A career in marketing communications puts you in a long conversation with public relations. I’ve briefed PR agencies in Lima and Sydney, sat alongside them through product launches, and run media relations directly when there was no agency and no budget for one. The tools have changed across all of it. What hasn’t is the thing the work runs on: a journalist’s willingness to take your story.
What PR buys you
Public relations is the discipline of earning attention. Where advertising pays for placement and controls the message, PR persuades third parties (journalists, editors, opinion leaders, broadcasters) to tell your story in their own words, on their own platforms, to their own audiences. The deliverable is coverage, credibility, and the trust that comes from someone outside your business choosing to talk about it.
A PR agency makes that happen: writing the story, pitching it to the right journalists, managing the contacts who decide whether it runs, and shaping how your brand shows up in earned media over time. The work spans press releases, launch events, executive interview prep, coverage monitoring, and stepping in when something goes wrong. The deliverable across all of it is third-party legitimacy: what other people say about your brand.
How PR has expanded
The core has held, but the surface area has grown enormously. PR agencies today also handle social media engagement, influencer and creator strategy, content for owned channels, podcast outreach, executive thought leadership, and crisis communications. The discipline now reaches almost anywhere a brand can be talked about.
The media landscape has fragmented in parallel. Spray-and-pray press releases have lost most of their value, but the release still works as a clean source document when the story is real, the angle is clear, and the outreach is targeted. Niche newsletters, podcasts, and creator-led media now matter alongside traditional outlets, and brands compete directly with journalists for attention through their own channels.
Earned media is a long game
Unlike paid placements, PR doesn’t guarantee outcomes. You can write a strong release, send it to the right journalist at the right time, and still see nothing run. The journalist decides. That uncertainty is the discipline. Teams that produce coverage consistently are the ones that have built genuine trust over years: they pitch only when the news is real, and they respect the journalist’s beat. Coverage isn’t a transaction; it’s a return on a connection maintained over time.
KOLs and the broader media universe
The target list for a PR campaign used to be journalists at established outlets. Today it includes Key Opinion Leaders: analysts, industry figures, podcast hosts, niche YouTubers, and topic-focused LinkedIn voices whose audiences trust them on a specific subject. For some niches and some audiences, the right KOL placement now outperforms a tier-one outlet mention. The PR agencies worth working with have built reach across both worlds, and the right target for your story might be a journalist, a creator, an analyst, or all three.
In-house, agency, freelance
A full-service PR agency on retainer brings depth of contacts, the bandwidth to handle multiple ongoing campaigns, and full coverage of pitching, monitoring, and crisis. An in-house team works best when the industry is stable, the journalist beats are well-defined, and the volume of news is manageable. Freelance specialists or boutique agencies cover the gaps: launching a single product, breaking into a new vertical, handling a sensitive announcement, or managing a moment of crisis. Most mature marketing functions use a mix.
For niche industries with stable journalist and a small enough world that everyone knows everyone, direct contact frequently beats agency-mediated outreach. A good example is the Australian audio-visual industry, where one of the major distributors, runs media relations directly with 60-plus named contacts across 20-plus specialist outlets (AV.Technology, Connected Magazine, CX Magazine, Mixdown, AudioTechnology, ITNews, among others).
International launches, complex narratives, and markets where the in-house team’s contacts don’t yet reach are agency territory. When Baraja, a Sydney-based deep-tech LiDAR startup, launched globally in 2018 with media events in Sydney and San Francisco, the in-house team had ties to some international tech press but not the full set needed to introduce a new Spectrum-Scan LiDAR architecture. Agency partners Mighty PR and Raffetto Herman helped with journalist outreach around the launch events.
The double edge
The same independence that makes earned coverage valuable also makes it unpredictable. A friendly outlet is still not your friend. Its loyalty is to the story and its audience, and the one that covers you warmly this quarter can run the unflattering story next quarter. That’s the deal, and it’s the whole reason the coverage is worth anything. So a sensible programme plans in both directions, with media-coached spokespeople and prepared positions ready before the day you need them. Which is where crisis stops being theoretical.
