#41 How AI Is Changing the Journalist–PR Relationship with Rosie Taylor

Louise:
Today we’re welcoming journalist Rosie Taylor to the podcast to talk about how PRs and journalists are working together, and should be working together, in 2026. Rosie is an award-winning freelance journalist who specialises in health and consumer news, and also offers training and consultancy on how to get featured in the press. She’s a fantastic follow on LinkedIn, where she shares honest and to the point tips to PRs based on her experiences as a journalist, especially when it comes to AI. We’re really looking forward to talking to her more in depth about all of this. Welcome.

Steve:
Thank you so much for joining us, Rosie. We’re going to delve straight in. From your perspective as a freelance journalist, describe to us how the relationship between journalists and PR professionals is at the moment. With AI changing both how PRs work and the media industry in general, has there been a lot of change in the last year or so? How is the dynamic?

Rosie:
Hi, thanks for having me. Hello. Straight in with a mega question there. I think I could probably talk for about an hour on that point alone. But yes, I would say that the last year, 18 months, has seen some of the biggest changes in the media industry, how we’re working and how we’re working with PRs, that I’ve seen in the whole of my 15-year career. And AI has been a massive driver in that.

One of the issues that I know you’ve spoken about before on the podcast is the volume of AI slop press releases that we’re getting, made-up stuff. There are issues with fake press releases, fake journalists, fake PRs, fake experts, and we’re having to wade through all of this.

Previously, the tension between journalists and PRs was that PRs wanted to get journalists, and to get us to use your stories. From a journalist perspective, all we had to do was say, is this story good enough? Yes or no? Now there’s a whole other layer that we’re dealing with, which is, is this story even true? Is the person it’s coming from a real person? That just added so much complexity.

At a time when journalists are more time pressured than ever before, we’ve seen rounds of redundancies at lots of publishers, lots of pressure to produce not just lots of content, but different types of content. So, you know, like we all are having to go on podcasts, we are right now. People are writing newsletters, there’s stuff for socials. The old transaction, that you just provided the story and it either went in print or broadcast, all of those lines have been blurred and everyone’s doing a bit of everything now.

Yes, it’s kind of a crazy time really. We’re all doing more than ever before and we’re having to do it in an environment where we don’t really know whether anything is true.

Steve:
That’s such a great way of summarising it. It’s just made your job so much harder at a time when there’s already loads of pressure. So how much harder is it making it? When you’re getting this AI slop, are you calling it out? Are you just binning it? How are you dealing with that aspect of things?

Rosie:
Really interesting, because I think it depends very much on the type of journalism that you do.

I think for journalists working for publications that have a much more clickbait, high volume model, it’s really difficult because they’re under pressure to generate a lot of content and a lot of that does come from PRs. There are other publications, I’m not going to name them now, but we all know who they are, who have been called out for accidentally ending up using fake stuff because there just isn’t the time to check. I think hopefully there’s going to be some changes brought in to stop that happening.

For me, because I’m a freelance journalist, and we can talk in a bit about how that differs, but I don’t really do that kind of stuff. I don’t cover breaking news. I don’t cover the daily stuff that’s sent out widely to large numbers of people, because I have to convince an editor to commission me to write a story and they’re not going to pay me to write something that’s already out there. So I work almost entirely with exclusive stories that get pitched to me, and I do get pitched AI stuff as well.

But I guess in a way it’s kind of easier for me to tell the difference because I tend to only work with pitches that are really tailored to me anyway, and the AI ones rarely are that. But I have had ones where I’ve had a tailored intro, but then when I’ve looked at the press release, I’ve been like, yes, this is very ChatGPT.

It’s really difficult because there’s a real temptation to use LLMs and ChatGPT, or whatever, to structure or help you put together a press release. Because when you put the information into it and say, generate a press release, it does come up with something that looks good, objectively. Like, oh yes, that reads quite well. That’s probably better than I could have done myself, so send it out. But the problem is that when you’re a journalist and you’re receiving maybe a hundred of these a day, they all look exactly the same.

