I caught up with a journalist friend recently, someone who covers business and tech for one of the bigger NZ outlets, and she said something that stuck with me. “My colleagues and I each get about 1,000 pitches a day now,” she told me, “and I can tell within two seconds which ones were written by AI. I delete them all.”
1,000 pitches a day. That’s more than double what most journalists were receiving even two years ago, and the reason is straightforward: AI tools have made it trivially easy for anyone to generate a press release, craft a pitch email, and blast it to every journalist in the country. The barrier to entry for media outreach has essentially collapsed, and the result is a flood of generic, AI-generated content landing in journalist inboxes every single morning.
For NZ businesses with genuinely good stories to tell, this is a real problem, because your quality story risks getting thrown out with all the rubbish AI slop.
The numbers behind the noise
The data backs up what my journalist friend described. According to recent industry research from Cision, 88% of journalists immediately delete any pitch that doesn’t match their coverage area, and 43% now hold explicitly negative views about AI-generated pitches, citing concerns that they “read like a bot wrote it” and erode editorial trust. There’s a striking contradiction buried in the numbers, too: 86% of published stories still start with a PR pitch, but 54% of journalists say they seldom or never respond to the pitches they receive.
That gap between “pitches work” and “journalists don’t respond” tells the whole story. Media coverage still overwhelmingly comes from proactive PR, but the sheer volume of low-quality outreach means that most pitches now get binned before they’re even read. The signal-to-noise ratio has never been worse.
Why this hits New Zealand businesses differently
New Zealand’s media landscape is small. We have a handful of major outlets, a relatively tight group of specialist journalists covering business, tech, lifestyle and culture, and everyone kind of knows everyone. In markets like the US or UK, you can afford to play a numbers game with your pitching because the pool of potential journalists is enormous. In New Zealand, that approach was always a bad idea, and now it’s actively dangerous.
When a journalist covering the NZ startup scene gets a thousand pitches a day and half of them are AI-generated slop from companies she’s never heard of, it doesn’t just affect those companies. It affects everyone trying to reach her, including you, even if your story is genuinely worth covering. Inbox fatigue doesn’t discriminate between a bad pitch and a good one sitting underneath it.
The other thing worth understanding is that New Zealand journalism runs on relationships. Always has. A journalist who trusts your judgement and knows you won’t waste their time is worth more than a thousand carefully crafted pitch emails. But those relationships take time to build, and the AI pitch flood is making journalists more guarded, more selective, and more cynical about anyone who emails them cold.
What’s actually cutting through right now
When you ask journalists what they want, the answers are consistent and surprisingly simple. Beat relevance tops the list at 70%, meaning the pitch is directly related to what they actually cover. Interview access to credible, interesting sources comes second at 58%. And original data or research comes third at 40%.
None of that is complicated. The telling detail, though, is that almost none of it can be faked by AI. A tool can generate a pitch email, sure, but it can’t build a genuine relationship with a journalist. It can’t offer exclusive access to a founder with a compelling personal story. And it can’t produce original research or data that gives a journalist something new to write about.
The businesses we see landing consistent coverage right now tend to share a few traits. They know exactly who they’re pitching and why that journalist would care. They lead with a specific angle, not a generic announcement. They offer something the journalist can’t get elsewhere, whether that’s data, access, or a genuinely fresh perspective. And they respect the journalist’s time, which in 2026 means being concise, relevant, and unmistakably human.
We saw this play out clearly when we worked with Contented on their seed round announcement. Contented is an AI company, which meant their story was landing in inboxes alongside dozens of other AI pitches every day. What cut through wasn’t the technology itself, it was the specific angle, a New Zealand-founded AI startup solving a real problem for a specific audience, paired with founders who could speak candidly about the journey. The coverage that followed came because the story was genuinely interesting and the pitch made that obvious in about three sentences.
The authenticity advantage
There’s a real irony in all of this. AI has made it so easy to do mediocre PR that doing it properly, with genuine thought and care, now stands out more than ever. One industry commentator put it well recently: in 2026, “being a real person” is basically a competitive advantage when it comes to media outreach.
That resonates with what we see at Payper every day. The pitches that work are the ones where a journalist can tell that a human being sat down, thought about their beat, understood what they’ve been writing about lately, and crafted something specifically for them. Not a template with their name mail-merged in, but a pitch that demonstrates real understanding and respect.
This is also why figuring out whether your story is genuinely newsworthy before you pitch matters more now than it ever has. When journalists were getting twenty pitches a day, they had time to skim something marginal and maybe come back to it. At 1,000 pitches a day, anything that doesn’t immediately register as relevant and interesting is gone. The threshold for what earns a journalist’s attention has risen sharply, and it’s not coming back down.
Some outlets like the Spinoff are super clear about their policy when it comes to AI assistance in writing media pitches, auto-sending this reply to all emails landing in their inbox:
Please note we will not publish content that has used any generative AI tool to assist in the writing or editing process. This includes AI-powered proofreading tools like Grammarly.
The hidden second audience: AI itself
There’s another dimension to this that most NZ businesses haven’t clocked yet. Every piece of earned media coverage you generate doesn’t just reach human readers anymore, it feeds the AI models that are increasingly shaping how people discover and evaluate businesses.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “what are the best EV charger companies in New Zealand,” the answer draws heavily on what’s been published in credible media outlets. Brands that show up consistently in authoritative earned media are the ones that show up in AI-generated answers. This is what the industry is calling generative engine optimisation, and earned media is the raw material it runs on.
So the stakes of getting media coverage right aren’t just about traditional PR outcomes anymore. They’re about whether your business shows up when someone asks an AI for a recommendation in your category. That’s a shift that makes quality earned media more valuable than ever, even as it gets harder to secure.
We’ve been thinking about this long game with clients like Evnex, building a media presence that compounds over time rather than chasing one-off hits. When every piece of coverage feeds into both public trust and AI visibility, consistency matters more than any single splash.
What to do about it
If you’re an NZ business trying to get media coverage in 2026, a few things are worth keeping in mind.
First, resist the temptation to use AI to blast out more pitches. More volume into an already flooded inbox is the opposite of what works right now. The businesses winning at PR are pitching less, not more, but pitching better and to the right people.
Second, invest in relationships. If you’re doing your own PR, learn how to pitch a journalist properly and then take the time to actually understand who you’re reaching out to. Read their recent work. Reference something specific. Show them you’re not just another AI-generated email clogging up their morning.
Third, be honest about whether your story is ready. The things journalists want in a press release haven’t changed, there just isn’t any margin left for getting them wrong.
And finally, think about PR as a long-term asset, not a one-off push. The businesses that will thrive in this new landscape are the ones building consistent, authentic media presences over time, because that’s what both journalists and AI models learn to trust.
The AI pitch flood has made PR harder for everyone, there’s no getting around that. But it’s also created a real opening for businesses willing to do the work properly. In a world where most of what lands in a journalist’s inbox reads like it was written by a machine, showing up as a real person with a real story is a surprisingly powerful thing.
Get in touch here and Payper will always give you a straight answer.