The earned media renaissance has a maths problem

A beekeeper who poisons the wildflowers gets one good season of honey, then nothing.

PR is heading into its second season of poisoning, and most of the industry hasn't connected the dots.

And it's the perfect time to. Akin to COVID days, earned media is having a huge moment. AI has made our work newly visible to founders and the C-suite in a way that 10 years of "owned, earned, shared, and paid" diagrams couldn’t even get close to. 

When the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism tested how generative AI chatbots responded to requests for the latest news headlines, ChatGPT returned non-news responses 52 to 54 per cent of the time, and Bard (now Gemini) returned non-news output in over 95 per cent of requests.

That finding is often discussed as a limitation of AI search. For PR, it points to something else as well: what AI can access, summarise, and cite is becoming a live reputational issue for brands.

When a buyer, investor, or journalist asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini who leads in your category, the answer is shaped by the public signals available to it: earned coverage, third-party reporting, expert commentary, owned content, reviews, forums, and social media.

In other words, earned media is increasingly becoming a part of the evidence layer machines use to understand who a company is, what it does, and whether it can be trusted.

So earned media is hot again, PR teams are being briefed on AI visibility, new tools are launching weekly, and CMOs are paying attention.

The maths problem is what’s happening on the other side of that equation.

When the hive shrinks

In Australia, the newsroom capacity problem is just as real. Analysis of 2021 Census data found the number of journalists fell by 19 per cent between 2011 and 2021, with the number of print journalists halving over the same period.

More recently, the Public Interest Journalism Initiative has tracked continued contraction in local news production, including 161 news outlet closures and 337 newsroom contractions between January 2019 and March 2024. For PR teams, that means the same volume of pitches is landing in front of fewer journalists, with less time, less specialist support, and more pressure to prioritise only the most useful stories.

Australian media company, Nine, recently told its newsroom that the sweeping restructure would touch every role and "fundamentally alter the way we produce and deliver news." The shift sits inside a broader pattern: Australian newsrooms are under pressure to do more with fewer resources, while AI is being folded into editorial workflows at speed.

The Reuters Institute's 2025 Australia report noted News Corp’s rollout of its in-house generative AI tool, NewsGPT, following earlier use of AI to produce local news stories. The point is not that AI is replacing journalism wholesale. It is that the mechanics of news production are changing, and journalists are being asked to absorb that change while still serving audiences, filling platforms, and maintaining trust.

The remaining reporters are stretched, inboxes are heaving, and the industry that PR’s renaissance depends on is hollowing out underneath it.

If you’re a PR practitioner, founder, or CMO whose comms strategy includes earned coverage, AI visibility, or brand credibility built through journalism, the maths says you owe journalism something back.

Supporting journalism is no longer a moral argument, but a supply chain one, as the honey gets more valuable and hives collapse without a credible alternative supply.

Looking after the wildflowers

Regardless of market, the strongest earned media results come when PRs treat journalism as infrastructure they have a stake in, not a vending machine they extract from.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

1. Pay for subscriptions

Not just the one masthead your CEO reads, but the trade press, the regional papers, the niche industry newsletters, and the independent outlets covering the rounds you pitch into. If your agency pitches the Australian Financial Review (AFR), you should be paying for the AFR, and if you brief journalists at Crikey, you should be subscribed to Crikey.

The "we get a forwarded link from the client" routine is a quiet form of freeloading that adds up fast across an industry, and subscription revenue is one of the few healthy levers left in the model.

2. Donate to organisations that defend press freedom

Reporters Without Borders, the Walkley Foundation, the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, and regional equivalents across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. Every market has them, and most are doing more for your future earned media outcomes than your latest media monitoring tool.

Set up a small recurring contribution from the agency, build it into client retainers as a transparent line item where appropriate, sponsor an award, or fund a fellowship. It isn't virtue signalling - it's protecting the source of supply.

3. Pitch fewer, pitch better

The number of pitches a journalist receives has gone up while the number of journalists has gone down, and the maths there is brutal. Sending generic pitches at scale because AI made it cheap to do so isn't a productivity gain, it's pollution, and every spray-and-pray pitch makes the inbox harder for the next practitioner sending something useful.

The pitches that land are the ones with local data, real customers, and spokespeople with something to say. Not every founder is "rethinking the future of X", not every product is "AI-powered", and not every funding round is a market shift.

The signal-to-noise ratio in journalist inboxes is the worst it's ever been and editors are tuning out, so the bar for pitches has gone up, not down. If your agency's KPI is "number of pitches sent", change the KPI.

4. Don’t let AI scale the worst version of your work

AI can write a pitch in four seconds and generate 40 angles before lunch, but it cannot tell you which of those angles will land, which journalist actually covers your space this quarter, or which story will look opportunistic in three weeks' time.

Use AI to move faster on the mechanical work, not to industrialise the bad habits that already had journalists tuning out. "Perfectly fine" is now free to produce, and judgment is the thing that's scarce and the thing that earns coverage.

5. Make your spokespeople worth a journalist’s time

The single best thing you can do for your earned media outcomes and for the broader ecosystem, is develop spokespeople who give journalists something they can't get anywhere else: original data, a genuine point of view, and a market read that holds up under questioning.

Generic thought leadership was already struggling, and in an AI-assisted newsroom it's invisible. The spokespeople who get pickup are the ones clearly saying what they actually do, what's actually changed, what hasn't, and why it still matters.

6. Champion good journalism, publicly

Share the work, cite the journalist, tag the masthead, and when a piece of strong reporting shifts a conversation in your sector, say so out loud. Reputation inside journalism is its own form of compensation, and PR has a disproportionate ability to influence it. Your clients notice who you're publicly backing, and so do the journalists you'll need next quarter.

The maths has to maths

There's a version of this argument that ends in despair, where newsrooms are shrinking, trust in media is wobbling, AI is rewriting the consumption model, and PR, sometimes, is part of the problem.

There's a more useful version, which is the one I've tried to land here. The renaissance is real, the opportunity for serious earned media outcomes in 2026 and beyond is real, and the credibility that compounds through journalism still compounds, possibly more than ever. It just requires the industry to act like a stakeholder, not a passenger.

The beekeeper who looks after the wildflowers gets honey for years. The one who doesn't gets a great quarter and an empty hive.

The maths is the maths.

Jasmin Hyde is the founder of Hyde & Seek Communications, a Melbourne-based strategic communications consultancy advising founders, executives and organisations where reputation has real commercial consequences. The firm focuses on earned media, executive positioning and digital PR for the AI search era, working across tech, healthcare, sustainability and social impact.

After a decade advising leaders across government, corporate and high-trust sectors, Jasmin started Hyde & Seek on the view that the industry doesn’t need more volume. It needs better stories, and the right people getting the right kind of attention.

She writes regularly on the shifting economics of earned media, the changing role of PR in an AI-mediated information ecosystem, and why credibility can’t be bought.

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