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!
Public Service Announcement: It’s the first of a new month, April Fools’ Day. Check every email, headline, tweet, and Slack message as judiciously as you would an AI output. Now onto our regularly scheduled newsletter.
What You Should Know
Why Journalists’ AI Use Raises the PR Bar
Two new reports landed last month that show where media relations is heading. Muck Rack surveyed nearly 900 journalists and found that 82% now use at least one AI tool in their work. Australian company Medianet surveyed 800 journalists and found that 78% say receiving an AI-written pitch decreases their trust in the PR professional who sent it, and nearly half say they can spot AI-generated copy almost every time.
Journalists using AI to work faster means generic pitches fail faster, too. If AI is triaging a reporter’s inbox, a pitch that does not immediately signal relevance does not get a second look. The bar for earning attention has gone up because the volume of noise has made reporters more efficient at ignoring it.
Muck Rack’s survey shows journalists value clear relevance to their beat, access to sources, and original research or data. Some 78% said a pitch feels genuinely relevant when it directly affects the community their audience belongs to. Are your pitches included in that 78%? Do they just carry water for your brand, or do they offer something genuinely valuable to a reporter’s audience?
If it’s the latter, AI can help it break through. It can pull background on a reporter’s recent coverage, identify the angle most relevant to their beat, and help analyze whether the hook actually serves their audience.
But you ultimately decide whether the angle is strong enough and whether it supports the relationship you’ve forged with the reporter. (Muck Rack’s report also shares how reporters say they want to be pitched: 78% want to be pitched before noon, 69% favor sub-200-word pitches, and 62% prefer 1:1 email pitches.)
The next phase of media relations will be defined by who uses AI to get sharper, not just faster. If reporters are relying on AI to decide what’s worth their time, then your pitch is competing with a system trained to spot patterns, shortcuts, and anything that looks like it was generated without real intent behind it.
All that puts more pressure on the human aspect of media relations, presenting a point of view or idea that holds up when someone, or something, quickly scans it.
Elsewhere …
- An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In
- Buying the Dip? This AI Agent Will Do It for You
- OpenAI Raises $122 Billion to Accelerate the Next Phase of AI
- How the AI Transition is Jolting Big Tech Stocks
Tips and Tricks
💤 Feign some laziness
What’s happening: Sometimes ChatGPT can drone on. Often, its verbose responses actually repeat information and talk in circles, so by the time you get to the end, you’re getting “a meeting that could have been an email” vibes. One Reddit user has found a solution.
User AdCold1610 found that if you tell ChatGPT you’re lazy, it removes a lot of the fluff. All you have to do is add “extremely lazy person here” to the end of your prompt, and it distills the most important information.
What it looks like in action: Ask ChatGPT to explain quantum mechanics, and it offers a 362-word response (this time, anyway. Generative AI is probabilistic, so unless you’re asking something fact-based, like “what is 2+2,” you almost certainly won’t get the exact same answer twice).
The same prompt with “extremely lazy person here” at the end generates a far more digestible 244-word response that is broken down into much shorter paragraphs and includes a one-line, “ultra-lazy summary.”
Quote of the Week
“Once we get past the fear of the unknown and we recognize that this is the internet, this is the future, the worst thing we could do is shut the door on it. And the most important thing we should be doing is to approach it from a perspective of knowledge, education.”
— Becky Sosnov, Head of Corporate Affairs at Reflection AI, speaking about building AI agents at the Axios AI+DC event last week
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