
This does not mean media relations is disappearing. It remains the activity occupying the largest share of practitioners’ time, and respondents expect earned media to become harder rather than less relevant. Instead, the findings point towards a broader professional role in which practitioners must combine:
- strategic judgement;
- AI-enabled workflows;
- media relations;
- data and analytics;
- multimedia communication;
- influencer relations;
- closer collaboration with marketing.
The report’s underlying argument is that success will depend on adaptation rather than abandonment of traditional PR. Practitioners will still need media relationships and editorial relevance, but these must be combined with stronger strategic planning, technological competence and evidence of organisational value.
A central limitation is that the report is produced by a PR technology company whose services include journalist discovery, pitching, monitoring and measurement. The survey data are useful, but some topic selection and interpretation naturally align with Muck Rack’s commercial field. The heavy US representation and differences in question wording between years also mean that global conclusions and year-on-year comparisons should be treated cautiously.