So if you want your pitch to stand out in an inbox, whether an editor, some editors get more than a thousand emails a day, if a hundred of them look the same, it’s so easy to just say, we’ll just ignore those hundred. And I think that’s where there’s a real risk with getting too reliant on AI in PR, because you want to stand out from the crowd. If you use AI to format your press release or help you write your headline, you really risk looking like all of those other AI-generated press releases, many of which are fake. And we don’t have the time to determine what’s fake and what’s not.

So it just automatically goes into the no pile. I mean, that’s not the case for everyone, but certainly for me.

My inbox, I’ve realised actually, because I’ve pressed ‘this is spam’ on quite a few very AI press releases, it now automatically detects that format. And all of those ones have gone. I looked at my junk the other day and I was like, there are loads of press releases in here, because they were all formatted in exactly the same way. So I think there’s a real risk that if you look too much like everybody else, your stuff is just not going to get seen, even let alone picked up.

Louise:
I was just curious, obviously you’ve been in journalism for a long time, so I imagine you recognise certain agency names or people who work in PR. The AI slop that you’re getting through, do they tend to be from new agencies that you’ve never heard of, or people who are very new to you? Or are they names you recognise, agencies you recognise, who you’re like, I think they’ve started to use a bit of ChatGPT here?

Rosie:
It’s a bit of a mix. I have been in journalism for a long time, but also the volume of people in PR, especially as a ratio to journalists, is just massive. For example, there’s one guy covering health and science news at The Sun, but every single brand, university, organisation, charity involved in health and science sends their press releases to that one person. So there’s just such a massive volume of names. People move all the time. So unless it is a contact that I know really well, I don’t always recognise names.

There’s just so many new names in my inbox every day anyway. But yes, the really spammy AI ones, it’s made up. I can’t tell whether they’re completely made-up people, but they’ve all got these weird names that sound a little bit too like John Smith. They’re just a little bit too perfect. They don’t quite, they are like English names, but not quite right.

You know when you get those T-shirts that are written in English, but have been written in English in a non-English-speaking country, and it’s like, “happy is good”. It does make sense, but it’s not quite right. And it’s the same with a lot of these press releases. The names and the PR agency names just don’t quite ring true. But it’s really hard to define what it is.

I think there have been some attempts to define how you can tell that a press release has been written with AI. I don’t think anyone’s been able to pin it down to anything. Often there’s just something a bit creepy and not quite right about it. But there is with a lot of that ChatGPT-type writing.

Even the tools that say they can detect it, I’ve put things through that I know aren’t written by AI and it will flag up certain parts and say it’s suspected AI, and it’s like, well, no. AI is based on how humans write. There’s just no foolproof way of doing it. But yes, you’re right. There is a vibe.

Steve:
There is a vibe. And that is also annoying for journalists, because I’ve seen journalists complain on LinkedIn that their copy has been flagged up as potentially AI-generated. And they’re like, you trained the AI model on my journalism. That’s why. You stole all my copy.

Rosie:
Yes. It’s a difficult time and it’s difficult to know what’s going on.

Steve:
Going back to your inbox, and how many pitches you get from PRs. How often are you using what people send to you, or PRs send to you, in your stories? Compare the number of emails you get to the ones that do turn into a story. What’s that ratio like?

Rosie:
So I love a bit of data. I did actually go and have a look at my inbox and have a think about this. I’ve done an inbox audit before and sometimes it’s as much as 95 per cent of what I get is not relevant. Or it’s not that it’s irrelevant because it is in my subject areas, but it’s not something I’m going to cover.

Like I said before, I’m a freelance journalist. I deal mainly in exclusives. I don’t cover breaking news. So it’s helpful for me to get releases showing, oh, this is breaking, this has been sent out to everyone today, but I’m not going to write about it. So there’s a bit of a tension there. I don’t mind getting those releases. I do mind getting followed up to ask why I’m not writing about it.

I had a look back through the stories that I’ve written in the past year, and because I’m a bit of a data nerd, I did a bit of crunching as to where those stories originally came from. I was surprised to find about 45 per cent of them were pitched to me. The rest were either ideas from me, or my editors, or had come from me covering an event.

