Tag: Muck Rack

About the paper

The State of PR 2026 is an original survey study of public relations professionals examining their roles, working conditions, strategic priorities, media relations practices, AI adoption, GEO and social media use.

Muck Rack surveyed 1,115 professionals by email between 14 May and 12 June 2026 and retained 971 usable responses after data cleaning.

The sample is heavily US-based (91%) and agency-weighted (56%), so the findings primarily reflect the American PR market rather than the global profession.

Length: 34 pages

More information / download: https://media.muckrack.com/documents/Muck_Rack_-_State_of_PR_2026.pdf

Core Insights

1. What does the report show about the changing scope of PR work?

Media relations remains the profession’s central activity. Eighty-four per cent of respondents say it accounts for at least a quarter of their work, unchanged from the previous year. This suggests that, despite major technological and organisational changes, traditional earned media work still defines the PR role.

At the same time, the role is broadening. Thought leadership accounts for at least a quarter of the job for 51% of respondents, six percentage points more than in the previous year. Media measurement and reporting is cited by 45%, content creation by 41%, and both executive and corporate communications by 25%.

The report therefore presents PR not as a profession abandoning media relations, but as one layering additional responsibilities on top of it. Practitioners are increasingly expected to combine journalist outreach with content production, executive visibility, analytics, strategic advice and authority-building.

This expansion may also help explain the pressure reported elsewhere in the study. Fifty-five per cent worked more than 40 hours in the preceding week, 77% worked outside normal hours at least once, and 66% rated their recent work stress above the midpoint of the scale. PR’s remit appears to be growing without traditional responsibilities becoming less important.

2. How are AI and GEO changing PR strategy and practice?

Generative AI has moved firmly into mainstream PR practice. Eighty per cent of respondents already use it in their workflow, compared with 77% in the previous year. A further 8% plan to explore it, while only 10% say they do not intend to use it.

AI and automation are also the leading long-term priority: 61% expect them to grow in importance over the next five years. However, the report does not suggest that AI is replacing conventional PR skills. Media relations ranks second at 48%, up from 35% the previous year, followed by strategic planning at 32% and reputation management at 30%.

Generative Engine Optimisation is emerging as a distinct strategic concern. Seventy-three per cent consider GEO at least somewhat important to their communications strategy, including 43% who describe it as very or extremely important. Yet responsibility remains unclear:

• 29% say no one owns GEO.
• 24% place responsibility with PR or communications.
• 15% assign it to SEO or content teams.
• 13% do not know who owns it.
• 11% place it with marketing leadership.
• 9% assign it to an AI or innovation team.

This indicates that organisational practice is lagging behind strategic interest. GEO has become relevant before most organisations have established governance, responsibilities or consistent measurement.

The tactics being adopted also reinforce PR’s traditional authority-building role. Fifty-five per cent are seeking coverage in high-authority publications to increase visibility in AI-generated responses. Half are producing more authoritative or data-driven content, and half are optimising content for search. Forty-four per cent are restructuring content so that AI systems can parse it more easily, for example through clear answers and FAQs.

The underlying implication is that AI visibility is not simply a technical SEO issue. The report frames credibility, earned media coverage, authoritative content and machine-readable structure as mutually reinforcing elements of an emerging PR discipline.

3. Why is earned media becoming harder to secure, and how are practitioners responding?

The report portrays difficulty securing earned media as almost universal. Only 2% say it has not become more difficult during the year.

The largest obstacles are structural:

• 71% cite low journalist response rates.
• 61% cite smaller or shrinking media lists in relevant beats.
• 43% point to increased competition for coverage.
• 36% cite a lack of timely or newsworthy stories.
• 36% cite shorter media cycles and faster newsroom turnaround.
• 35% identify overloaded or understaffed PR teams.

These findings suggest that practitioners face pressure from both sides. Newsrooms have fewer relevant journalists and less available attention, while PR teams are competing more intensely for that attention.

