Interview with Lynda Williams, Founder of the WorkWell PR System

Every few years, someone declares the death of the media release.

Today, the arguments sound familiar. Journalists don't read them anymore. Everything is social-first. AI is replacing traditional media outreach. It's all about the pitch. Press releases are becoming little more than AI-generated filler.

And yet, when we speak with journalists across Asia Pacific and the Middle East, a different picture emerges.

Media releases aren't dead, but expectations around them have changed significantly.

We've analysed more than 10,000 Journalist Interest Survey responses in the Telum Media platform collected over the past five years, alongside insights gathered from conversations with editors, reporters, and producers across the region.

Key takeaways:

1. Journalists still value useful PR content
2. Relevance matters more than reach
3. The pitch and the release serve different roles
4. The best releases reduce friction for journalists
5. Modern releases need to support multiple platforms

The conclusion is clear: journalists still value media releases, but they value them for different reasons than they once did.

The media release has evolved from a distribution tool into something far more strategic.

The media release is no longer the story

For decades, many PR professionals treated the media release as the centrepiece of media relations activity.

Write the release. Send it widely. Hope for coverage - “spray and pray”.

That approach was far from perfect, but you could get away with it in an era when newsrooms were larger, competition for attention was lower, and journalists had more time to evaluate incoming information.

Today's reality is very different.

Journalists are producing content across multiple platforms, often with smaller teams and tighter deadlines. Their inboxes are flooded with pitches, announcements, thought leadership submissions, and increasingly, AI-generated content.

As a result, journalists have become far more selective about what earns their attention.

The modern media release is no longer just about news stories. It has become a source-of-truth asset, a newsroom resource, and a content hub that supports broader communications activity.

The best PR teams understand this shift.

“The strongest message from journalists can be summarised in a single phrase: ‘Understand what I cover’. Relevance remains the most important factor in successful media engagement.”

What journalists are actually rejecting

One of the most revealing findings from our analysis is that journalists are not rejecting PR content altogether.

What they're rejecting is low-value outreach.

Across thousands of responses, the same frustrations appeared repeatedly:

• Irrelevant pitches
• Generic outreach
• Mass distribution
• Weak story angles
• Excessive follow-ups

In other words, this is less a rejection of media releases and more a rejection of poor media relations practice.

The strongest message from journalists can be summarised in a single phrase:

"Understand what I cover."

Relevance remains the most important factor in successful media engagement. In fact, our journalist surveys over the past two years have seen a sharp increase in a desire for both relevance and personalisation in pitches.

Journalists increasingly assess pitches within seconds. If the connection to their beat, audience, or current priorities isn't immediately obvious, the opportunity is often lost before the email is even opened.

The pitch and the release have different jobs

One of the biggest misconceptions in modern media relations is treating the pitch and the release as the same thing.

They are not.

The pitch exists to earn attention; the release exists to support the story.

The best pitches are:

• Brief
• Human
• Relevant
• Contextual
• Conversational

The best releases are:

• Structured
• Factual
• Complete
• Reusable
• Easy to reference

At a recent Telum Media event, a senior journalist described the fastest way to kill a pitch with a single word: “Respect”. Or a lack thereof.

A generic greeting. A story unrelated to their beat. A mass-produced email that demonstrates no understanding of their audience.

All signal a lack of respect for the journalist's time and expertise.

High-performing PR teams increasingly write pitches and releases for different audiences. The pitch is written for the journalist. The release is written for the journalist's audience.

That distinction matters.

Why journalists still value media releases

Despite predictions of their demise, journalists continue to actively request media releases.

But they want releases that help them work more efficiently.

The most common requests include concise writing, clear headlines, strong news angles, supporting data (with downloadable images and assets), spokesperson access, and easy-to-use formats.

These preferences reveal the modern role of the release: it functions as a workflow tool.

A strong release helps journalists:

• Understand the story quickly
• Verify information
• Access supporting materials
• Build content efficiently

The best releases reduce friction. And in today's newsroom environment, reducing friction is often more valuable than generating hype.