There is quite a lot of potential for PRs to pitch ideas. But I would caveat that by saying they’re definitely not all PR pitches. A lot of the stories I work on come from members of the public coming to me with their own personal experience, or campaigners saying, we’ve come across this, we’ve got a story. They are PR-ing themselves in a way, but not in a formal way. So PR pitches probably make up the minority of that. But I do use them.

What happens more rarely is that someone will pitch me something and that is what the finished article is. Often it’s just a small part of a bigger idea.

For example, I did a feature this year where someone had pitched me a case study of someone who lived in a really remote part of the country and they had to use an online service to get healthcare. I pitched this as a case study to an editor and they came back and said, why don’t you broaden this to look at access to healthcare in rural areas more generally. Then I wrote a feature about healthcare deserts in the countryside. That original PR pitch made a couple of hundred words within a 2,000-word feature.

I guess it depends on what your end goal is. If your end goal was for your brand to be the headline on the story, then that’s not happened. But if your goal was to get mentioned in a respected publication, then it works. So yes, I always see value in PR pitches, as long as they are relevant to what I’m actually writing about.

Louise:
Let’s talk about that relevance. Disregarding AI, what kind of things do you not want to see in PR pitches? What makes a pitch immediately irrelevant to you? Is it something that’s a bit clichéd or overly promotional? You can flip it the other way too. What do you want to see?

Rosie:
For me, it’s always that it’s tailored. I’m a freelance journalist, I’m not on a particular publication. So I get a lot of pitches that say, “we think your readers would be interested in this”, and I’m always really tempted to reply saying, “which readers?” I write for multiple different publications and it’s clear they haven’t thought about that.

Also, do you know who I am, not in a “don’t you know who I am?” way, but do you know who you’re pitching to? Do you know that if you give this to me, I could potentially put it into five different publications? Do you know that I write for publications you might not be targeting and I might decide to send it there? You need to know who you’re pitching to and what kind of thing they do.

So for me it’s anything that shows someone is aware of who I am, what I do, who I write for, and then provides a story that readers would be interested in.

Even when I do get tailored pitches, the biggest place people fall down is, especially because I write a lot about healthcare, it’s easy to get caught up in pitching something about a new technology that’s going to save hospitals money or make doctors’ lives easier. And that never quite works for a mainstream audience.

You’ve always got to take it that extra step and be like, but why would patients care? It’s going to save hospitals money and therefore waiting lists are going to go down and you’re going to get your hip replacements. This is what people care about. The pitches that work best are the ones that have taken that extra step and thought, why would my readers care about this?

Steve:
Ironically as well, coming back to AI, it should be easier than ever to find out what you cover. I used a little bit of ChatGPT ahead of this podcast to go, okay, tell me about Rosie Taylor, and it gives some good info. It baffles me that everything is for speed and ease rather than focusing on detail. It should be more detailed, like this is exactly who I’m pitching to and why.

Rosie:
That’s exactly one of the things I always recommend as a good use of AI in PR and journalism, to really research the publications and journalists you’re targeting.

You can interrogate it. I’ve tested it on myself. I’ve put in links to my byline pages and socials and been like, tell me what kinds of things this journalist writes, and then put a pitch in and ask, would this journalist be likely to cover this story?

The slight downside is that ChatGPT is super flattering, so it’s like, yes, you’ve got such an excellent idea, I’m sure the journalist would love it. And you have to be like, no, seriously. And then it’s like, no, probably not. But it is really helpful, especially because media databases can be very broad.

I get put into a category called “health”, which includes so many things, like wellness and fitness, and I don’t write about any of those unless there’s a very sciency or consumer protection angle. So I get constant press releases about supplements, which I don’t cover.

When I tested it and said, I’ve got a story about supplements, would Rosie Taylor be likely to cover this? It said, probably not, unless there was a public health risk angle. And I was like, that’s actually really good.