Nevertheless, many practitioners still use relatively broad outreach. Forty-nine per cent pitch more than 20 journalists per campaign or announcement, including 24% who pitch more than 50. This wide-net approach may partly reflect shrinking response rates: as the probability of an individual journalist responding falls, practitioners may compensate by increasing the number contacted.

The relationship base is mixed rather than predominantly strong. Thirty-six per cent have previously worked with only a few of the reporters they pitch, while 35% have worked with about half. Only 27% have worked with most or all of them.

Personalisation is common but often limited. Sixty-six per cent usually or always personalise their pitches, but among those who personalise, 73% change only a few sentences. Fifteen per cent tailor every part of the pitch, while 11% personalise only the greeting.

The report therefore reveals a tension between relevance and scale. Practitioners recognise the need for personalisation and relationships, but the difficulty of earning coverage encourages larger pitch lists and relatively light-touch customisation.

4. How do PR professionals believe the function can demonstrate greater value?

Most respondents feel positively regarded by organisational leadership. Sixty-seven per cent say PR and communications is valued or very valued, including 36% who say it is very valued. However, one-third regard the function as only moderately, slightly or not valued.

The strongest consensus in the entire value discussion concerns measurement. Sixty-nine per cent say producing measurable results is the best way to increase PR’s perceived value to leadership or clients. The alternative answers are far less prominent:

• 11% choose improving executive visibility.
• 10% choose delivering creative solutions.
• 8% choose managing reputation risk.

This does not necessarily mean that executive visibility, creativity or risk management are unimportant. Rather, respondents appear to believe that these activities become more persuasive internally when their consequences can be evidenced.

Measurement and reporting already constitute at least a quarter of the job for 45% of respondents. The study therefore positions measurement not as a specialist or administrative add-on, but as an important source of organisational legitimacy.

There is, however, a contrast between this strong belief in measurement and the immature measurement of GEO. Thirty-nine per cent are not currently measuring GEO success, while 21% are unsure how it is being measured. Only 25% track brand mentions in AI-generated responses, 21% monitor search visibility, and 17% track referral traffic from AI tools.

The implication is that PR’s strategic aspirations may be developing faster than its evaluation methods. Practitioners believe measurable results are essential, but one of the profession’s most rapidly emerging priorities does not yet have widely established indicators or standards.

5. What broader picture of the PR profession emerges from the report?

The report depicts a profession experiencing simultaneous continuity and transformation.

The continuity lies in media relations. It remains the dominant component of the job, and practitioners expect it to become more—not less—important. Online and digital media are pitched by 91%, but traditional formats remain significant: newspapers by 69%, magazines by 64% and television by 60%. Podcasts have also become a mainstream target, cited by 57%.

The transformation lies in how authority, visibility and influence are created. PR now operates across earned media, thought leadership, search, social platforms and AI-generated answers. High-authority media coverage is valuable not only because people see it directly, but because it may influence what AI systems retrieve, cite or reproduce.

LinkedIn occupies a particularly strong position. Sixty per cent regard it as the most valuable social platform for PR work, far ahead of Instagram at 18%. It is included in 87% of company social strategies and is the platform respondents most want to monitor, at 73%. This suggests that LinkedIn functions simultaneously as a corporate channel, a professional network, an executive visibility platform and an arena for thought leadership.

Yet the profession’s development carries a human cost. Long hours, after-hours work and elevated stress are widespread. The combination of traditional media work, expanded content responsibilities, measurement demands, social media monitoring and emerging AI tasks may be increasing expectations faster than resources and organisational structures can adapt.

Overall, Muck Rack’s perspective is that PR is becoming more technologically enabled and strategically expansive, while remaining rooted in media relationships and credibility. Its most important emerging role may be helping organisations build the authority required to be visible across both human and AI-mediated information environments. However, the sample’s strong US and agency bias means that this conclusion should not automatically be generalised to every national market or in-house communications setting.

About the paper

Muck Rack’s State of PR 2025 is an original survey study examining PR professionals’ roles, leadership perceptions, future priorities, media relations practices and social media use.