Crisis is its own category
When something goes wrong publicly, a good PR agency earns its annual retainer in a single week. Crisis comms is its own discipline: holding statements drafted in hours, journalist contacts called on at scale, message discipline maintained across spokespeople, social monitoring escalating to leadership in real time. Most in-house teams don’t have the bandwidth, the experience, or the contact breadth to manage a serious crisis well. If your sector is exposed to reputational risk, having an agency on standby may be well worth it.
Investing in the relationship
The bond with the journalist is the “product”, and there are different ways to invest in it: gestures, content, or both. In a 2017 conversation, Fiorella Gutierrez, a Peru-born marcom professional now based in Canada, put the priority plainly:
The most important thing is the relationship the agency has with the media, and the treatment you give them as a brand.
Her own example was a small gift she sent 50 journalists for Peru’s Journalist’s Day in October, with no pitch attached, a way of saying “you matter to me, thank you for what you do” and earning goodwill before it could be needed. Any gesture like this needs care, though: never tied to a pitch, respectful of editorial policy, and modest enough that it reads as thanks rather than influence-buying.
At the Canberra Business Chamber, where I led marketing communications during 2020 and 2021, the CEO at the time had a line that stuck with me: the media loves a few numbers. The original ACT business research and member opinion figures we put out were among the fastest-picked-up content the Chamber produced, regularly running across local TV, radio, and print. Where Fiorella’s example was a small gift on the right date, the Chamber’s was a regular flow of original data. Different gestures, same purpose: giving the journalist something they genuinely value.
The fullest version of that investment I’ve seen came earlier in my career. From 2009 to 2010, I worked at CAD Ciudadanos al Día (Informed Citizens), a Peruvian non-profit running the Best Practices in Public Management Awards, the country’s longest-running programme recognising excellence in public sector management. Around the awards, CAD ran 2 annual press meetings where journalists got something rare: validated research and metrics they could cite, training on how to read public-management data, and direct access to the public servants behind the winning practices. We also published a weekly bulletin of research and data points built for journalists to use, an ongoing tool rather than a one-off pitch. It’s the same lesson the Chamber CEO would later put plainly: the media loves data, numbers, and metrics.
The journalists’ own reflections stuck with me. One regional reporter said the 7th and 8th gatherings made them feel like part of the family, a horizontal dialogue with the organisers that let them work with more passion. Another said the objective information made it possible to take a position and test it against the reality in their own community. The data, the access, and the human dynamic all compound. Give journalists something they can use, and they remember where it came from.
The practical mechanics
When you inherit a media list from a predecessor, a short personal introduction to each journalist goes a long way: who you are, the role you’ve stepped into, the stories the brand will be putting out, an open invitation to keep things going. Journalists work with named contacts, and an unfamiliar address sliding into the inbox is one they’ll start filtering. A simple introduction earns the right to be read.
Sending a release is simpler than most people make it. Send a plain email, with the full text pasted into the body so a journalist can scan and copy without opening anything. Attach the same release as a PDF or Word doc for the record, and add links to an electronic press kit or online newsroom holding the assets: logos, headshots, photography, B-roll, founder bios, fact sheets. The body carries the story, the attachment is the formal version, and the links give extra detail for journalists who want to explore further without asking for downloads.
What the work has taught me
A handful of things hold up whether I’m briefing an agency, sitting beside one, or doing the outreach myself. The news has to be real; finding the angle on it is shared work, where the brand owns the substance and a good agency often spots a framing the in-house team has stopped seeing. The best agencies sell their contacts, the weakest sell press releases, so access is worth paying for and volume isn’t. Availability on a tight deadline matters more than it should: the second-best source gets the call when the first doesn’t pick up. Weak announcements are better killed before they go out than pushed and ignored. And the coverage is never the real scoreboard; the relationship behind it is.
That’s the throughline across every version of this job. Every contact is worth more than any single placement. A gift on the right date when it fits, data shared when you have it, a door opened to people your audience can’t reach on their own. Look after those, and the coverage tends to follow.