It’s difficult to keep track of what journalists do because we change jobs a lot and we change beats within our jobs. What I do has evolved over 15 years and I don’t expect anyone to know the ins and outs. But because AI can look at big volumes of data quickly and see trends, it’s good at establishing not just “does this journalist cover health”, but what kinds of health stories do they cover. Are they likely to pick up my pitch or not?

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Steve:
It takes me onto the next question, which is around building a relationship with a journalist. If you have a one-to-one relationship, you’re going to know if they’ve moved jobs or what they cover. But how realistic is that now? There are fewer journalists, lots of PRs, journalists probably don’t have time for the classic boozy lunches of the 90s. What are your thoughts? Is a relationship still important? Does it change if your story is picked up? And if so, how can a PR foster that relationship?

Rosie:
That’s a great question because I am sad about the demise of the boozy lunch. There was a time when I did go for some nice long lunches and it was great, but they’re few and far between these days, mainly because we literally don’t have time to be away from our desk.

The relationship question is so important because in this world where we’re not sure what’s real, knowing you have a real human relationship with someone is so important. But there’s a paradox because getting hold of journalists is extremely difficult.

A few things I recommend. One is straightforward: engage with our content. If we’re on socials, comment, not in a creepy fan way, but if you’re genuinely interested, that shines through. And then when you’re pitching, even just to say, I saw you posted about this recently, so I thought you might be interested in this. That little bit of human connection shows you recognise who they are and what they do.

Another thing is meet us where we are. It’s hard for us to get away from our desk on a speculative basis, like “let’s have a chat and see what stories we can come up with”. But if we’re covering an industry conference or attending a big event, then come along and meet us, or email and say, are you going to this conference, could I grab you for five minutes for a coffee? I never mind sparing time when I’m already working. It’s taking time out of work that’s difficult.

Similarly, with a lot of journalists now, we offer consultancy. It’s something I do. I go into people’s offices. I do Q and A. Essentially you’re paying for our time, but you get us for an hour and can ask anything you want. And we don’t forget it.

I always say, if you’ve met me in person, email me and make that overwhelmingly obvious at the start of your email. Like, I saw you the other week at the Q and A. It’s difficult for me to keep track of names. But if I’ve met someone in person, I always try to at least reply, even if I can’t use the pitch.

The final thing is that the old model, that you had to meet a journalist and schmooze them before you could get a story in, has turned on its head since COVID and remote working. In a lot of cases now, someone will offer me a really good exclusive and they’ll work with me to build it into a story that works for a publication. Then off the back of that we might meet for coffee next time I’m near their offices and talk about other stories. So it’s almost reversed. It starts with having the great pitch as your entry point, then you might build an ongoing relationship.

So getting the right pitch, the right story, is still your best way in.

Steve:
That makes sense, rather than, “come and have a drink and then you’ll cover my story”. I missed out on the boozy lunches too.

I’m going to drag you back to AI, because you mentioned you use ChatGPT on yourself. How do you use AI in your day-to-day workflow? Can you give examples of what you’re doing, and why it’s beneficial?

Rosie:
Sure. I have to admit for a long time I was very anti AI. The whole premise that it was stealing writers’ copyright to feed the beast, I was strongly against on an ethical basis. But you have to accept it’s happening, like social media, all of these things. It’s happening and we have to engage with it. So I’ve been trying to use it in constructive ways.

I never use it for writing, largely because I just don’t think it’s good enough. And I really think the future of journalism depends on people wanting and valuing content that is authentic and human, not something that anyone could just feed into ChatGPT and generate.

So I avoid using it for writing, but I have used it for research. It’s quite good, like we said, for finding what journalists do, and it’s the same for research topics. If I’m struggling to find stuff that I know has been published but public bodies are making difficult to find, they do that thing where they’re trying to be transparent, so they put everything on their website but not in a way you can ever find. It’s quite good at pulling out links and digging into things.

I use it to make time-consuming boring tasks easier. If you’ve got something in a spreadsheet and need to convert it into bullet points in a Word document, Word formatting goes wild and it takes ages. In ChatGPT you can just say, can you convert this? Stuff like that.

I once had a story with 40 different currencies to convert into pounds, which would take me about an hour manually. I said, can you convert all of this into pounds at today’s rate? It did it straight away. I checked a few and it was right. That saved me an hour.