The survey was distributed primarily by email between 5 June and 16 July 2025; 1,089 PR professionals participated, with 911 usable responses retained after data cleaning.

The sample is heavily US-based, with 90% of respondents located in the United States and only 10% elsewhere, including 5% in Europe.

Length: 31 pages

More information / download: https://media.muckrack.com/documents/State_of_PR_2025_report.pdf

Core Insights

1. What does the report reveal about the current role and professional position of PR?

Media relations remains the dominant activity within PR. Eighty-four per cent of respondents say it constitutes at least a quarter of their work, considerably ahead of thought leadership at 45%, measurement and reporting at 44%, and content creation at 42%. Corporate communications accounts for a substantial share of the work of 30% of respondents, while crisis management, influencer relations, ESG and DEI are considerably less prominent as major job functions.

This creates a picture of a profession whose remit has broadened, but whose centre of gravity remains traditional media relations. Thought leadership, content and measurement have become important complementary disciplines, yet they have not displaced earned media as the defining PR responsibility.

The findings on leadership perceptions are more complicated. Based on the response categories shown on page 10, 33% say leadership understands their work completely and 47% say it understands it somewhat, producing a combined figure of 80%. The accompanying narrative inconsistently states 88%, which appears to be an error in the report.

More importantly, understanding does not necessarily translate into perceived value. Only 37% of respondents overall feel that PR is “very valued” by leadership. The gap between agency and in-house practitioners is striking: 50% of agency respondents feel very valued, compared with only 16% of brand-side respondents. At brands, 24% feel only slightly valued or not valued at all, compared with 8% at agencies.

The report therefore points to a persistent legitimacy challenge for in-house PR. Communications professionals may believe that leaders broadly understand what they do, but many do not feel that the function is accorded correspondingly high strategic value.

2. Which developments do PR professionals expect to shape the profession over the next five years?

AI and automation clearly dominate expectations for the future. Fifty-nine per cent believe this area will grow in importance over the next five years, well ahead of media relations at 35%, strategic planning at 33%, reputation management at 29%, and both influencer marketing and owned content at 28%.

This is not merely an expectation about the future. Generative AI is already mainstream among the respondents: 77% say they use tools such as ChatGPT or DALL·E in their workflow, while another 11% plan to explore them. Only 8% say they do not intend to do so.

The findings suggest that AI has moved rapidly from experimentation to routine professional use. However, the report does not examine what respondents use AI for, how intensively they use it, whether their organisations have governance policies, or whether AI is improving quality, productivity or outcomes. Adoption should therefore not be interpreted as evidence of maturity.

At the same time, established strategic disciplines remain important. Media relations, planning, reputation management, measurement and owned content all feature prominently among anticipated growth areas. The likely future is therefore not one in which AI replaces conventional PR functions, but one in which AI increasingly changes how those functions are performed.

The very low ranking of DEI and ESG communication is also notable. Only 4% identify it as an area likely to grow most in importance. That does not necessarily mean such issues are becoming irrelevant, but it does suggest that respondents no longer view them as major areas of professional expansion relative to AI, reputation, media and content.

3. Why has earned media become more difficult to secure?

The report presents earned media as operating under severe structural pressure. Seventy-two per cent cite low response rates from journalists as a challenge, while 62% point to smaller or shrinking media lists within relevant beats. Only 2% say it has not become harder to secure coverage.

Respondents also identify:

• increased competition for coverage: 49%;
• shorter media cycles and faster turnaround: 48%;
• reduced media appetite caused by the economic or political climate: 47%;
• a lack of timely or newsworthy stories: 42%;
• overloaded or understaffed PR teams: 32%;
• limited access to executives or subject-matter experts: 29%;
• difficulty personalising pitches at scale: 26%;
• conflicting internal priorities: 21%.

These findings indicate that the difficulty is not caused by a single failure in pitching technique. It reflects a combination of shrinking journalistic capacity, intense competition, rapid news cycles, weak story material and internal organisational constraints.

