What PR Skills are In Demand Today?

The landscape of B2B public relations and tech comms is shifting faster than ever before. Driven by the rise of generative AI slop, shrinking newsrooms, journalists’ overflowing inboxes, traditional media relations playbooks aren’t holding up. On this episode of FiredUp!, we analyze the capabilities required to execute a high-impact communications program in today’s world. We discuss standing out in an over-saturated media landscape and the essential human skills that cannot be replaced by automated tools. This week, episode 141 of the FiredUp! podcast is about what PR skills are in demand today! 

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In this episode of the FiredUp! podcast, the Firebrand team shares the importance of creativity in crafting media pitches and actionable steps you can take right now to stand out from the AI slop saturating the PR space. 

Morgan and Chris discuss:

• Develop a Sharp Nose for News: Raw product pitching is virtually dead in B2B tech. To cut through modern inbox clutter, PR professionals must cultivate a keen news sense—framing product capabilities within broader macro industry trends and compelling narrative hooks.
• Protect the Art of Human Writing: As AI-generated copy saturates pitch inboxes, authentic human writing has become a major competitive advantage. Crafting original, well-researched copy builds executive credibility and prevents your contributed content from being rejected by discerning editors.
• Target Emerging Sources of Influence: Modern PR extends far beyond traditional tier-one print publications. To drive real business outcomes, communications programs must target specialized Substack newsletters, niche industry podcasts, and influential individual creators.
• Cultivate Deep Domain Expertise: Superficial tech knowledge is no longer sufficient. High-performing PR pros must deeply understand their sector's underlying technical architecture, business models, and market history to act as true thought partners to CEOs and journalists.
• Demand Real AI Fluency: True AI capability isn't about generating automated pitches—it's about understanding where automation accelerates research and where it creates strategic risk. PR leaders must master AI tools to streamline workflows while maintaining rigorous quality control over final outputs.

PR hasn't become impossible, it has simply raised the bar for creativity, domain knowledge, and strategic execution. Human judgment, sharp news sense, and authentic relationships are your ultimate market differentiators in today’s landscape.

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5.5.2026

Transcript

Morgan McLintic: 0:00

PR is changing very rapidly at the moment, so today we thought we'd take a look at the changing skills that a PR professional needs. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Fired Up, the podcast for marketers working in early and late stage startups. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Fired Up. My name is Morgan McClintic, and today I am joined by head of media, Chris Albrecht. Hey, Chris, how are you?

Chris Ulbrich: 0:26

Hey, good to be here.

Morgan McLintic: 0:28

So we're going to talk about the skills that you need to be great in PR at the moment, and that's really been changing. And of course, AI has had an impact on it, and we'll talk a bit about that. But some of the skills have stayed the same, right? The core fundamental skills you need to be great at comms. We thought today we just sort of unpack each of them, and let's start at the top here with having a nose for news, Chris. Sense of what makes a good story, because I think fundamentally that's where everything boils down to when it comes to comms.

Chris Ulbrich: 1:03

That's right. I think, as with a lot of developments in PR, this one is related to what's going on with AI, but it's also related to what's going on with the continued strain on the profession of journalism. So I've been in PR roughly 20 years now, and you know I would never say that getting coverage was easy, but it has never been as hard as it is now. And so very little, unless you are working at a large company that can take coverage for granted, but has beat reporters clamoring to dig up the latest news about you. It's harder than ever to get people's attention, get reporters' attention, and the standard for crafting a good story, I think, is higher than ever. It's not that the basics have changed. I would say that you would tell a young PR, like an intern or a junior person, is just learning about media relations. You would give them the same advice today about understanding the types of publications that you're trying to pitch, understanding the needs of the reporter you're trying to pitch, paying close attention to when they like to be pitched and when and how often they write-all of those factors were in play 20 years ago, but I would just say there's a lot less wiggle room. There's a lot less room to get away with sloppiness that right now than there was 20 years ago. So you might, because reporters were hungrier for news because they had more competition, they had more time to think about their next story. You could get away with being less than spot on sometimes, and I just don't know that you can anymore. So it's really important when you're evaluating. I think an agency or someone you're thinking of hiring in house, you need to think about evaluating their ability to sniff out a story and frame it for reporter because it is a talent. It's an increasingly important talent to get right, and I think that it's increasingly valuable because now increasingly the difference isn't between the brands that get good attention and those that get less good attention, those that get good publicity and those that get less good publicity. It's those that have awareness at all, and those that are just completely unbelievable.