Think beyond media coverage

Another major shift is that media releases are increasingly serving multiple audiences.

A modern release doesn’t just support journalists; it might also support clients and prospects, employees, investors and analysts, partners, and search visibility.

Rather than creating a single-use document, leading communications teams are building content ecosystems.

The release becomes the foundation for:

• Media outreach
• Newsroom content
• Executive communications
• Social media content
• Email campaigns
• Sales collateral
• Thought leadership activity

This approach not only improves consistency but also increases the return on investment from every announcement.

The role of the modern media release

Not every story needs a release

Perhaps one of the most important lessons is recognising when a media release is the wrong tool.

Releases tend to perform best when there is:

• Genuine news value
• Multiple stakeholder audiences
• A need for factual consistency
• Strong supporting assets
• Broader business significance

They are often less effective for internal milestones framed as major news (or self-congratulatory announcements), generic thought leadership, and untargeted mass outreach.

In some situations, a targeted pitch, LinkedIn strategy, executive commentary programme, or direct relationship-based outreach may be more effective.

Good communications strategy isn't about defaulting to a media release; it's about choosing the right tool for the objective.

A framework for modern media releases

If there is one word that captures what journalists are asking for today, it is respect.

At Telum Media, we summarise this through the RESPECT framework:

R – Relevance
Make it relevant to the journalist, their audience and the moment.

E – Efficiency
Help journalists work faster through clear, concise, and usable content.

S – Substance
Provide genuine value through expertise, data, insight, or access.

P – Personalisation
Demonstrate that you've done your homework.

E – Ecosystem
Think beyond the release and consider how it supports broader communications goals.

C – Clarity
Make the key message immediately obvious.

T – Timing
Reach out at the right time, not simply any time.

What journalists are asking for in a pitch / media release: RESPECT

The future of the media release

The debate over whether media releases are dead misses the point.

The more useful question is how do we make releases work better in today’s media environment?

Journalists still value relevant information, credible sources, strong story angles, and efficient communication. Media releases continue to play an important role in delivering those things.

But success today depends less on the existence of the release itself and more on how strategically it is used.

The media release remains a valuable communications tool.

Just not in the way many of us were taught to use it.

FAQs

Are media releases still useful in 2026?

Yes. Journalists still value media releases, but these days want targeted outreach, relevance to their beat, alignment with their audience, and contextual pitching.

What makes a media release useful to journalists?

Journalists are looking for releases in a format that helps them work efficiently. Which means releases that are concise, factual, with a clear angle, contain usable quotes, and come with downloadable assets and supporting data.

What is the difference between a pitch and a media release?

A pitch earns the journalist’s attention in their cluttered Inbox. A media release supports the story by providing structured, factual, and reusable information relevant to their audience.

With more than 30 years’ experience spanning journalism, corporate communications and media intelligence, Reuben Aitchison is Telum Media’s Head of Insights and Communications.

Explore Telum Media tools that help PR teams pitch with precision. 

In 2022, when we returned to the office after Melbourne's two years of lockdown, it was the silence that surprised me most. Not because the people weren't there, but because the juniors we'd hired and the ones we promoted during the pandemic were listening intently, absorbing everything around them.

As artificial intelligence reshapes the way our industry works, what I hear from colleagues and witness in my own agency is that our offices are falling silent again. Only this time it is not because the juniors aren't listening. It is because fewer of them are making it through the front door.

This is not an accident. It is a rational response to the changed economics of expertise.

A rational choice with a hidden cost

When I founded Stake 18 months ago, I made a deliberate structural choice: hire seniors and leverage AI as much as we reasonably can. Clients pay for judgment, and judgment is what senior practitioners carry. In a world where AI can produce a competent first draft in seconds, the most defensible thing a firm like ours can offer is the capacity to know what to do when the situation has no precedent and the stakes are real.

