The PR industry is developing a spam problem

For many journalists, inbox triage has become nearly impossible.

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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.

The problem with these databases is that their data entry isn’t exactly rigorous, and they use categories that are so broad that they’re effectively useless. Let’s say you're a PR rep looking to promote a client’s new mobile app, so you go into a database and run a search on every reporter who covers “tech.” The platform is going to spit out a list of thousands of email addresses, even though many of those reporters cover niches in tech that have nothing to do with mobile apps.

And the database of emails these platforms harvest is bigger than ever. It used to be that only reporters who worked for traditional media outlets had to deal with this problem, but the PR industry has finally caught on that creators wield significant influence as well. A few years ago, I briefly listed an otherwise-private email address on my Substack “about” page. The address was only there for a few weeks before I switched it out for my public Gmail address, but by that point the bots of several PR databases had already crawled my page, and now I’m inundated with pitches to that address. 

Email automation tools also contribute to the deluge. It used to be that generic press releases were easy to spot; now there are tools that automatically affix your name within the message. These tools also automatically track whether you open or respond to an email, and they can send follow-up emails on a publicist’s behalf. Now imagine a publicist who harvests thousands of email addresses and then sets up a drip campaign where the tool just keeps following up with all the reporters who don’t respond. Now multiply this scenario across 100 separate publicists. Are you beginning to understand the chaos being unleashed?

Now I know what several of you are going to say, because it’s a response I get every time I rant about this issue on social media: “Not all publicists.” There are always folks who come into my mentions to say that they don’t conduct PR this way, and it’s unfair to malign an entire industry based on a few bad apples.

Well, sure. There are publicists who only send personal emails to journalists who cover the relevant subject matter. Receiving emails from these folks is like a breath of fresh air. But ask any journalist, and they’ll tell you that these emails are the exception to the rule; for every personalized pitch, there are at least 100 automated ones. And I’ve worked with enough PR firms — both on a full-time and freelance basis — to know that they train their employees to conduct this spray-and-pray approach.

So what’s the solution to this crisis? For one, I think there needs to be deeper interrogation from the clients who hire these firms. I don’t think most even know that their publicist is engaging in these practices, and they’re wasting gobs of money on monthly retainers when the firm is doing nothing that takes any particular skill.

I also think there needs to be a larger outcry, both from outside and within the industry. That Jay Rayner rant I quoted above came from an angry email he sent the CEO of a PR tech company that enables this automation. Communications professors need to start incorporating these lessons into their curriculum. Industry conferences need to host panels on the subject.

In the meantime, I’ll continue my practice of leveraging Gmail filters to send irrelevant pitches to the trash folder. If you're a publicist who’s been frustrated that I never seem to open your emails, well now you know why.