Opinion | Painting a bigger picture: why PRs use pray and spray despite it leading the industry to a deadend | James McCann

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A recent opinion piece published by the Observers restaurant critic, Jay Rayner lambasting PR professionals’ use of the ‘Pray and Spray’ approach has sparked significant debate online, writes James McCann, CEO of ClearStory International and Everhaze. It’s true, the sheer volume of one way email traffic to journalists inboxes has become paralysingly overwhelming and is contributing to the breaking down of relationships between the PR and media industries. This begs the question…are we rushing towards an ‘emailagedon’ of sorts as an industry?

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Over the years the pace of the PR industry has accelerated rapidly due to increases in client demands. As a result the media industry has witnessed a parallel acceleration with a twenty-four hour news cycle bolstered by the emergence of the blogosphere and podcasts. The thirst for rapid, groundbreaking content is the market we, as PR professionals seek to satisfy but, with the advent of AI content generation that noise will only continue to build.

Let’s be honest, we all know why we practice the ‘Pray and Spray’ approach. At a lesser level it’s because we often find ourselves with an announcement or piece of company news that we need to generate coverage for straightaway. At a higher level there are more fundamental reasons. Firstly, the nature of the industry has changed. On the media side, despite existing outlets increasing editorial output, the sector continues to shrink, with smaller teams of journalists. This means less editorial space, less opportunities to capture the attention of those that matter and, subsequently, a higher bar for editorial competition. A point I regularly make to clients is that while relationships matter, the value of the content you’re pitching is much more significant, especially as news rooms globally continue redundancies, media houses merge and journalists’ beats consolidate. With the sheer volume of content they are now being pitched running into the several hundred, if not, thousands, of pitches and press releases each day, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for journalists to cover every story, let alone take the time to interview clients. As a result, from a PR perspective, agencies are often unable to reach KPI’s and therefore ‘panic pitch’ as part of attempts to consolidate numbers. 

The way the PR industry operates has changed dramatically too. How can it not when the number of PR’s currently outweigh journalists by almost four to one across the UK and Ireland. From experience, the conference circuit has become a litmus test for the industry where more and more journalists hide away in speaker or media villages lest they be set upon by overzealous pitchers for irrelevant beats or uninteresting stories. We have to acknowledge that we have reached a saturation point in the industry.

Overpitching has manifested in many ways in the industry. It is nearly impossible to receive feedback from journalists on pitches as they simply don’t have the time or resources. Pitching exclusives has become a zone of uncertainty, even for the most newsworthy stories as journalists fight floods of emails and refuse to answer calls from PRs. This has meant that fostering new relationships has become increasingly challenging and generating a response from a journalist has tested both parties’ zones of tolerance. The pressure PR teams often need to apply has increased also as it becomes harder to reach targets, creating a ‘doom loop’ for everyone in the cycle, resulting in a lower level of practice in some cases. AI will only make the problem worse as it lowers the bar and fuels amateur PR pitches to journalists already flooded inboxes.

To conclude, the relationship between PR and media is more turbulent than ever. It’s true, we are overwhelming our media compatriots and we need to find a better way but the question is, where should we start? New startups pitched as ‘story marketplaces’ are emerging but, in my opinion, they risk the principle of ‘democratisation’ by ring fencing access to communicate with journalists. Perhaps we need to start with ourselves and our own infrastructure. Regular reviews of how we train our teams, the quality of editorial, the understanding of ‘newsworthiness’ and we should also use Jay Rayner’s email as an opportunity to review our approach to media relations as a whole. We need to invest further in our own practices to reduce the noise where possible as for now email as a sole method of outreach shows no signs of slowing down.