So little things like that at the moment. I’m yet to find anything major that’s been game-changing, but I’m certainly trying not to avoid it as much as I did before.

Steve:
I’ve decided to argue with it, which is worrying. When I know it’s wrong, I’m like, why is this difficult for you? Why am I being rude to ChatGPT?

Rosie:
It’s like when you get those customer service chatbots and they make you angry so quickly because they just don’t get it. I find the same.

ChatGPT is really bad at word counts. You’d think that’s basic. I’ve done a thing before where I had to cut something right down and I wanted inspiration. I said, can you cut this to 50 words? And it made it 75, or 40. I’m like, why can you not count? It seems like a basic computer thing. But it can’t count words. And then you challenge it and it apologises and does exactly the same thing. It’s like dealing with a small child.

Steve:
Microsoft Word has been counting words for 20 years. Good old Microsoft Word. Clippy. Remember the paperclip? That’s the real AI. Bring it back.

Louise:
You mentioned you don’t use it for writing. Are there any other elements of journalism where you think AI simply shouldn’t be used?Rosie:
I think it goes back to we, as an industry, need to be seen as the place where you can get authentic information. There have been lots of examples recently where even very respectable publications have used fake case studies, fake stories, because they’ve been fed them. On one side, AI is this powerful tool helping lots of people, but for journalists it’s created a massive headache where we now have to check and double check that everything is real.

From a PR perspective it’s changed things as well, because how experts are verified now is different. There’s a push from journalists to make sure experts will speak to us in person on the phone or video. A lot of experts and spokespeople aren’t comfortable with that. There’s a lot of shifting because of AI.

The red flag for me is taking what an LLM says at face value. You have to interrogate it. I do it all the time. I might ask it to find information about something and it will pull out facts, and I always ask for links and sources. Where did you get this from? And then I look and often it’s talking about something else on the page or it has misinterpreted it. It can be helpful, but you can’t trust it.

Steve:
It has got a lot better, so people have been lulled into a false sense of security. Sometimes you dig deeper and it’s got the wrong end of the stick. I find it with the AI summaries at the top of Google. You can be like, can I drink alcohol while taking this medication? It’ll say yes, it’s fine, very confidently. You have to remind yourself to double check and click through. Sometimes you click through and it’s like, the advice used to be it was fine, but now it’s reversed. Or it’s someone on Reddit saying it. So yes.

Are there areas of PR where you don’t love the idea of AI being used?

Rosie:
It can be useful for lateral thinking, but it does come up with the same stuff everyone asks. There is a risk we’re all coming up with the same thing.

It can be helpful if you have something unique, like a load of data, and you ask it to come up with ideas for different ways you could use it. It can help you expand your thinking. Or you can say, give me everything, and then you can say, I definitely won’t do that, but I could do the opposite. But if you’re like, I need to write something about health, give me five ideas about women’s health, you’re going to end up with generic things that everybody else is pitching.

Where it can help is if you have a case study and you ask, can you suggest three different ways to present this in a story? It might come up with one thing you hadn’t thought of. I don’t think there’s any problem with that.

Also, there are circumstances where we’re impressed by AI. In health and science we get research where they’ve analysed millions of pieces of data using AI and found things we didn’t know before. People say, oh great, you’re amazing. But the important thing is everything around it is authentic and reputable. It’s being done by a proper academic institution, it’s double checked, cross-referenced, they’ve looked at ethics.

There’s potential for PRs to do the same. You could take existing datasets, ONS data, government data, NHS data, analyse it using AI, double check it, and go to a journalist and say we’ve done this analysis, we used AI, we’ve checked it, and it shows these things. That could generate great story ideas. It’s about being honest about it.

Steve:
That leads nicely to disclosure. Should PRs disclose when they’ve used AI? Would it put you off?

Rosie:
It’s difficult because we get very hung up on “have you used AI”, when spellcheck is AI. We’ve been using some kind of AI for a long time without labelling it.

