Almost Timely News: ๐️ Advice I Would Give to a New PR Practitioner (2026-09-06)
Almost Timely News: ๐️ Advice I Would Give to a New PR Practitioner (2026-09-06)If you enjoy masochism and poverty...
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Click here for the video ๐บ version of this newsletter on YouTube » Click here for an MP3 audio ๐ง only version » What’s On My Mind: Advice I Would Give to a New PR PractitionerThis week, I answer a question Farzana Baduel had over on LinkedIn: what would you tell a brand new PR person about what they’ll need to succeed in their career, especially in the age of AI? Having worked at a PR firm for 5 years prior to co-founding Trust Insights with Katie Robbert, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. This will be an uncomfortable newsletter for a lot of people because the truth is that public relations, as a profession, is not adapting to the realities of the world today, and a lot of new PR professionals are being given advice for a world that no longer exists. Now, to be clear, that’s not every PR firm, that’s not every shop, that’s not every practitioner, but there’s a lot of bad advice and obsolete perspectives in the PR industry that are hindering its growth and hindering practitioners’ ability to have fruitful careers. In terms of what new practitioners need to know, I’ll structure this following Katie Robbert’s 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ - purpose, people, process, platform, and performance. This is the best overall structure for analyzing business, and it’s well-suited for today. So, (cracks knuckles) let’s get underway. Part 1: The Purpose of PRPublic relations is exactly what it says on the box: how you, the PR professional, relate to the public on behalf of your company or client. Your job is to connect the public to the org you represent with the goal of increasing awareness and trust in that org. I’ve said for years that PR is the worst sales job in the world. It has all the stress of a sales job - outreach, pitching, prospecting, followups, nurture - and none of the commissions. When you “close” a “deal” in PR, you get a pat on the back (maybe) from your stakeholder... and that’s it. No bag of money comes with it, unlike sales which usually has commissions. So the skillful communicator has to really enjoy masochism and poverty as you develop your skills. Why? Because, especially for new folks to the profession, it doesn’t pay particularly well. In the Boston area, the average account coordinator starts at a salary of about USD 56,000 per year, or USD 28 per hour more or less. The MIT Living Wage Calculator for the Boston area estimates that a living wage that covers basic survival but no financial security is USD 32.46 an hour. Automatically, PR practitioners are placed in a very high financial stress environment from day one. And that’s something you need to know as a PR practitioner. If you want financial security, if that is a motivating influence on you, public relations may not be the right profession for you. Where a lot of public relations firms and agencies are in trouble today is that they’ve lost sight of the purpose of PR. They’re so focused on doing what they’ve always done and trying to meet net margins of 17-21% and billable hours that what they typically do is less and less effective every year. It doesn’t take a PhD in communications to look at how the average PR firm works - going out and obtaining media placements in publications - and look at the media landscape, shattered like a vase in a gift shop that my kids ran through - and see the disconnect. Where and how people consume news, information, and entertainment has shifted dramatically in the last 6 years, ramped up by the pandemic and everything after. Why is this happening? Why has the purpose of PR been forgotten? Most of that fault lays at the feet of agency owners and principals, folks whose expertise and worldview is from years, if not decades ago. Publications like O’Dwyers, PR Week, etc. Estimate that the average age bracket for agency owners is 53-60 years old, folks in my age group. We grew up in the last generational cohort that had a pre-internet media landscape and in general, we place undue emphasis on traditional publications. Brands like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal still have some residual influence with us, knee-jerk reactions that what they publish is trustworthy and impactful. If you, as a new person to the profession, want to make an impact, part of your remit is helping your peers and superiors understand reality as it is, the media landscape as it is, a world in which a single personal email newsletter like this one (~292K) can have a greater reach and circulation than the MIT Sloan Management Review (~100K, now defunct as of this month). If you want to connect to the true purpose of PR, of relating to the public, you have to go where the public is. Part 2: The People of PRHere’s the million dollar PR question: who is the public in public relations? The knee jerk answer is “people, of course!” followed by traditional descriptors like heads of household, shopping parents, decision makers at companies, etc., the usual lists that every PR professional produces as part of a pitch. Here’s an example from a pitch deck from the agency I used to work at (the NDA expired years ago):
While this isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen - it looks more at behavioral than demographic data - it’s still so vague that it’s impossible to take action on. As a new PR practitioner, whenever you’re dealing with people in any capacity, your first instinct should be to ask, “Does this information help me know where to act?” If someone says, “our audience is digital natives”, that’s superbly unhelpful. That’s like saying your audience is women. Sure, it’s more granular than “people”, but you still can’t do anything with that information. If someone says, “our audience are people who are complaining on Reddit about subscription-based sports entertainment services”, you have a clear remit. You go to Reddit and you read what they’re saying, and then you advise your stakeholders. Now, let’s talk about the audience you’re completely ignoring as a PR practitioner: machines. Machines have been silent intermediators in communications for 30 years, ever since the first search engines came out in the late 1990s. There’s always been some kind of algorithm between your stakeholder and your public, but never at the scale that you face today. Think about every form of communication that’s digital:
In the USA, where I’m based, Cloudflare Radar estimates that half of all Internet traffic is machine-based now.
