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.