Morgan McLintic: 3:43

And why do you think that is? I could think the pace of business and news has accelerated. That's been going on since we moved online with news, and therefore the pressures on reporters to write multiple stories in a day and break them quickly, and then maybe go back and update them has increased. There's just a race to find the story quicker, less time for them to pay attention to the pitches from PR. And I could also, at the same time, point to a trend of just an increasing number of comms professionals compared to journalists, right? Their ratio has just used to be one to two or one to three, and now what is it? One to seven, maybe more. Lost count. There are just more PR people and trying to place their story with probably fewer reporters, and the competition has got a lot higher, so you've therefore the bar has gone a lot higher. It's faster, and the standard has to be harder to cut through.

Chris Ulbrich: 4:47

And longtime listeners will recognize that this comes up a lot in our conversations. I think that in addition to all the trends you cited, which have been in play pretty much as long as I've. NPR. There's just been this steady downward slope of available attention. You know, if you were if you were charting available attention, it has been either on an exponential decline or it's been on a steady downward slope. Whatever metaphor you want to use, it's been going down. But I think that what has really accelerated this trend recently has been the introduction of AI into the pitch stream. So now reporters talk about getting absolutely overwhelmed, even more than they already were, with clearly AI-generated pitches. So the cost of creating a pitch has declined to near zero at this point, and so it. I think for a lot of reporters, that has threatened to make email all but useless as a vehicle for getting their next story, just because the email itself and media database, when you combine media databases with email, the price of contact is very low. Anyone with a media database can get a their pitch into someone's mailbox, but now the cost and time investment of generating the pitch is near zero, and inevitably, when the cost of something falls to near zero, you're going to get a whole lot of it, and that is not a promising development for brands trying to get attention because it's very difficult to stand out from all the slop that is surrounding you in the reporter's inbox

Morgan McLintic: 6:43

because I think it used to be obvious. There used to be spray and pray PR agencies that would just have a whole media list and send the same email to everyone, and then there would be the people who would custom write individual pitches for each reporter, and very much like cold email, right? But now with AI, you can mass personalize these, so people do get a slight variant on. Hey, I really enjoyed your article about X, and I wondered whether this, but like you can fill in the tokens and sort of. So you're going to get this sort of mass personalization, and it's still AI slop, and it still doesn't work, but there's just more people doing it because people now I don't want to spray and pray, but this sounds like a very happy medium, and so you're getting more of that, and we're all seeing it in our own inboxes. So reporters are no different. If

Chris Ulbrich: 7:34

you're being generous, you could even assume that all those pitches are great pitches, which they're not, but let's just, for the sake of argument, say that they were. The fundamental problem remains that it's a lot harder to get noticed than it was previously. Either you are the diamond in the rough, but there's a lot of the rough, or you are trying to stand out among a slew of pretty good pitches generated by AI. If we grant that AI could generate good pitches, which I don't. Either way, it's just really hard to stand out, and that makes the ability to craft a good a standout pitch, the ability to time the pitch properly, find just the right fit to the reporter who it's really going to land with, it it makes those skills all the more valuable because there's so little room for error now.

Morgan McLintic: 8:36

Yeah, and so I guess related there's Understanding the media, reading it, understanding how a publication is structured, to what structure to cover, and who's on bot beats and what types of stories they write. But then there's also the creativity of coming up with that pitch, right, and crafting it. So you know, I know what it's supposed to look like, but I've also got to then actually do it. And so those are slightly separate skills, but I do feel like the level of creativity has to go up in order to stand out from all that.