There is also an important asymmetry in the results: the largest barriers are external to the PR function, but several internal weaknesses compound them. PR teams may have less access to genuinely newsworthy material, insufficient time to customise outreach, or limited access to credible spokespeople. The report therefore implies that improving media relations performance cannot be reduced to better email wording. It also requires stronger story development, internal coordination and more selective targeting.

4. What do the findings say about the quality and scale of media pitching?

The report depicts pitching as relatively broad and only moderately personalised.

Nearly half of respondents pitch more than 20 journalists for each campaign or announcement: 23% pitch between 21 and 50, while 25% pitch more than 50. Only 12% typically pitch five or fewer.

These pitches are also often sent to journalists with whom the PR professional has limited previous contact. Thirty-six per cent have worked with only a few of the reporters they pitch, and 31% have worked with about half. Only 31% have previously worked with most or all of them.

At first glance, personalisation appears widespread: 70% say they always or usually personalise their pitches. However, the next question qualifies that claim. Seventy-five per cent say personalisation consists of changing only a few sentences. Just 11% tailor every part of the pitch to the journalist, while 13% personalise only the greeting.

The combined picture is therefore one of semi-personalised outreach at scale. Practitioners are not generally sending completely identical mass emails, but neither are most producing deeply tailored pitches for individual journalists.

This may help explain the low response rates identified elsewhere in the report. The study does not establish causation, but it suggests a tension between scale and relevance: PR professionals are trying to reach large numbers of journalists while also claiming to personalise their messages, yet most personalisation remains relatively light.

The report’s five-year pitching summary reinforces conventional practice: nearly 70% prefer one-to-one emails, 87% keep pitches below 300 words, 51% prefer Tuesday, 80% pitch before noon, and 54% send their first follow-up three to six days later. These findings describe prevailing practitioner preferences, however, rather than demonstrating which practices produce the best results.

5. What are the report’s most important implications for PR strategy and measurement?

The strongest strategic message concerns measurement. Sixty-seven per cent say that producing measurable results is the best way to increase PR’s perceived value among leaders or clients. This is far ahead of creative solutions at 12%, executive visibility at 11%, and reputation-risk management at 6%.

This finding is particularly significant when considered alongside the low perceived value of in-house PR. It suggests that practitioners see evidence of results as the main route to stronger organisational legitimacy. However, the report does not define “measurable results”. These might range from media outputs and engagement metrics to changes in awareness, behaviour, reputation or business outcomes. The lack of definition means respondents may not share a common understanding of what meaningful measurement entails.

The social media findings also have clear strategic implications. LinkedIn has consolidated its position as the most important professional platform:

• 56% regard it as the most valuable platform for PR;
• 87% include it in their organisation’s social and communications strategy;
• 70% want to monitor it.

By contrast, X has declined sharply. Only 11% now regard it as the most valuable platform, and 39% say they stopped using it professionally during the previous year. Nevertheless, 41% still include it in their organisational strategy and 52% want to monitor it. This suggests that X may be losing value as an active communications channel while remaining relevant as an environment that organisations feel obliged to observe.

There is a wider gap between declared strategic importance and monitoring capability. Although respondents say their companies use an average of 3.6 social platforms, 53% do not use social listening tools at all. Only 14% use them daily and 8% weekly. This raises questions about how organisations evaluate conversations, emerging issues and audience response across their multichannel presence.

Overall, the report implies five priorities for PR leaders:

1. connect communication activity more clearly with measurable organisational outcomes;
2. treat AI adoption as an operational and governance issue, not merely a tool experiment;
3. make earned-media outreach more selective and substantially more relevant;
4. reconsider channel investment as LinkedIn strengthens and X weakens;
5. improve monitoring and listening capabilities so that multichannel strategies are informed by evidence rather than platform presence alone.

The report’s conclusions should nevertheless be interpreted within its sample limitations. It is based mainly on US practitioners, agencies make up 51% of respondents, and some questions changed wording from earlier surveys. The authors therefore caution that direct year-on-year comparisons may not always be valid.

