We owe the media more than this
PR has long been grounded in its relationships with the media. Yet in response to the LLM-driven gutting of journalism, our industry’s response has been to take more and give nothing back.
If you spent last week in Cannes, you might have heard several prolific PR industry CEOs talking up "the renewed importance of earned" in the LLM era.
Their logic is straightforward. Research suggests that earned media fuels what LLMs say about a company, brand or topic, which of course makes pitching the press more valuable than ever. But, as I heard the readout from a number of these Cannes panels, I found them tone-deaf to a structural reality: as agencies pitch more pitching, the journalistic outlets they rely on for success are steadily eroding.
Roughly 58.5% of U.S. searches now end without a single click to an external website, as AI‑driven interfaces increasingly answer queries without sending traffic back to publishers. Meanwhile, the news industry lost an estimated 6,900 jobs in 2025 alone — an 8% decline in a single year.
“The renewed importance of earned" is a good sales story for agency executives seeking a new angle. It’s also disrespectful. Our industry is grounded in our relationships with journalists, yet these leaders are directly monetising the source of journalism's collapse — by asking for more, and more, and more from outlets who won’t see a financial reward.
