Get journalist outreach pitches seen and understood by improving targeting, email authentication, subject lines, and the details AI inbox summaries pick up.

Everyone is clamoring for news coverage (linked and unlinked), and AI has made it easier to find and spam journalists.

In this post, I’ll show you why the landscape is very different from what it used to be, based on four major studies I published, including 14.3 million emails by domain age, 39 million emails by subject line, 628 AI summaries, and data on the journalist workforce.

I’ll focus on four areas: journalist attention, domain optimization, subject lines, and AI summaries.

In the AI era, there are a LOT more PR professionals in the space than ever before and they outnumber journalists.

In the U.S., I estimated about two or three PR pros for every one journalist (though our research showed a big discrepancy based on where you look: the U.S. Census says 1.8; the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 7.2). In the U.K., it’s roughly 1.5 pros per journalist.

Now, take all those PRs and add the fact that many link builders are also migrating to PR as an inroad to AI exposure.

AI-generated pitches, even fake experts, now flood the market, and journalists are underwater with irrelevant AI slop pitches.

We are seeing this playing out in the data as well. Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 found that 47% of journalists say they seldom or never receive pitches that match what they cover!

Source link