I use AI transcription software and it saves me loads of time, but I wouldn’t disclose that as using AI in my work, because people read that as “we wrote this using AI”. As a general rule, I would not say unless the use of AI adds value to the story. For example, we have this massive dataset and we used AI to find specific information that would have been impossible, or would have taken eight weeks without it. That shows you’re using AI to add authenticity and value rather than take it away.

If you used AI to brainstorm at the beginning, don’t tell the journalist. I don’t think it helps you. It’s only a new incarnation of Googling. We used to Google for ideas, what’s already out there, what people already said. It’s the same thing in a different format. So I don’t think you need to declare that.

Steve:
That makes sense. It would be absurd to be like, we used AI here to edit the copy, we used AI to do the original ideas. As long as there’s a human element and you’re checking it, it’s fine.

Rosie:
Yes. Ultimately it’s behind the scenes. As long as you haven’t used AI to generate, as in make up, any elements of the story or write the whole thing, then you don’t need to declare it. And if you have done that, you’re trying to be deceptive anyway, so you wouldn’t declare it anyway.

Steve:
You spoke about the nefarious side where people are using AI to make up everything. Press Gazette has been investigating. We had Rob Waugh on a few episodes ago. On LinkedIn you weigh in on this and you’ve provided comment for Press Gazette articles. We’d love to pick your brains about people using AI to come up with fake experts to get a brand mentioned and linked in the press. What are your thoughts, and how has it gone down among journalists? Were they surprised?

Rosie:
I heard your interview with Rob Waugh. He’s great. He shoots from the hip, doesn’t he? Brilliant. And he’s done such a fantastic job of exposing this practice. It’s really shocking.

Journalists, especially in written media, can be guilty of not being as up to date with technology as we should be. I like to think I’m not a dinosaur, I’m still in my 30s, just about. But there are lots of people in the industry who are older and more experienced, and there’s an attitude of trying to ignore technology for as long as possible until we absolutely have to engage with it. I worked with an editor not that long ago who refused to have a computer in their office. These are the attitudes you’re up against.

So when stuff like this happens, we were taken by surprise. Stories came out about reputable publications running completely made up stories about made up people. It’s hugely embarrassing for the industry. It exposes that proper checks aren’t taking place, that often young journalists are pressured into turning stuff out, and they haven’t necessarily had the training and experience to recognise when something isn’t right.

My first reaction when I read about these fake caseworks was, God, I hope I haven’t accidentally used one. I did a quick search of my own copy and thought, okay, I think I’m all right. But it puts you on guard.

My first experience, and the one I shared with Press Gazette, was that I put a call out for stories and I got three almost identical responses from three experts, in inverted commas, from different places around the world in completely different time zones, within 15 minutes of putting out the call. I was like, this is weird.

I got back to the PR, in inverted commas, and realised they had a ProtonMail address, which is an encrypted dodgy email provider, and didn’t have a full name, and didn’t have an agency name. The more I looked into it, the more I was like, this is so weird.

These comments were from these guys and they had a LinkedIn page and they were from random industries. But what really gave it away was that I was asking for people’s experiences of using a supermarket loyalty card, and these guys from Australia and Malta and New Zealand and Taiwan were like, oh yes, I go to Tesco all the time. And I was like, do you?

I got back to the PR and said, what’s going on here? These guys are in different time zones. How have they replied within 10 minutes when it’s three o’clock in the morning, and why have they been in Tesco recently? And they were like, no, they’re all legitimate. Yes, we’ve got a bank of statements and we do update them on different things, but they’re legitimate. One of them was in England recently and had gone to Tesco. And I was like, none of this rings true.

From then on I’ve been really cautious. I still call out for experts because I write about a wide range of topics and I don’t always have a bank for everything. I do have contacts I go to, but I often have to cover new things. So I need to find new experts. But I’m very cautious now.

I’ll only take email comments from an established press office, like in-house at a major organisation. And even then sometimes I’m like, this is obviously written with ChatGPT, can you go back and speak to them? You just have to be so much more careful.