Chris Ulbrich: 9:09

Yeah, and that gets at another topic that we've touched on before, which is that there is very little room left, or is very little attention left to raw product pitching,

Morgan McLintic: 9:23

yeah,

Chris Ulbrich: 9:24

there are certain areas like consumer electronics where you might be able to still get away with a straight product campaign, but by and large, especially if you're in the B 2b technology space, the amount of pure product coverage has dwindled to near zero in some areas, like like data data pipeline database. It was always a pretty small universe of publications that covered those topics, but now the number that cover it is news is near zero. So that means that. In order to get coverage for anything you're doing, you need to be able to think creatively about what that product stands for, and what sort of larger development in the industry you connect with, and what's the most compelling way to frame it. You really just you have very few places to just pitch your product press release and expect to see coverage. If you were a PR professional 20 years ago and that was all you could do, you could still have a pretty decent career in PR because there were a lot. There was still a lot of need for that kind of pitching, especially if you were the person developing the press release, writing the press release, working with the client to make sure all the eyes were dotted and the Ts were crossed, that was still really valuable. But now it's just not as much. You what's become even more valuable is what used to be the highest tier of media sensibility, which is the ability to create news outside of the release.

Morgan McLintic: 11:09

That's interesting, though, Chris. I wonder whether media relationships, connections with reporters, are at a premium now for a long time. Oh, I want to hire an agency. They know so many reporters, and what they really mean is they understand news. They know who to go to with these stories. But are relationships even more important now as a skill or as a look? This

Chris Ulbrich: 11:34

is a whole topic, right? You could do a whole show on the value or lack of value of relationships, and I would push back a little. I think a lot of people do believe that the value of an agency or the value of a PR person lies largely or primarily in how close they are to reporters and the extent to which they can get reporters to, they can basically draft a reporter to write a story about their client because they have a friendly relationship, and as just about any PR person will tell you, that's not typically the way it works at all, because reporters don't write stories out of charity, right? In fact, a lot of times they're not even able to write about the things they're most interested in because they are writing for publications that have certain needs, and for their for stories, and they need to cover companies of a certain magnitude, and they're hired sometimes, often to cover certain companies. And anything that falls outside of that just isn't on their beat, and they don't really have a lot of latitude to write about what they want. But there is no doubt that if you are regularly working with reporters and they are used to hearing from you, you have more of an opportunity to put a new idea in front of them than someone who isn't working with them on a regular basis. That, in practice, is what a relationship looks like. It's not a quid pro quo. It's not I had you over for dinner, and so as a result, you're going to do me a favor and write about my client, I mean, look in the great big world, does that exist? Yes. How often can someone call on, like, cash that shit in if they are friends with a reporter? A couple times, maybe. But by and large, having a relationship effectively means that the reporter will take your call, your reporter will give you a hearing. It doesn't mean that you can get your client covered. It just means that you will you can make a connection and you can shoot your shot, right?

Morgan McLintic: 13:57

And that you'll care about what you send them, so that you'll only send them stuff that's high signal, and you're not going to send them just anything, so they can trust. Well, that's another given the stop and look time. They get the benefit of not not being on the sort of oh, I'll just lob it in and see whether it worked because you don't want to. Well, that's

Chris Ulbrich: 14:15

right. A lot of times, I've definitely encountered clients or prospective clients who think the the reason I'm hiring an agency is I need to bring someone on board who can just push the coverage button with the reporter I care about, and what they don't realize is that almost by definition that state of affairs can't exist because if a PR person brings bad opportunities to a reporter they have a relationship with. They will cease to have a relationship with that reporter very quickly. A working professional relationship looks like you, the reporter. Trust that I'm not going to waste your time, and if it was. Possible for anyone to hire me and pay me my going rate, and me to get them, and then I would put your story, whether it was a good one or not, in front of a reporter. I would, if I ever had any credibility with that reporter, I would lose it,

Morgan McLintic: 15:15

right,

Chris Ulbrich: 15:16

in short order.