It was a sound business decision. It was also, I have come to realise, a decision that removes me from the pipeline from which I have benefited for 25 years.

Across my career, I have absorbed tacit knowledge from senior people who never had to teach it explicitly, because proximity did the work. I sat near people making hard calls. I watched them manage a crisis with no playbook, read a room wrong and recover, and hold a line under pressure when the easier path was to fold. Whatever the work was that put me in those rooms, it was never really the point. The rooms were the point. And I was allowed to be in them.

And here is what troubles me about that. The market is now actively rewarding firms for making exactly this choice. Not through malice, but through logic.

AI reduces the economic case for hiring at the base. A senior led, AI supported model is not just a positioning line, it is where the incentives point. Which means the mechanisms through which future expertise develops are being quietly dismantled, not by careless firms, but by careful ones.

The question nobody has answered

Last year, I had the opportunity to ask a chief technology officer of one of the world's most valuable technology companies how they were approaching this challenge as an employer. How do you develop judgment in people who may never have to spend a day doing the grinding work that judgment used to be built through? They didn't have an answer.

If the organisations building this technology haven't solved it, the communications industry's failure to reckon with it looks less like negligence and more like a shared blind spot. AI removes the need for the ticket. But the room still exists, and judgment still needs to transfer somehow.

The lost habit of learning by being there

The traditional apprenticeship in our profession was never formally designed. It worked because volume created proximity, and proximity created osmosis. Junior practitioners wrote the releases nobody used, compiled the media lists, and sat in on the client calls they weren't expected to contribute to.

In doing so, they absorbed, slowly and imperfectly, the thing that no brief can teach: how a senior mind moves through an ambiguous situation and arrives at a defensible position.

That system is now quietly breaking down, and nobody is building a replacement. The apprenticeship pipeline is not collapsing because anyone decided it should. It is collapsing because increasingly it doesn't make sense to pay for it anymore. And for the time being, the people who will feel that most acutely are not the firms making the rational choice. They are the future practitioners who never get to be in the room.

Making judgement visible

So, what do we owe the generation ahead of us?

Two things, I think. The first is deliberate proximity. Senior practitioners need to stop assuming osmosis will do the work and start narrating their judgement out loud. Invite the junior into the client call not to contribute but to watch. Debrief out loud after the hard conversation. Say the thing you would previously have just done.

The second is counterintuitive: use AI as the mechanism, not the replacement. Let AI generate the options. Require the junior to choose and defend and then interrogate that defence. The judgment transfer happens in the interrogation, which is closer to how good legal and medical training works than anything our industry has ever formally done. AI, used with intention, can become the forcing function for the kind of explicit, reasoned, defensible thinking we were always trying to develop but never had a reliable way to teach.

For two years our profession has been consumed by anxiety about what AI means for our own careers. That is a reasonable response to an unreasonable rate of change. The harder question, and the one we have been slower to ask, is what it means for the people coming after us.

While the future remains unclear, we can at least be deliberate about handing on what we were given.

Matthew (Matt) Thomas is Founder and Chief Catalyst at Stake The Reputation Company, a Melbourne-based consultancy working across brand, reputation, communications, and public affairs. He has advised some of Australia’s largest private companies and has worked extensively with global organisations localising their storytelling and narratives for Australian audiences. His experience spans consumer, government, health, infrastructure, technology, and corporate reputation, including advisory work at all levels of government in Australia.

Matt’s work sits at the intersection of communications, behaviour change, and institutional strategy. He is also a contributor to the The Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose, writing on reputation, legitimacy, and the growing gap between organisational messaging and operational reality.

Grace Chiang has returned to Endowus as Vice President Communications, joining the digital wealth firm's leadership team.

Based in Singapore, she oversees investment and corporate communications, executive and employer branding, corporate social responsibility and internal communications.

Grace first joined Endowus as Head of PR and Communications in 2021, before moving to Xora, a Temasek-backed deep tech venture firm as Head of Marketing and Communications.