A very smart PR colleague of mine recently asked me if I think PR will survive AI.
The headline for this blog purposely uses classic clickbait phrasing because that’s another obstacle PR and journalism have had to deal with. There was a while when clickbait was the big scourge. But PR and journalism survived that…to some extent.
Before that, social media was supposed to vanquish PR and journalism. And PR survived that…though it has had a negative impact on the media industry. Many people don’t pay for news coverage, and surveys show they get their news from social media influencers. Despite knowing those influencers aren’t 100% reliable, readers are fine with that.
We think PR will survive AI because it is currently a tool, and in some hands, an inexact tool. There’s a lot AI can do, and it is getting better — fast. (A year ago or so, AI-generated photos produced mistakes, but AI no longer produces third arms and legs anymore.) Right now, the equivalent of the third arm is what people call AI slop: content that may be smoothly written but doesn’t provide real insights or information. We believe that it won’t be as easy for AI to improve AI-generated content as it has been to remove third arms in photos.
Meanwhile, a key component of PR’s survival is the survival of the media. Based on what we’ve been seeing, that’s not as assured.
We are worried about the future of journalism because the media landscape is increasingly fragmented. We talked with a client today about the need to pitch reporters who now post their work to Substack because they continue to produce quality journalism, even if no longer for a recognized brand name like the Washington Post.
Fragmented media makes PR harder because there are more people to follow, learn about, pitch to, and develop relationships with. But it also means that PR will be important because, while AI can help with the research, it still can’t help do the things a top media relations person can do, which is to build relationships and write pitches that are personalized and compelling.
There are two big problems facing journalism–and PR has a symbiotic relationship with journalism.
- Good journalism is fact-checked and expensive to produce. But many people want to get news for free.
- The audience no longer trusts the media. A dizzying array of news providers means that each of us may live in a different echo chamber. That affects who you trust. And as we’ve seen with news organizations, most recently (but not exclusively) CBS News, changing how you define and present news rarely works well. According to media reports, CBS now tilts to the right but we haven’t seen an uptick in viewers. The same happened when the Washington Post editorial page began tilting right. The result was that they lost subscribers who no longer trusted the Post–without picking up new subscribers who liked the new politics of the Post’s opinion page.
We know we need good journalism. We’re not sure what that will look like over the next few years.
We also believe PR will continue to be needed. It won’t look like it did 15 years ago.
But then, what does look the same?