Morgan McLintic: 15:17

Which is why we put the emphasis on a sense for news right at the top there, and back in the day, agencies would have this sort of team, and they might have a few individuals who are their sort of key media pitchers who would be you know brought into clients to try and land that key piece of coverage or what have you, because they happen to have that real sense for news, and they could look at a client and go, okay, maybe this one, and I know a few reporters; they'd have built those relationships up. But now, almost everyone needs to be that that hit squad, right? Because the standard is so high, and everyone needs that. So I think we're placing more emphasis on that understanding what makes a great story and what the trends are and what the reporters are set up to do than ever before. Second thing on our list here, Chris, is ability to write, not necessarily using AI. And now we've covered this a lot and unpacked lots of different aspects of it. But again, similarly, the reporters are getting bombarded by pitches. People are reading lots of. There's a lot of AI content out there, and it doesn't. In order to stand out, you've got to be able to write properly without it, because I think people are attuned to the voice of AI now. So, same sort of concept applies here, right?

Chris Ulbrich: 16:32

Yeah, I think it does. And this is a case where the ability to write without AI helps you differentiate yourself, and we've talked about the importance of that in in previous episodes, and how AI voice is becoming so recognizable and common that it is starting to generate a backlash. People are starting to actively dislike it, especially younger people. The ability, if you hire in PR, whether you're hiring in an agency or hiring in house, it's always been true that ability to write is highly prized. Writers are at a premium in this industry. I think for an agency, it's even more so now because this business is more international than it's ever been, and we're working with clients who are based in East Asia, or we're working with clients who are based in the Middle East, and English is not necessarily their first language. But when they are making their forays into the U.S. market, a lot of the content they're generating is with AI, right? So if you are just doing what they're doing. If you're generating content with AI yourself, I think it's going to be even more evident. They're going to think to themselves, "Look, I don't even speak the language natively, right? And my product is more or less the same as your product. If I'm generating off my marketing docs with AI, and you're doing the same thing. How are you adding value to our program? So I feel that is increasingly a factor when you're thinking about hiring an agency. Can they help you stand out from the crowd and stand and level up your program beyond what you're already doing, and if they're just firing off 800-word articles with AI, it's unlikely that they're going to be taking you anywhere with your content program that you couldn't go by yourself.

Morgan McLintic: 18:33

Right, and we've talked a bit about this concept of mental tension that when you write about a topic, you have to deeply understand it and put the effort in, the reps in, to understand the subject matter. When I'm writing about a new client, I have to understand their technology. I have to understand the words that they use and that that are common parlance here that might be slightly unfamiliar to me. I have to put the work in, and in doing so, I understand their sector a lot better. I understand the brand a lot better. But if I and if I then if I just put these as context into an LLM and press the button, and so I do think that if you're looking for a lot of clients are looking for a partner in their PR agency, a thought partner, and you can't be that unless you've paid that price. And so I think that same is true about in-house counsel, where if they can write, they will have thought about the topics and the thought leadership issues, and they'll have wrangled with the vocabulary and the trends and the issues, and they've had to research them. Hang on, I'm saying this is that actually right, and who else says this? They looked at all the competitors in just writing. It forces you to do that groundwork, and that makes you a good thought partner because you have put the work in to have the thoughts. And so that's why it's always been one of the top skills in PR, but now. Really, is even more emphasis on writing without AI. It doesn't mean never use AI to write. You know, there are plenty of opportunities to use AI to write where you should save yourself some time. No one's going to critique you for cutting down the bio to 400 words when submitting for an award with AI, for instance. But just for those big pieces, this concept of sort of mental tension that writing makes you do, I think, is really at a premium. Our sources of influence are really changing a lot or evolving. We think about social. We think about when it comes to executive visibility. We think about newsletters and the various substacks. We're thinking about podcasts. Which events are hot? Which influencers a brand could work with? Which ones are good? How to engage with them? Like that piece of it, I feel has become more important recently because little communities, little events can pop up really quickly and shape an industry narrative, and being there at the beginning and building those relationships there, I think is probably more important than ever.

