Each week we'll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!

What You Should Know

Pitching May Look Different in 2026. Here’s How

Every year, we see a new set of predictions for the industry. More AI. Fewer reporters. Leaner newsrooms. Faster cycles.

How about a new format for pitches?

Because while tools, staffing, and workflows have changed, the way many pitches are written hasn’t. They still assume a linear reading experience: a hook, a narrative arc, a reveal of why something matters. We can't assume that path anymore.

Let’s start with the inbox that PR pros send pitches to. Google recently announced it will start infusing Gemini into Gmail inboxes. Instead of a list of emails, users will see summarized threads, inferred priority, and extracted context. Now, surely not every reporter uses Gmail, but that AI influence is changing how humans read, too.

A sturdier pitch format puts the bottom line up front with a short, explicit block of facts. Who is involved. What happened. When. Why it matters. Numbers included. Terms defined. One or two links that answer obvious follow-up questions.

The narrative can still follow. Context still matters. But the core information has to stand on its own, because there’s a chance that’s all a reporter — or their tools — will ever see.

Short, to-the-point pitches aren’t new, but formatting them this way helps make them stand out so that reporters and their inboxes understand the value sooner. As PR Daily’s Allison Carter recently noted, the same bad pitches (now generated by AI) that journalists complain about today showed up a decade ago. AI didn’t invent bad pitching. It just made it faster, which in turn added volume.

Cision’s Inside PR 2026 report lists storytelling as the most in-demand skill for the year ahead. But storytelling looks different in the AI era. At least in scenarios like pitching reporters.

For many teams, storytelling still means narrative flow and a strong hook. Those skills still matter — but they assume the story is encountered intact. In practice, pitches are increasingly experienced as fragments. Storytelling in 2026 means structuring information so the story survives compression.

If storytelling is truly the most important skill in 2026, then the pitch format has to reflect how stories are actually received. Not read once, top to bottom, but summarized, searched, and resurfaced over time.

Many predictions, across this industry and others, suggest that AI will move from hype to execution. If that’s true, storytelling, and the pitch itself, has to change with the times.

Elsewhere …

• Apple Picks Google to Make Siri Smarter
• Anthropic’s Viral New Work Tool Wrote Itself
• National Labs Are Quietly Making Breakthroughs in AI-Powered Cyber Defense
• College Paper Fights to Stop AI Slop Website from Stealing Its Identity
• Sure, AI Is Speeding up Work — It's Also Creating More

Tips and Tricks

👣 Retrace your steps

What’s happening:Sometimes AI is about as good at following directions as a toddler with selective hearing. In fact, those on our team with young children often talk about how parenting that age group makes our AI muscles stronger because you really need to spell out instructions explicitly. But it’s not always foolproof.

In a recent poll within our firm, AI not following directions is among the top five challenges of working with the technology. In some cases, that’s because the directions weren’t specific enough. In others, AI just dropped the ball. To figure out which, you’ve got to retrace the steps of your prompt.

How?: Start by rereading your conversation to see if you can identify where things went wrong. If you look at your prompts through a critical lens, did you offer enough context or explain things clearly enough? If not, you can click on the pencil icon under your prompt in ChatGPT (similiar capabilities exist on other platforms) and edit the prompt in question. When you re-send, the output you didn’t like goes away, and ChatGPT tries again based on your new prompt.

But sometimes…: You also might be doing everything right and the AI just missed the mark, especially when it comes to reading what you share as source material. This most commonly happens if the AI doesn’t read a link or document you shared. If it seems like context is getting lost, ask, “Did you actually read the contents of [the document or page]?” Semantics are important here: If you ask, “Did you read the link?” it might say yes because it looked at the URL but didn’t actually visit the page.

Quote of the Week

“(J)ust as illegal file-sharing through Napster eventually evolved into licensed platforms like Spotify and Pandora, the current wave of lawsuits against AI companies will likely establish proper licensing and payment systems. That’s the long game. In the meantime, artists have an immediate choice: use AI transparently or leave audiences guessing.” 

— Poet and filmmaker Dave Malone, in a post about how writers and artists should label their AI use

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