It’s difficult because you want to trust people, but I find myself about to file copy and suddenly think, I should check that this case study is a real person. I’ve spoken to them on the phone, but let me just quickly search and check. Do they have a social media presence? Are they on their work blog? A picture at a charity event? A fundraising page for a marathon years ago? Anything that shows, yes, they’re real.

We’ve always had to do these checks, but there was no need to do it as thoroughly before. Previously, if you spoke to someone and they gave you their name and it seemed legitimate, that was enough. Now it isn’t. It’s a whole new layer of checking.

Steve:
I can’t get over that Tesco example. That’s such an audacious lie. It highlights the behind-the-scenes mechanism. When I first started in PR I didn’t even understand that when a brand turns up in a newspaper, a PR has often helped provide survey stats or whatever. I assumed a journalist would just go to Tesco and ask them. Before AI, you could email a journalist and say you work for a brand and there was a degree of trust. It helped if you came from a reputable agency. We used to do more over the phone and in person. There’s been a shift to email, which has made it easier for people to slip in.

Rosie:
Yes, and it’s such a shame that as soon as something becomes easier, people see an opportunity to do dodgy things.

What’s blown my mind is that there are also fake freelance journalists pitching completely made up stories and getting them into proper publications. Eventually they’ve been caught and exposed, but I bet some haven’t.

Freelance journalism is not lucrative. Of all the places to start scamming, don’t take the few commissions we have away from us. But there was an editor who got pitched a weird story, followed it back and turned it into a story himself, tracing it back to a guy using a fake name based in Kenya. He was working for a content creation thing. He was basically like, if I can get paid $200 for a story, that’s good money for me. You think, fair enough, but there are easier ways to make $200 than to be a freelance journalist. There are so many systems to game.

Steve:
We’ve covered a lot of ground. Final question, and maybe it’s cathartic. Is there anything else you want to tell PR professionals? Anything that vexes you, anything you want to celebrate, anything else we’ve missed?

Rosie:
The most important thing everyone should be focusing on over the next year is being as human as possible, in all aspects. The way you interact with journalists, yes you might have to write your press release, but write a personalised, chatty, friendly, normal human email introducing yourself, being helpful, cooperative, proactive. All of those things that help professional human interactions.

We get very hung up on this PR versus journalist thing, when actually it’s just professionals working with other professionals. Do it in a way you’d want anyone in your office to get your attention. If you wanted to grab your boss for a quick chat, you’d say it in a way that was professional, and “by the way, I’ve got something really important to tell you”. It’s exactly the same with journalists.

Also with the stories being pitched, what I’m seeing from editors is so much interest in human-facing stories. Previously I might have written something like, five signs you’ve got this condition. Now it’s like, I wish I’d known this was the sign of this condition, I was diagnosed five years later. It’s the same feature, but the focus is through a case study lens.

There’s a push towards putting humans, real people, real experiences first and foremost in lots of types of journalism, not just real-life magazine tabloid stuff. A lot of broadsheets are using first-person perspectives now. So in all aspects of pitching, making your story appeal to real readers, using real people, and pitching it in a friendly human way, is your best chance of cutting through the mountains of AI nonsense we get every day.

Steve:
What a mad time to be alive that we’re saying just be more human. In 2026, being human is your USP.

Rosie:
Yes, I know. But somehow it’s like, being human is quite good actually, we should be more human. Even doing this, we’re talking to each other. How nice. We never normally do that, just through a screen. So yes, being human is the 2026 trend. I’ll call it here first.

Louise:
Perfect end to a lovely conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. How should people get in touch if they want to get in touch with you? Following you on LinkedIn, where you’re very active, is that the best way?

Rosie:
Yes. I’ve just realised I’ve done a terrible job of promoting myself, which is why I need a PR. I run a weekly newsletter on how to pitch to the national press. It’s called Get Featured and you can find it on Substack. If you Google “Rosie Taylor Get Featured”, it will come up. You can also follow me on LinkedIn, Rosie Taylor.

Louise:
We’d definitely recommend Get Featured. We both read it and it’s excellent. Thank you for helping PRs to be better, and for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure to chat to you. Thank you, Rosie.