Chris Ulbrich: 21:11

Yeah, listeners may be shocked to learn that, but probably not if they work in tech. That a lot of people who work in tech marketing aren't actually that interested in tech, and they go to work, they endure the material, they do their best to engage, and then they go home and they do not think about technology until they get back to work, unless they're going to a party where they're asked about their job, and it is really really hard to be effective at PR if that's how you approach your professional life, because, as you say, the sources of influence are changing quickly. And I know PR is changing. It's a cliche. PR is always changing, but I do think that I've seen more change in the past three, four years than the past decade before that. Before that, you had relative sources. Media was maybe on the wane, but then video was coming up. But it was still video produced by traditional media sources in most cases, and then then you had the rise of YouTube influencers, which you had to account for. But I think that the shift to what you probably conjure up when you hear the word influencer, like TikTok influencer, in some sectors that's a real shift. If you are a like a really garage stage, early stage company, you may very well be doing a lot of your most effective early corporate promotion on TikTok or some other kind of a video platform. But beyond that, beyond what the word influencer often conjures up, I think what we are seeing as well is the shift from institutional editorial sources of power to individual entrepreneurial sources of media power. So you have these one-person newsletters. You have an elite reporter from a business publication break off and start their own Substack, or you have a few reporters who are like-minded and want to build their own thing, go off and do a four or five-person publications, and those are increasingly influential and. and I think you could make the argument that's actually where the center of power is right now on industry podcasts, in industry newsletters. It's hard to it's hard to make the case that the New York Times is still not is still doesn't carry a lot of clout. It does. I don't know though. 20 years ago, it was indisputable that the thing that would matter to you most was coverage in the New York Times, coverage of your brand in the New York Times. If someone wrote about your industry five years ago in the New York Times, you would still be getting leads if you were included in that story five years later. And now, I just I think that the power is in these platforms that are more conversational, that are driven more by individuals with the individual voice, and that means that for all the talk of a sort of a decline in the power of the media sphere, there is a proliferation of these individual and small publications at the same time, and if you're in PR, you really need to be on top of that, or your media strategy is going to look the same as it did 10 years ago, and that means it just won't be as effective. If your media. Strategy is just pitch the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. You're missing the boat,

Morgan McLintic: 25:06

right? And then, Chris, you had mentioned just there. You've got to be interested in the technology. I'm in fact when I'm interviewing, particularly a more junior positions, I always say to people, "Are you interested in technology? And everybody says yes because who doesn't love an iPhone? And I said, well, we're not doing the PR for the iPhone or the carrier or the cell tower. We're doing like the software that tests the antenna or the the new transistor that goes into this antenna. It's just much more detailed, and I'm interested in that. I like talking about databases and those kind of things. Like I find that really interesting, but not everybody does. When I first started in PR, I was in a healthcare agency company called Conan Wolf, and we were talking about in systolic and diastolic myocardial infarction, different types of heart attack. I hated that. I don't want to talk about gizzards and innards, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting and fascinating to other people. It just it's just not my thing, and every day would be pretty long. So don't put yourself through it. So I do think though having an interest in technology, if you're going to be in tech, and then understanding the different areas of tech and having deep domain expertise is really important. More important than ever, we're focused on AI, and that doesn't just mean okay, I'd really like to know what OpenAI is doing, but you write down it. Okay, what's going on in the vector database that's part of the RAG that, or how do you get the data to do fine tuning, and what does red teaming need? Like you're in the weeds of it, which I find really interesting, and I think you need to have that even more now in order to advise on what the media strategy or comm strategy should be, because the sector is changing so quickly. When there are new developments, how do you put them in context, and how do you explain this technology to broader audiences if you don't understand it? And like, I just think the that's become more important than it than it ever has.

Chris Ulbrich: 27:15

Yeah, I think if you're not engaged with the technology, if you can't find your enthusiasm for it it makes it very difficult to engage with the business problems that your client is trying to work out because underlying all of these seemingly esoteric technologies are nagging business problems that your client is if you're an agency that your client's trying to solve, and that these are the problems that are preoccupying them. If you want to use the term like the keeping the CEO up at night, that's not to say that reporters are always perfectly synced up; that their concerns are perfectly synced up with vendors' concerns. But ultimately, if you're pitching a business story, you have to understand the bigger picture about how this technology fits into a larger economic and financial framework.

