Edited on Jun 22, 2026

Every few months a journalist publishes a take about how bad PR pitches are. The pitches are too long. Too templated. Too off-topic. Too pushy. Too vague. Too generic.

Some of those takes are right. Most of those pitches are bad. But the framing — that the PR industry is the problem and journalism is the victim — has it backward.

The two industries depend on each other. Both are under structural pressure. Both are adapting to the same audience shift. And the agencies that complain about journalists, and the journalists who complain about agencies, are mostly avoiding the harder conversation about what's actually happening to both crafts.

Here's the honest picture from inside the agency side of the table.

Journalism is shrinking. Newsrooms are smaller than they were ten years ago. Reporters cover three beats instead of one. The volume of pitches per reporter has gone up. The time per pitch has gone down. The math forces journalists to triage harder. Which means more good pitches get killed alongside the bad ones — because the reporter only has nine seconds to decide.

PR has gotten lazier in parallel. The agencies trying to fill the volume gap have automated pitch lists. AI-written subject lines. Mass blasts. None of it works. The output is the templated noise journalists complain about. The agencies that still do real research — knowing the reporter's byline history, the angle they care about, the timing of their next story — get the placements. Everyone else gets ignored.

Both industries are adapting to the AI audience shift. The reader who used to land on a journalist's article through search or social now asks an AI engine instead. The brand whose press release used to get a reporter's attention now also has to be visible to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The audience is splitting. Both the reporter and the publicist are building for two readers now — the human and the model. Most haven't admitted this out loud yet.

Here's what would actually improve the relationship:

Reporters could stop pretending every cold pitch is an insult. A targeted pitch on a relevant story is not spam. It is the function. The good ones deserve a one-line reply, even if the answer is no. The bad ones can be ignored. Performative outrage about the entire industry helps neither side.

Publicists could stop pretending the volume is the work. One well-targeted pitch beats fifty bad ones. The agencies sending mass blasts to save time are wasting everyone else's. The clients should be paying for the targeted pitch. Most still pay for the volume because the volume is easier to invoice for. That's the real problem, and it's on the agency side to fix.

Both sides could be honest about the model layer. The reporter's piece will be summarized by the engine. The publicist's press release will be summarized by the engine. The brand mentioned in the piece will be cited by the engine, or it won't. Whoever optimizes for the model layer — alongside the human reader — will win. Whoever pretends the model layer isn't real will lose.

The relationship between journalism and PR isn't broken. It's evolving — under the same pressure that's reshaping both crafts. The agencies and the reporters who understand that pressure are the ones building real careers right now.

The ones still complaining about each other are losing to both audiences at the same time.

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.