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:

1. Producing measurable results — 66%.
2. Connecting PR activity with important business initiatives — 60%.
3. 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.

About the paper

Muck Rack’s State of PR 2023 is an original survey of 1,034 PR professionals, conducted online from 31 March to 25 April 2023 and distributed primarily by email.

The sample is heavily US-based: 89% of respondents were in the United States, while Europe and Canada each accounted for 3% and Asia for 1%; 55% worked at agencies and 23% at brands.

The stated margin of error is approximately 3%.

Length: 54 pages

More information / download: https://media.muckrack.com/documents/Muck_Rack_-_State_of_PR_2023.pdf

Core Insights

1. What does the report reveal about the main pressures facing PR professionals?

The most immediate pressure is the increasing difficulty of media relations. More than half of respondents, 53%, selected getting responses from journalists as one of their three biggest current challenges. This concern was particularly pronounced among agency respondents, at 59%, compared with 46% among people working at brands.

Resource pressure is nearly as significant. Some 48% identified insufficient budget or staffing as a leading challenge. Here the pattern was reversed: 55% of brand-side respondents were concerned about resources, compared with 42% at agencies.

A third major challenge is demonstrating value. Forty per cent selected justifying or showcasing the PR team’s value to stakeholders, while 37% pointed to the difficulty of identifying relevant journalists. These figures suggest that PR teams are under pressure at both ends of the process: they struggle to secure media attention and must then prove internally that their activities have created meaningful value.

The workload data reinforces this picture. Fifty-one per cent reported working 41–50 hours in the preceding week, while 6% worked more than 50 hours. Seventy-eight per cent had worked outside normal hours at least once during that week, and 26% had done so three or more times.

At the same time, respondents were not generally alienated from senior management. Ninety per cent felt that leadership understood their work at least “somewhat well”, and most felt that the communications function was valued. The problem therefore appears less to be outright organisational rejection of PR than a combination of high expectations, constrained resources, difficult media conditions and persistent demands for evidence of impact.

2. How is the role and scope of PR changing?

The report presents PR as a profession that remains strongly centred on media relations but is becoming broader and more integrated with other organisational functions.

Media relations still dominates practitioners’ work: 85% said it constituted at least a quarter of their job. However, thought leadership was cited by 51%, measurement and reporting by 47%, events by 34%, corporate communications by 27%, and both internal and executive communications by 23%.

Internal communication appears to be expanding. Forty-four per cent said their teams were spending more time on it, while only 4% said the amount of time was decreasing. This is particularly noteworthy because brands also regard internal communications and counsel as highly unsuitable for outsourcing: 73% said they would be very unlikely to assign this work to an agency.

The profession’s boundaries are also becoming less clear. Sixty-one per cent believed that the term “public relations” would need to be defined more broadly within five years, while another 15% thought it would need to be renamed. Only 22% expected the existing term to continue describing their work accurately.

The relationship between PR and marketing is another sign of convergence. Seventy-one per cent expected this relationship to become more important during the following five years, although the report notes that this expectation had declined slightly from the previous year.

Taken together, the findings suggest that PR is evolving from a relatively distinct media-relations discipline into a broader communications function encompassing internal communication, thought leadership, executive communication, measurement, digital channels and closer coordination with marketing.

3. What does the study say about media relations and the future of earned media?

The report portrays earned media as both central to PR and increasingly difficult to obtain.

Seventy-one per cent expected securing earned media to become more difficult over the next five years: 44% anticipated that it would become somewhat more difficult, and 27% much more difficult. Only 8% expected it to become easier.

Respondents nevertheless remained highly focused on traditional pitching. Eighty-nine per cent considered individual, one-to-one email the most effective channel for approaching journalists. No alternative came close: Twitter and mass email were each selected by 18%, while phone and LinkedIn were selected by 15%.

Relevance was regarded as the most important ingredient in a successful pitch. Thirty-three per cent chose whether the subject was relevant to the journalist as the single most important factor. Existing relationships and personalised pitches were each chosen by 20%. Elements such as executive quotations, brevity, visual content and statistics in the headline were rated much lower.

