The PR landscape has changed virtually beyond recognition since I wrote my first ever press release in 1997.

Back in those heady days of Cool Britannia and Britpop, the office I worked in in Otley only had one computer with internet access; press releases went out by post or fax; and you knew off by heart the telephone numbers of all the key journalists that sat in judgement of your attempts at creating newsworthy stories on behalf of your clients.

Fast forward an awful lot of years and there’s internet access on nearly every wrist (admittedly not mine, which sports a Casio digital watch that usefully will tell you the current time in most major cities across the world); fax machines in museums and, let’s face it, most of us don’t even know our own phone numbers, let alone those of the editors of Hospital Magazine and Construction News or the business editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post.

The most worrying change, at least from an experienced (or should that be aging?) PR hack’s point of view, is one that has tiptoed in over the last year or so. The option of uploading news stories directly to newspaper and magazine websites – a process that removes the journalist / PR relationship from the media relations equation. And this, I strongly believe, does untold damage to the PR landscape. Coverage no longer being truly earned; a layer of communication being stripped from our jobs; and the most delicate element of the art of media relations – journalist relationships – being put under threat of extinction.

Cast your mind back and we’ll all remember the journalists who scared the living daylights out of our fledgling PR selves when we called them to tell them excitedly about our latest groundbreakingly unique world changing product launch or the news story we had that really would lead to them shouting STOP PRESS across a smoky newsroom. At the end of the resulting tirade (and there were some beauties), we’d all know how many press releases they received a day, and that if we’d put something in the post with their name on then they’d definitely have got it. But occasionally there’d be interest – especially when you learnt to drop all that world changing hyperbole – and the more times that happened, the relationship went from you being an irritant on the end of the phone to someone they knew they could rely on for good stories or turn to for comment.

And the stronger these relationships became, the better the results for the clients paying for you to get their stories out there.

Over the years, the nature of how we communicate with journalists has changed. Picking up the phone giving way more and more frequently to sending across a quick e-mail – a step that did feel a backwards one in terms of building and maintaining relationships, but took into account changes in the way we all worked and (more recently) where we all worked.

But uploading stories to news websites feels like a step far too far.

Put simply, PR without the need for strong journalist relationships is very much just PR Light – whether traditional or digital.

But why are these relationships so important? Well, think about the current media landscape, to say it’s a tougher crowd than ever before would be an understatement. There are print titles, digital titles, websites, influencers, bloggers and more social media news platforms than you can throw a stick at.

And the number of news stories being circulated by PR agencies, freelancers and in-housers grows and grows. 864,000 new business were registered in the UK in 2024. That’s an awful lot of launch press releases and subsequent PR campaigns.

Faced with that landscape, the importance of keeping strong media relationships is more important than ever before.

And sitting at the heart of it all, is earned credibility and professional trust.

From a PR perspective, we need journalists to share our stories in credible editorial pieces. And, sorry journalists, but you do need us – you really do. Whether it’s for a steady flow of potentially newsworthy stories to fill business pages with to having someone you trust who you can get on the phone and be sure you’ll get relevant comment, additional facts and figures or just some background colour for a story.

The world though is changing at an astonishing pace – not least when it comes to the growth in use of, and sophistication of AI. And if you follow this development to its scariest conclusion then both PR and journalism are under real threat.

News served to us in AI baked snippets, pulled in from AI generated PR stories on AI built websites. The need for fact checking discarded along with journalistic integrity and PRs working with clients to ensure stories being pitched in are still newsworthy and not just advertising in a different outfit.

Hopefully, that’s just a dystopian nightmare that will stay lurking in the shadows. But to make sure it stays there, we as PR professionals need to communicate – and communicate like it’s still 1997. Talk to journalists; tell them stories that are relevant to them and their publications. Build relationships where they need building – maintain ones that need maintaining. Take the time to meet up for a coffee or go old school and call it a beer. Introduce them to clients so that there’s a face to a business name.

Yes, the PR and media landscape has changed completely from what it looked like nearly 30-years ago, but the art of communication hasn’t. And that at the end of the day that is what we are – communications professionals. So, let’s keep all the current communication channels open; and maybe look to reopen those sat in the corner gathering dust. Now, more than ever, the responsibility is on PR practitioners and journalists to work together to deliver proper news in a proper way.

So, paraphrasing, the PM back in my first days in PR – it’s all about communication, communication, communication.