I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what “media relations” actually means in 2026.
For much of my career, the equation was relatively straightforward. When I was a reporter, getting a story on air or online was the end product. Later, working in PR, I saw the equation from the other side: getting the right story, interview, or placement was often the goal. Both models made sense for the media environment they were built around, but I’m not sure either way of looking at it completely holds up anymore.
Traditional media still matters enormously, and I don’t buy the argument that companies can simply become their own publishers and make earned media irrelevant. A great story in a respected publication can establish credibility, introduce an idea to a huge audience, and shape a conversation in a way that is very difficult to manufacture on your own.
What has changed is everything happening around that story.
Someone might first discover a company through a story in The New York Times, but they could just as easily hear its CEO on a podcast, come across an executive’s perspective on LinkedIn, read a newsletter that references its research, or see an interesting take shared by someone they follow. Increasingly, they may ask an AI assistant a question about a company, person, or topic and get an answer without visiting any of those sources directly.
To me, that doesn’t make communications less important. It makes the job considerably more interesting.
Media Relations Is Becoming Something Broader
For a long time, it was relatively easy to organize communications into distinct buckets. PR handled the press. Social handled social channels. Content produced articles and other owned materials. Brand worried about the larger identity, while executives were often brought into the mix when there was an interview, conference, or particularly important announcement.
Those distinctions still exist organizationally, but audiences obviously don’t experience a company that way. They see an interview here, a LinkedIn post there, perhaps a piece of research or an executive appearing on a podcast. Over time, all of those encounters contribute to an impression of what a company knows, what it believes, and whether it has anything worthwhile to add to the conversation.
That means I’m increasingly interested in communications strategies that build around ideas rather than individual outputs.
A good media placement absolutely has value, but so does having executives with something interesting to say and helping them develop a recognizable point of view over time. Original research can generate earned media while also creating material for social channels, executive content, speaking opportunities, and conversations with customers. An interesting idea that starts in a LinkedIn post could eventually become an op-ed, an interview topic, or the basis for a larger campaign.
None of this replaces media relations. It makes media relations part of a much broader system.
Journalism Skills Still Matter—Perhaps More Than Ever
One thing I’ve found particularly interesting about moving between journalism, media, and communications is how many of the underlying skills remain the same even as the job changes.
As a reporter, you learn fairly quickly that having information is not the same as having a story. You have to figure out what matters, ask the question someone else hasn’t asked, find the tension or relevance, and then make the result understandable to someone who hasn’t spent all day thinking about the subject.
Those instincts translate remarkably well to communications.
Companies today have no shortage of things they could talk about. There are product announcements, executives, proprietary data, customer insights, industry trends, and internal expertise. The harder question is figuring out which of those things someone outside the organization would actually care about and why.
That’s a fundamentally journalistic question, and I suspect it will become even more valuable as companies produce more of their own content. The ability to publish has become almost universal. The ability to recognize what is genuinely interesting has not.
Then There’s AI
AI adds another wrinkle because it is beginning to change not only how content gets created, but how people discover information in the first place.
For decades, communications professionals have thought carefully about the intermediaries between an organization and its audience. Journalists and editors were one layer. Search engines became another, followed by social platforms and their algorithms. Now AI assistants are increasingly becoming another starting point for discovery.
If someone wants to understand a company, an executive, or an industry, they may no longer begin by searching for a collection of links and deciding what to read. They may simply ask a question and receive a synthesized answer drawing from information published across the web.
We’re still early in understanding exactly what that means for communications, but I think it makes the broader information environment around an organization increasingly important. Media coverage matters. So does what a company publishes itself, what its executives say publicly, what other credible sources say about it, and whether there is a consistent set of ideas connecting those things.
In that environment, the question for a communications team becomes bigger than, “Where can we get this story placed?” We also have to think about what someone—or something—researching the organization is likely to understand about it after encountering all of those different signals.
Maybe the Lines Should Get Blurrier
I expect the lines between PR, content, social, executive communications and brand to become even less distinct over the next few years, and I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing.
There will always be specialists, and there should be. But the strongest communications programs will increasingly need to understand how these disciplines reinforce one another rather than treating each as its own distribution channel with its own calendar and set of outputs.
A journalist writing about your company, an executive explaining an idea on a podcast, a thoughtful LinkedIn post, a piece of original research, and an article on your own website can all serve very different purposes. But ideally, they are contributing to the same larger understanding of who you are and why anyone should pay attention.
That’s why, despite everything changing around media, I don’t think the fundamental purpose of communications has changed very much.
The goal was never really the press release or even the placement. Those were ways of accomplishing something much more important: getting people to know who you are, understand what you have to say, and give them a reason to care.
We simply have a much bigger canvas to work with now.