The report’s practical summary of pitching habits shows a fairly conventional workflow: almost 90% preferred one-to-one emails, 92% kept pitches below 300 words, 81% preferred pitching before noon, and Tuesday was the most popular day. Respondents were divided over whether one or two follow-ups were acceptable.

The media mix itself is broadening. Ninety per cent commonly pitched online or digital media, 66% magazines, 63% printed newspapers, 52% television and 50% podcasts. This indicates that earned media is not disappearing, but the number of relevant formats and outlets is increasing while journalist responsiveness is declining.

The underlying implication is that PR practitioners will need to combine better targeting, stronger relevance and broader media knowledge rather than relying on higher volumes of outreach.

4. How are technology, AI and social platforms reshaping PR practice?

Technology is becoming a strategic capability, although adoption remains uneven.

Generative AI had already gained substantial attention when the survey was conducted in spring 2023. Twenty-eight per cent said they were already using tools such as ChatGPT or DALL-E, while 33% planned to explore them. A further 24% were unsure, and 15% had no plans to use them.

AI also entered the list of important future skills. Thirty-one per cent said that integrating new AI tools into workflows would be one of the capabilities their organisation needed to develop over the following five years. It ranked below media relations, strategic planning and data and analytics, but roughly alongside social media, multimedia production, influencer marketing and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Technology use was not universally sophisticated. Media lists were commonly stored in spreadsheets, cited by 68%, as well as dedicated PR software, cited by 64%. Only small minorities used sales CRM or marketing automation platforms for this purpose. Social-listening practices were also fragmented: 34% used such tools daily, but another 34% used them only case by case.

Social-media priorities were shifting noticeably. LinkedIn had become the most widely used social network in communications strategies, selected by 84%, followed by Instagram at 75%, Twitter at 72% and Facebook at 71%. LinkedIn had risen by 11 percentage points from the previous year, while Twitter had fallen by five points.

Looking forward, 53% planned to use LinkedIn more and 40% expected to increase their use of TikTok. Facebook was the only major platform where considerably more respondents expected to reduce rather than increase usage.

The report therefore depicts a profession moving towards AI, analytics, LinkedIn and multimedia communication, but still relying extensively on spreadsheets, email and relatively conventional workflow systems.

5. What are the report’s most important implications for PR leadership and measurement?

The central leadership implication is that PR teams believe their value depends increasingly on demonstrating results linked to organisational priorities.

When asked what would increase PR’s value among stakeholders, 66% chose producing measurable results and 62% selected connecting PR activities to key business initiatives. Fifty-seven per cent also cited securing more media coverage or relationships.

There was, however, a tension between this aspiration and the metrics respondents considered most useful. The four highest-ranked measures were the number of stories placed, reach or impressions, key-message pull-through and website impact. These are largely outputs and intermediate outcomes rather than direct evidence of organisational or stakeholder impact.

The report notes an important difference between agencies and brands. Agencies were more likely to prioritise the number of stories placed, whereas brand-side practitioners were more likely to rank revenue impact highly. Brand respondents were also more likely to say that connecting PR to business initiatives, improving internal reporting and mitigating reputational risk increased the function’s value.

This points to a structural difference in how the two sides define success. Agencies appear more focused on deliverables and media performance, while in-house teams are somewhat more concerned with organisational consequences and business alignment.

Leadership involvement remains strong. Forty-two per cent said the executive team was briefed about PR activities weekly, 16% monthly and 12% daily. CEOs were also the most commonly identified decision-makers for PR and earned-media spending, at 38%.

The report’s broader implication is that PR’s future credibility will depend on closing the gap between the desire to demonstrate business value and the continued reliance on exposure-based metrics. As media coverage becomes harder to secure, counting placements and impressions alone is unlikely to be sufficient. PR teams will need stronger connections between communication activity, stakeholder response, reputation, digital behaviour and organisational outcomes.