Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

In theory, journalists and publicists have a symbiotic relationship. On the one side, the publicists’ clients are in search of earned media and often willing to pay handsomely for it. On the other side, the journalists are in need of story ideas and sources that will keep the content train running. 

In practice, though, the relationship isn’t quite so balanced. Journalists have no financial responsibility to the clients, so there’s no obligation to cater to a brand’s message goals or timelines. And when the reporting is outright adversarial, then publicists play the role of gatekeeper, limiting the journalist’s access to the sources and information they need.

That tension has always existed, but in recent years a new dynamic has entered the fray, one that makes journalists increasingly frustrated to the point of outright hostility toward the PR industry. This frustration was best summed up by food critic Jay Rayner:

The way far too much of the PR industry behaves has been driving me nuts for a long while now… I receive literally hundreds of emails from PRs a week. And what staggers me is the vast number that have absolutely nothing to do with my beat … It is clear to me that a staggering number of you put together random, unfocussed lists of journalists and then just send them everything, despite it being irrelevant to them. And then you send follow up emails. So many damn follow-up emails. The record is five, but three is common. If I replied to every single PR email that was of no interest to me I would literally have no time to do my job.

I can certainly confirm the accuracy of his claims. For any journalist or content creator with even a modicum of audience reach, inbox triage has become nearly impossible, with thousands of pitches and follow up emails making it more and more difficult to pluck out the ones that are actually relevant to our jobs. And what’s worse, the vast majority of these pitches have absolutely nothing to do with what we cover. I can’t tell you how infuriating it is to read a third follow up email about a product I would never write about in a million years. 

How bad is this problem? So bad that I’ve had to take drastic measures to save my inbox. At first, it involved blocking publicists at the individual level — meaning that whenever I was sent a completely irrelevant pitch, I’d quickly create a Gmail filter that sends all future emails from that address to my trash folder.

But recently, I’ve gotten even more draconian. Whenever I get an irrelevant pitch, I’ll sometimes block the sender at the domain level — meaning any email from any publicist that works at that same firm will go straight to trash. 

So what’s going on here? Part of it has to do with the shifting headcounts in each industry. As certain sectors of the traditional media have contracted, the PR and marketing industries expanded. According to US Department of Labor data, there are now six publicists for every one journalist. 

But that’s only part of the equation. The bigger problem, in my opinion, stems from all the automation tools that make it trivially easy for a single publicist, with just a few keystrokes, to spam thousands of journalists.

First, there are the PR databases. These are SaaS services that collect data on thousands of content creators and then provide access to that data for a monthly fee. A publicist can log into one of these platforms, enter a few keywords, and then export a huge Excel file of journalist contacts...