Tier-1 doesn’t mean what it used to.
Kate Dmytrenko is senior PR director at The Colab.
The media landscape is contracting and expanding at the same time. These two realities may seem contradictory but are actually connected.
On one side: consolidation. The Wrap reported more than 17,000 jobs were cut across media and entertainment in 2025, up 18% from 2024. For journalism specifically, Press Gazette tracked 3,434 journalism job cuts in the U.S. and U.K. in 2025. CNN cut roughly 200 jobs in January 2025. The Washington Post cut roughly 100 in the same month, then a third of its entire newsroom (300+ people) in early 2026. The LA Times made another 6% newsroom cut mid-2025, following a 20% reduction in 2024. The mainstream press is getting narrower, and in many verticals, thinner on the beat-specific expertise that proved its worth in the first place.
Never miss a story: Sign up for our free newsletter
On the other side: proliferation. The reporters who left didn’t stop reporting. Many took their beats, their sources, and their audiences with them. The cohort of Substack writers in news and politics earning over $1 million annually has doubled in the past year. Derek Thompson left The Atlantic after 17 years to build his own publication on Substack, which is where a meaningful portion of serious beat journalism is happening now.
For PR professionals, the practical consequence is this: the map of where a client’s audience gets its information has changed. But that shift hasn’t effectively made its way into many media lists.
What the new tier-1 pool looks like
The traditional tier-1 designation was shorthand for reach and brand recognition. That shorthand isn’t the north star it once was. An independent newsletter written by a former trade pub editor, with 15,000 engaged subscribers who are exactly the right buyers, investors, or decision-makers for a given client, is doing something a legacy outlet with ten times the circulation and a fraction of the engagement is not.
The pool of outlets that can legitimately function as tier-1 now includes journalist-run newsletters, niche podcasts, and independent publications stood up by reporters who left institutional mastheads with their credibility intact and their audience following. The lens through which we evaluate tier-1 has shifted. The question is no longer what the outlet is called. It’s whether the right people are reading it and whether they trust it.
Start with an audit
Before rebuilding a media list, map where the audience actually lives. Search your client’s category keywords, competitors, and key topics. Look at what their buyers are sharing and citing on LinkedIn. Ask the sales team what customers are reading. Get creative: you can even check what shows up in investor memos, industry Slack channels, and conference agendas. A media database search should just be step one.
Once you know which outlets are in the mix, evaluate them against signals that actually indicate reach. Some helpful questions to frame this:
- Does the coverage focus map to what your client needs to be part of?
- Is the journalist’s work generating comments, shares, and sustained conversation, or passive impressions?
- Is their reporting cited by other journalists or referenced in industry conversations?
- Are they showing up in AI search results for queries your client’s buyers are actually running (is it GEO-friendly)?
An outlet that functions as a source, not just a destination, is one worth targeting.
The client conversation
The harder conversation is usually with clients. Most come in with a mental picture of the publications they want to be in. Some of that is legitimate strategic instinct. Some of it is brand recognition posturing as media strategy.
There is a version of this that is understandable: if a client has spent years measuring success by masthead, it takes a beat to recalibrate. But the hierarchy many clients are defending, the one that puts a thin placement in a legacy outlet above substantive coverage in an independent publication their actual buyers subscribe to, doesn’t map to how information moves anymore. Substack readers are there because they signed up to follow a subject they’re invested in, or a journalist they deeply trust.
Reframe the conversation around what a placement is actually for. Instead of leading with outlet name, lead with audience match: here’s who read this, here’s why they’re the right people, here’s how we know. If the goal is to reach the people making purchasing decisions, signing term sheets, or recommending vendors, the question is where those people are getting information, not where the client would like to see their logo.
The pitch mechanics don’t change, but the target list does
The fundamentals of a good pitch are the same whether the recipient is a beat reporter at a trade pub or a journalist running their own newsletter: know their coverage, read their recent work, understand their angle, make a connection that’s specific to them. None of that changes.
What changes is who gets on the list. The discipline that used to get applied to a narrower pool of recognizable outlets has to extend to a wider, less legible one. Yeah, it’s more research. But it also produces a more accurate map of where credibility lives in your client’s industry, who holds it, and where the people you’re trying to reach are paying attention. That’s what good media strategy has always been. The outlets just look different now.
The post Building a tier-1 media map for new media appeared first on PR Daily.
