In 2024, a well-written press release and a decent media list could reliably earn you coverage in New Zealand. In 2026, that same approach increasingly earns you silence, and the data explains why. Cision's 2026 State of the Media survey, which polled nearly 2,000 journalists across 19 markets, found that 72% say fewer than a quarter of the pitches they receive are relevant to what they actually cover. Muck Rack's latest State of Journalism report puts it even more bluntly: 50% of journalists seldom or never respond to pitches at all.
Those numbers don't mean PR is broken. They mean the landscape moved, and a lot of businesses, including some very good ones, didn't move with it.
What Actually Changed in Newsrooms Between 2024 and 2026?
The short answer is that newsrooms got smaller, faster. Cision's research found that 49% of journalists now cite shrinking budgets, staff cuts and increased workloads as their biggest obstacles. The reporters who remain cover wider territory with fewer resources, which means the technology journalist you pitched successfully last year might now be covering technology, business and climate under a single brief. The dedicated property reporter at your local outlet might simply be gone.
The counterintuitive part is that PR has actually become more important as a story source, not less. Cision found that 66% of journalists rely on PR-provided content, including press releases, pitches and media kits, for story ideas. Muck Rack's survey confirms it from a different angle, with 86% of journalists saying at least some of their stories start with a PR pitch. Journalists need good PR more than ever. They're just drowning in bad PR at the same time, and they've stopped being polite about the difference.
Are Journalists Still Open to Hearing From You?
Absolutely, but what works has changed. The clearest finding from the 2026 data is that shorter, sharper, more relevant pitches dramatically outperform the rest. Research from Propel analysing roughly 400,000 pitches found that those between 51 and 150 words earned a 7.51% response rate, more than double the overall average of 3.43%. Journalists want you to get to the point, tell them why it matters to their audience, and let them decide if it's a story.
Original data, exclusive access and embargoed information are what journalists value most in pitches, according to Cision. They want something they can't find elsewhere, something that makes their job easier rather than harder. At Payper, we see this play out constantly. Whether it's a long-term client like Evnex building a steady drumbeat of energy-sector coverage or a one-off campaign that earns a single well-placed feature, the pitches that land are the ones that match what a journalist actually covers and offer them something genuinely useful.
On the other end of the spectrum, 48% of journalists surveyed said they would block a PR person over repeated aggressive follow-ups. That's not a soft preference. It's a hard boundary, and it's worth respecting.
How Have Platform Preferences Shifted?
One of the more striking changes in the 2026 data is the decline of X (formerly Twitter) as a tool for media relations. In Muck Rack's 2024 survey, 36% of journalists called X their most valuable platform. By 2026, that had dropped to 17%, and X now sits in third place behind Facebook and LinkedIn.
LinkedIn, meanwhile, climbed to second position with 20% of journalists calling it their most valuable platform. More tellingly, 58% of journalists see LinkedIn as treating their content fairly, making it one of the few platforms where journalists actively want to be. If your PR strategy still treats X as the primary channel for engaging with media, you're spending energy in a room that most of the people you need have already left.
Cision's report reinforces the trend from a different angle: 62% of the journalists they surveyed use LinkedIn professionally, and 33% rank it as the single most valuable platform for their work. For businesses, the implication is straightforward. If you want to build genuine relationships with the journalists covering your industry, LinkedIn is increasingly where that happens.
What Should You Know About AI and Pitching?
The AI numbers tell two stories at once. Muck Rack found that 82% of journalists now use AI tools in some part of their workflow, up from 77% in 2024. ChatGPT leads at 47%, followed by Gemini at 22% and Claude at 12%. Journalists are comfortable with AI as a tool for their own work.
And yet, 53% of journalists in Cision's survey oppose AI-generated pitches. The data backs up their instinct: research from EPR found that pitches mentioning AI saw a 62% drop in response rates, even as AI-related pitch volume rose 42%. Journalists have developed a finely tuned radar for copy that reads like it was produced by a language model, and they're increasingly choosing not to engage with it.
This creates a genuine competitive advantage for any business willing to invest in human-crafted communication. When the majority of what arrives in a journalist's inbox sounds the same, a pitch that sounds like an actual person wrote it, with specific knowledge of that journalist's recent work, stands out in ways it simply wouldn't have three years ago.
Why Does This Hit Harder in New Zealand?
New Zealand has roughly 1,400 working journalists covering a population of five million. It's one of the smallest media markets of any developed economy, and every structural change in global media lands here amplified. When a single outlet cuts one reporter, it can eliminate an entire beat's coverage for the country. When newsrooms consolidate and journalists cover wider briefs, the pool of people who might actually cover your story shrinks even further.
But the small market cuts both ways. In a country where the journalist covering your sector probably knows every PR person who pitches them by name, relationships carry more weight than they do in larger markets. A journalist who knows you and trusts your judgement will always take your call, even when they're ignoring 50 other pitches that morning.
Payper's approach works in New Zealand partly because of this dynamic. We pitch journalists we know, about stories we genuinely believe are newsworthy. When we helped Meridian Energy announce their biggest-ever Community Decarbonisation Fund distribution, we didn't blast a generic release to every newsroom in the country. We tailored the story for local outlets across New Zealand, each one pitched to a journalist who covers community or energy news in their region. The result was 19 stories reaching an estimated 328,500 New Zealanders, because every pitch landed in the right inbox.
That kind of precision isn't just nice to have in a market this small. It's the difference between getting covered and getting ignored.
What Should You Actually Change?
If your PR approach hasn't been reviewed since 2024, these are the changes worth making.
First, audit your media list against reality. Check whether the journalists on it still cover the beats you think they do. In a contracting media landscape, lists go stale faster than you'd expect, and a quarterly review is the minimum.
Second, write shorter pitches. The data is unambiguous: 51 to 150 words is the sweet spot. Lead with what's new and why it matters to the journalist's audience. Save the company background, the founder bio and the product specifications for a follow-up if they're interested.
Third, move your media engagement to LinkedIn. It's where journalists are building their professional presence, sharing their work and signalling what kinds of stories they're looking for. Engage with their content genuinely, not as a calculated prelude to a pitch, but as part of building real familiarity over time.
Fourth, stop sending AI-generated pitches, or at the very least, substantially rewrite anything a tool produces before you send it. The personal touch is now a measurable competitive advantage, not just a nice thing people say at conferences.
Fifth, bring something original. Data, exclusive access, a genuine subject-matter expert willing to go on the record. When a journalist receives a pitch that offers something they can't get anywhere else, they respond. When your pitch could have been written and sent by any company in your sector, they don't.
And finally, respect the follow-up boundary. One follow-up is fine. Two is pushing it. If you haven't heard back after that, the journalist isn't interested in this particular story, and that's OK. Burning a relationship over one pitch makes no strategic sense when the next story might be the one they actually want.
The Advantage Hiding in Plain Sight
The 72% of irrelevant pitches flooding journalist inboxes is a problem for the PR industry broadly. But for any business willing to be thoughtful about how it approaches media, it's actually an opportunity. When the signal-to-noise ratio is this poor, genuine signal stands out more than it ever has.
The businesses that consistently earn coverage, whether they work with an agency or handle PR in-house, share a few traits. They research the journalists they're pitching. They lead with something genuinely newsworthy. They keep it short. And they understand that a relationship built on trust and relevance will always outperform a strategy built on volume.
Payper is a results-based PR agency in New Zealand where clients only pay when coverage lands. We built the business that way because we believe PR should earn its place, and the data increasingly shows that the businesses approaching media with that same demanding, evidence-first mindset are the ones cutting through.
If that sounds like the kind of PR you've been looking for, get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.