The Future of Media Relations Is Not Media, It's Influence

The newsroom is shrinking. Since 2005, the newspaper industry has lost nearly two-thirds of its journalists.

Nearly 15,000 media jobs were eliminated in 2024 alone. The reporters who remain are stretched thin, covering more ground with fewer resources.

For organizations that have built their communications strategies around media access, this is a structural shift, and most have yet to reckon with what it actually means.

The instinct has been to pitch harder. More press releases. More follow-ups. More targets on the list. But the average journalist response rate sits at just 3.43%, with lack of relevance as the top reason for rejection. Effort alone does not move the needle.

The deeper problem is trust. Shrinking newsrooms have created a vacuum that audiences are filling with skepticism. They are more fragmented, less anchored to legacy media, and increasingly indifferent to organizations that only show up when they want coverage.

The unit of value in communications is no longer the placement. It is the perception, and perception is shaped long before any journalist picks up the phone.

That is where influence enters. In his landmark work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini identified seven principles that govern how people form judgements and make decisions. Two of them cut closest to the problem at hand.

Authority explains why audiences defer to sources with demonstrated expertise over time. Social Proof explains why credibility compounds: the more an organization is seen, cited and referenced by others, the more its voice carries weight.

Together they describe something that no pitch can manufacture. Influence of this kind is accumulated. It is the product of consistent positioning, not a single well-timed statement.

The organizations that understand this show up differently. They invest in original research. They build executives into credible public voices before a crisis arrives. Journalists rank original research and exclusives among the content they value most from communications professionals.

That is not a media relations tactic. It is an influence strategy dressed in media relations clothing.

Artificial intelligence is already flooding the information ecosystem, lowering the cost of content production while driving the noise level up. Narratives can be generated, adapted and redistributed at a pace that outstrips traditional response cycles.

As content becomes easier to produce, credibility becomes harder to sustain. The role of media relations shifts under this pressure, away from generating outputs and towards maintaining narrative discipline. The question is no longer how to secure attention, but how to ensure attention leads to the intended interpretation.

None of this works in isolation. Media relations needs to sit alongside policy communication, digital strategy and stakeholder engagement. A consistent and credible narrative does not emerge from a press release.

It is built across every channel where audiences form opinions. People trust sources they feel they know. AI can replicate tone and mimic structure, but it cannot build genuine familiarity. The human advantage in communications is not speed. It is the capacity to be known, trusted, and believed by the people who still decide what gets told.

Institutions that treat communications as a reactive function will find the ground shifting under them. Influence does not wait for a campaign budget to be approved.

Coverage was always a proxy. The real prize was always trust.

David Olajide, a communications professional with nearly a decade of experience, is the senior marketing and communications manager at Curzon PR in London. He also runs the firm’s blog, PR Insider.