If you think the public in public relations is humans only, you are literally missing half the audience. You are doing 50% of the job. Doing outreach to machines is literally half the job now, because those machines are the conduits to the audience you care about. Yes, there is a human somewhere at the end of the value chain (for now). But that human is increasingly influenced by the algorithms between the human and their interests in an online world. On day 1 of your new PR job, you’d better be given two playbooks - how you do PR for humans, and how you do PR for machines. If the organization you work for doesn’t give you BOTH playbooks, they are doomed. And folks, GEO/AEO/GAIO/LLMO/AIO/whatever the hell we’re calling it this week, isn’t the whole of it. GEO is a temporary transition phase, a bridge between old and new. It’s not permanent. It’s not going to stick around. All these PR agencies marketing their new GEO offerings will need to keep adapting them as the game changes, because as AI technology advances, today’s GEO practices become increasingly obsolete. Here’s a simple example. For a couple years now, I’ve advocated that you invest time and effort getting placed everywhere online because AI companies were building bigger and bigger models, vacuuming up more and more training data. That still remains true to a degree, but how AI works has dramatically shifted this year. AI companies are now heavily focused on agentic models, models that do stuff. They treat them less as libraries, and more as engines, with the assumption that the harness a model operates in, from ChatGPT web chat to advanced AI agent swarms, will provide the knowledge separately, or tools to go get the knowledge. Take a look at Google’s Gemini Flash, the model that powers Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. It hasn’t had new training data, new knowledge, since January 2025. Why? Because Google is focused on making the model a better engine - faster, with better tool calling, with better tool usage. Gemini doesn’t need to know new things - it needs to know what searches to run and when. We see evidence of this in Cloudflare’s Radar, a longitudinal analysis of AI traffic:
In calendar year 2026 so far, training has been holding steady at 39% of AI traffic. But search has doubled from 7.5% in January to 15% today. AI models are doing more search than ever in their own unique way. A PR organization telling you that GEO is the future of PR doesn’t understand the future of AI or where it’s going. For a day one practitioner in PR, I would say you need to understand the underlying technology and where it’s going. Put GEO aside and focus on what are the tools doing and how will that apply to how people get their information. That’s where you’re gonna make a big impact. Part 3: The Process of PRThis is where things get ugly. Public relations has always been very manual. When I worked at a PR firm, the account coordinator position had four basic jobs: [1] to take notes during meetings and email summaries to the client at the end of the meeting, [2] to do first drafts of things like press releases, news releases, and blog posts, [3] to make copies of things and errands around the office, like fetching their manager coffee, and [4] to manually copy and paste Google search results about their clients into a spreadsheet. Except for fetching coffee, literally none of those tasks need to be done by a human anymore and none of those tasks should be done by a human anymore. All those tasks are templated tasks that are highly repetitive that AI is perfectly capable of doing. What that means is that it’s only a matter of time, if you are starting a job at a PR organization where these or very similar tasks are what you’re doing, before your job is eliminated. There’s no polite way or soft way to say that - these types of tasks belong to the machines now and arguably should have been owned by the machines long ago. If this is your job today, it’s going away. Back in 2015, on stage at a conference, I said that if you do a task with a template today, a machine does that task without you tomorrow. While I may have been a bit early, that statement is now completely true. Any task you do today that is templated will become the domain of a machine in the very near future, if not today. Which means that as a new person to the PR field, you should be focusing on the tasks that do not have templates and cannot have templates. Grab a copy of your new job description and break it down into tasks with tangible outputs. Are those tasks templated? Is there a written standard operating procedure you are expected to adhere to for that task? If the answer is yes, a machine is going to consume that task sooner rather than later. People may not automate tasks well - I’ve lost count of the number of horrendous PR pitches I get every single day - but increasingly, they are automated. How do I know? As I show you in the new AI for Writers course from Trust Insights every AI model has a distinct style of writing and I recognize it more and more in every pitch, almost to the point where I can recite the specific order that AI is going to write a pitch, because people give it naive, sloppy instructions that creates naive, sloppy output. Here’s an example, courtesy of a PR pitch to my Marketing Over Coffee podcast I co-host with John Wall. I’m 99% certain this is straight up Claude:
This is 193 words of mind-numbing slop and I still can’t tell why I’d want to talk to Doofus. This is a large paragraph that says nothing except generic platitudes and hand waving. Let’s catalog:
One of the most important things you bring in your first 90 days on the job is a set of fresh eyes. If you read a pitch like this and it makes no sense to you, it could just be a steaming pile of hot garbage and not inexperience. some people will say, oh, you just don’t have enough experience in the role. If you can recognize garbage, and this is garbage, you can provide that feedback. This is clearly made by somebody who has no idea how to use AI tools. This is why you’ve been hired. Not to generate mechanical templates - the machines do that fine. No, your job is to exercise judgement that what the machine spit out is hot garbage, and to fix it. That plus doing the one thing machines can’t do and actively make worse: build human to human relationships. Build trust - from your counterparts in every media type to your stakeholders to your peers. That’s job one now. And if your manager on day 1 hands you a playbook of standard operating procedures that are all templates, know that your role has a pretty short expiration date. Take ownership of it and automate it with AI - then be the person who manages the AI. Part 4: The Platforms of PRThe public relations industry as a whole has tons of software vendors, and most of those software vendors are badly overpriced for what they do. A technically savvy person with a Claude Max subscription could probably custom code half the software that PR firms and organizations pay thousands of dollars a month for, and get it done over a long weekend. I’m serious. Media monitoring is fancy for web scraping and web search. Social media monitoring is also mostly scraping and APIs where available. There’s a legion of free, open source software (FOSS) tools for different PR functions, and today’s agentic AI tools can replicate many previously expensive tools. Here’s a simple example. Suppose I want to find a media contact’s information. I could spend time searching media databases, or I could fire up Claude Code with this straightforward prompt:
What you need to know on day 1 is that your PR organization is almost certainly dramatically overpaying for software and services that today’s modern AI tools can do for you, and probably shave a zero off the fees as well as a fast track to a promotion if you’re the person shepherding it. If I were starting at a PR firm today, I would ask for access to any agentic system within the employer’s ecosystem. If it’s a Microsoft shop, Microsoft Copilot Cowork. If it’s a Google shop, Gemini Spark or Antigravity. If it’s an OpenAI Shop, ChatGPT Work, and if it’s a Claude shop, Claude Cowork. Give me those tools, and I could do the work of ten account coordinators. Part 5: The Performance of PRNow for the part where you, as a day 1 employee, could really shine. Public relations is notorious for being bad at math, for being bad at measurement, for being unable to prove the impact of what PR does. If we think about it, measuring trust is difficult and expensive if you do it right. Measuring awareness is much cheaper but requires access to tools PR professionals are usually unfamiliar with and unsure how to use. And when it comes to measuring AI visibility... wow, there’s so much I could say, but most of it is angry ranting. there is a tremendous amount of snake oil around AI visibility. The 5 tools you need to measure AI visibility today are all free. You don’t have to pay a dime for them. Vendors charging tens of thousands of dollars for AI visibility measurement that’s largely fictional are doing the entire industry a massive disservice. What are those tools?
These five tools cost you, at most, USD 20 a month (for a Cloudflare paid plan). Any one of them gives you real data, not just about AI visibility, but also your PR efforts. Google Search Console in particular is the most valuable PR measurement tool you have access to, for one simple reason: If no one has Googled you, then you have achieved no awareness. If I could tell a day 1 PR practitioner one tool to focus on, it would be Google Search Console. The Google team just integrated search on X, YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram, making it a one stop shopping tool that’s incredibly budget friendly. Now, if you’re the average PR practitioner who is not, shall we say, quantitatively gifted, that’s okay. That’s literally what AI is for. Given a pile of exported reports in CSV format from all these different tools, plus a catalog of what you did, you can ask a tool like ChatGPT Work or Claude Cowork to do the data analysis for you and identify in what ways, if any, your PR program has had an impact. I will offer two caveats here: first, honesty is important for both you and your machine. You may not want to hear it, but your current PR program might be doing nothing at all. Not too long ago, I did an assessment for a client of the client’s PR program (to be clear, Trust Insights is not a PR agency, we don’t do PR work, and thus we are often brought in as an independent, impartial consulting firm to judge someone else’s results) and after gathering all the data, we proved... nothing. Despite what the client was spending a month on PR, their program had zero measurable, quantifiable impact at any level. Sure, there were the usual PR metrics, like unique monthly viewers of a publication, but when you use real analysis techniques like uplift modeling, very often you find that there’s no impact at all. If it’s day 1 at your new PR job and you have the ability to ask for it from your AI of choice, you can be THE person in your organization who understands PR measurement. You will