Two separate journalist surveys released in 2026 point to the same uncomfortable fact for PR teams: reporters have moved to AI tools faster than pitches have adapted to them. Cision’s global survey of 1,899 journalists found 79 percent now use AI in their daily reporting, up from 67 percent a year earlier. Muck Rack’s separate survey, released the same spring, put adoption even higher at 82 percent of nearly 900 respondents. Different sample, different wording, same direction.
The tools have specific names now. Muck Rack’s survey found ChatGPT in use by 47 percent of journalists, Gemini by 22 percent (up from 13 percent the prior year), and Claude by 12 percent, double its earlier share. Reporters are not testing one tool and stopping. Cision’s research describes the same habit spreading into daily routines: brainstorming angles, fact-checking claims, and summarizing interview audio are now ordinary parts of a reporter’s day, not novelties.
The same journalists who use AI resent being pitched by it. Cision’s report, drawn from interviews across North America, EMEA, and APAC in January and February 2026, found 53 percent of journalists oppose receiving AI-generated pitches or press releases, citing marketing language, unsourced claims, and plain irrelevance. That is not a contradiction. A reporter can use a chatbot to speed up research and still want a pitch written by someone who clearly read their last three stories. The same survey found 72 percent say fewer than a quarter of the pitches they receive fit their beat at all, AI-written or not.
PR has not caught up to either half of that finding. Trade coverage compiling Muck Rack, Cision, and PRSA survey data this year put the share of PR professionals who say they changed their pitching approach in response to journalist AI use at only 4 percent, a figure that circulates through analysis rather than one named study, so treat it as directional. The gap is widening while the agencies doing the pitching are shrinking: Omnicom’s absorption of IPG eliminated more than 12,000 positions by mid-2026, and Edelman cut 330 roles, 5 percent of its global staff, while projecting an 8 percent drop in US revenue. Fewer people are writing more pitches into inboxes that already delete most of what arrives.
What still works is narrow and specific. Both surveys point the same direction: journalists reward original data, access to a named expert, and embargoed information they cannot get from the chatbot they already opened before reading the pitch email. A pitch that restates a company’s own press release in friendlier language is competing with a tool the reporter trusts more than it is competing with other PR teams.
Sources referenced in reporting: Cision, 2026 State of the Media Report, Muck Rack, 2026 State of Journalism Report, Everything PR, The Journalist AI Adoption Study 2026, Everything PR, The PR Agency Consolidation Report H1 2026.