Morgan McLintic: 28:15

And I think then the arc of technology of how we've got here to this solution-like this problem has been around for a while. How has other technologies tried to solve it, and why is this different? What other companies tried and failed, and what so that you can put it in context with a reporter. And you've got to understand sometimes as a PR agency, your PR contact, your marketing contact, even the CEO may not be aware of all the different companies in a space, or the history of all those companies, because we're all busy and we haven't got time to research it all. But often, when we're making an announcement, we'll say, "Okay, you've been working on this new feature. How is it different from these other two companies that are doing something very similar? And I know that's part of product marketing, etc. But there are blind spots, and that is part of being a thought partner, and that's whether that's something that you're going to want from an agency, but it's also something you want from your PR person, and that's why I put domain expertise here because in a world where there are so many competing pitches, yours just has to fit neatly into context, and you want to make sure it reflects well on you. And if you're saying something is a first, and it's it's not even the fourth. It's not going to land. And lastly, Chris, we've left it till last, but I think it goes without saying that AI fluency is critical here. You've just got to use the technology, and that doesn't just mean whacking up a few projects in Claude and claiming that's the bench. But I don't think it means having to show your GitHub repo when you're applying for a comms job yet, but we're probably nearer that one than we are. Just I've used a few tools, and I'm feel pretty good about it.

Chris Ulbrich: 29:51

I think that the ability to understand where AI can deliver value in a communications workstream. Is important. It's a new skill that, if you're hiring, you're going to look for because it's not self-evident. We've done at least one show on where you get the most value out of AI and communications. So, if you want more on that, we have a lot to say. But it is not obvious. You actually have to work with these tools in communications to see where they're actually going to deliver value and where they're going to they're going to send you down a rat hole, and you find yourself spending more time trying to get the AI to do what you want it to do. Then you're actually saving by using it. So you're going to want to bring someone on who has grappled with the technology, understands the state of the art, and has a point of view on the best way to deploy it. And I think takes us all the way back to the beginning of the the conversation here. I think a big part of that is being familiar with AI's if you're talking about using it for writing the way it's typical turns of phrase, so that you can see when the AI is BSing you, or when it's generating content that sounds good superficially, but doesn't actually address the topic you're at hand, or doesn't really say much of anything at all, which is often the case. If you come to those questions without grappling with them, if you come to that without any experience, you're going to make assumptions about what AI can do that just aren't accurate, and you're not going to be able to help. If you're in house, you're not going to be helping your your organization move beyond where it already is with with their use of AI. And if you're on an agency, you're just going to deliver bad advice.

Morgan McLintic: 32:02

Yeah, certainly. When I'm hiring, I'm looking for every new hire to come in and just raise the bar on our use of AI, bringing in new experience, new tools, new lessons, things that we can then roll out to the rest of the team. Because clearly, that's the direction of travel, and you want to be hiring people ahead of the curve, ahead of the team, so that you're not having to back backfill on that. So, to the extent that's maybe a fairly obvious point, but you've got to prove that, right? And so, sometimes talking about the agents you've done and your successes and your failures, it's going to become pretty evident in the first few minutes of that conversation whether someone's actually done the work there. So, Chris, I think this feels like a good place to wrap up. We've talked about the importance for news. We've talked about and sort of general media pitching. We've talked about writing and constantly crafting your art there, understanding sort of emerging sources of influence and where you can find them. They do evolve. They don't change super rapidly, but things do pop up, and you've got to be across it. And we've talked about the increasing importance for sort of domain expertise in that area of technology that you're working in, the data and AI, or whatever cybersecurity or what have you. I think the bar has gone up on that, and then just helping out whatever team you're joining, bringing more AI capability to that team is just going to really be a big lever to improve their output. And you want to be that lever. I think those are the changing skills for comms today, I hope that was useful, Chris. I really enjoyed talking through that with you, and if you enjoyed that, please drop us a comment or let us know what you think. Maybe you disagree, and maybe there are areas we've we've missed, and so tell us about that. And we will see you all again next time.