also, unfortunately, be the Department of Bad News (which comes with its own reputational hazards), because you’ll find at most PR agencies and firms, their work has limited impact at best. This lack of measurement capability is why PR is often treated as a nice to have rather than a must have function in many companies. Without solid analytical proof, PR can’t defend its budget, which in turn means you can’t defend your job. If you become the person who can do that, then your career is on solid footing. Part 6: The Future of PRI’ll close with more ugly truth. The PR industry, like many industries, is in the clutches of corporate entities like private equity, institutional investors, huge holding companies, and investment monoliths who care mostly about extracting as much value as possible from their portfolio companies. This means maximizing profits, minimizing expenses, and generally creating unpleasant working conditions. Granted, this is not new - PR agencies in particular have always worked under challenging conditions, but the current macro market picture makes things worse. Not all companies, not all agencies, but one look at the reviews on Glassdoor will tell you pretty much all you need to know. Investment companies are squeezing firms from the top, and agentic AI is eroding it at the bottom. As we discussed in part 3, there are a TON of tasks that agentic AI is capable of now, and AI systems grow more capable by the day. The future is fairly straightforward to forecast: the most valuable work (and possibly the only work) will be things that don’t fit in a template or standard operating procedure. The sooner you identify that, the sooner you can shape a more durable career. I’ll add a special caution with AI. Because of the nature of PR firms and teams, you’ll be asked to do way more in less time than previous generations did, and you’ll reach for AI to do it, to meet deadlines. Do so cautiously. The simplest check to guard yourself against problems is one Katie Robbert tells the entire team at Trust Insights: for any given document, without it open in front of you, be able to tell a stakeholder in detail what’s in it. If you can’t, you outsourced your thinking to AI - and then that stakeholder has no reason to employ you. You’re a copy paste laborer, not a knowledge worker, and machines can copy paste better and cheaper than you. The third and final part, at least in the near term horizon, is that as the global economy is not exactly on solid ground, PR competes for the same bucket of money that SEO, advertising, marketing, demand gen, and every other team competes for inside the walls of corporations. Even topically, PR firms trying to justify their budgets are positioning themselves as GEO/AIO/AEO experts in a land grab against SEO agencies also positioning themselves as experts. What this means for you is that you’re going to face a lot of contradicting claims on every stakeholder call as each party dukes it out to look the best. Your antidote, your sword and shield, is the data, analysis, and insights you derive in ways others can’t. The PR profession has never been more challenging than it is today. It pays poorly, it’s high stress, high workload, mostly thankless, dealing with irrational stakeholders with Dom Perignon tastes and Miller Lite budgets, and changing faster than most practitioners realize. There IS opportunity to be had, if you’re adaptable and clever. If this is your day 1, I wish you the very best of luck. How Was This Issue?Rate this week’s newsletter issue with a single click/tap. Your feedback over time helps me figure out what content to create for you. Got More Feedback?๐ Please take my 6-question Reader Survey to tell me what you want! Here’s The UnsubscribeIt took me a while to find a convenient way to link it up, but here’s how to get to the unsubscribe.
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My Merch ShopI’ve been adding so much stuff that I’ve decided to bundle it all in what I call a Merch Shop, because otherwise there’s literally too much to keep track of and I run out of space in my own newsletter. So welcome to the Merch Shop! Courses: Books: Skills for Claude and Agentic AI:
Subscriptions: On The TubesHere’s what debuted on my YouTube channel this week:
Advertisement: New AI For Writers Course“It’s not X, it’s Y!” “XYZ is the load-bearing feature here.” “XYZ is the entire argument. Everything else is incidental.” Does AI writing grind your gears? When you use it at work and it spits out dreck despite your best efforts, does that frustrate you? It’s not your fault - and believe it or not, it’s not AI’s fault either. It’s that great writing is inherently low probability, and AI is a probability engine that trades in high probabilities. In the new Trust Insights AI for Writers Course, I teach you how to use tools, analysis, data, and code to force AI to write much more like you, giving it measurable requirements that it can obey to give you what you want - writing that doesn’t sound like the Terminator went on a bender with a thesaurus. The course is 22 lessons and includes tools, skills, plugins, and how to use them all to generate the kind of writing you’d want to read, and retails for USD 397. ✍️ Claim your seat here and start making AI write the way you expect. Get Back To Work!Folks who post jobs in the free Analytics for Marketers Slack community may have those jobs shared here, too. If you’re looking for work, check out these recent open positions, and check out the Slack group for the comprehensive list.
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