The Washington Post has laid off most of its own PR team, among bigger layoffs. Its comms head said in an email that the paper will “stop the dedicated practice of publicity for our journalism across broadcast and traditional media outlets”. Instead it is launching a “Star Talent Unit“, because: “Talent-driven journalism is the future of media, and personalities and creators will lead the way.”

Is this the start of a trend, and what does it mean for companies seeking coverage in major publications?

Doing media relations to get a publication’s top reporters or columnists to appear on TV or be cited in other publications is not easy work. Securing a broadcast interview for an FT reporter on CNBC, or getting a WSJ reporter cited in the Economist, say, is hard. It’s hard because media outlets instinctively don’t like to quote other outlets’ reporters.  And as newspapers and TV channels have been all become more multimedia (eg. CNBC has written copy online, the FT has its reporters on videos), everyone becomes a competitor to everybody else.

The work has always been about quality, not quantity.  Typically, a TV channel, in particular, wants a specific name they like, like Ed Luce of the FT, who appears regularly on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.  Historically, the reporters and columnists who appear most often are top political types who appear on the Sunday shows or PBS Washington Week in Review.  The second tier would tend to be economics and markets reporters/columnists, with the third tier being beat reporters and local reporters who can add specifics, perhaps around a major accident, or a state-level race (think Greg Blustein of the Atlanta Journal Constitution).

News outlets seeking publicity for their experts are in competition with experts at think tanks and at academia, which have got highly organized with press offices promoting experts lists.  And beyond WaPo, only a handful of media outlets, like the NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters, Economist, really have the scale to run press offices capable of promoting dozens of their writers. These are slick operations, largely inhouse in London and New York, but with some use of PR agencies elsewhere.

This work of promoting reporters to other major media is separate from the growing amount of organic and paid social media promotion undertaken by publications, encouraging people to read stories, take out free or premium subscriptions, and to fully use existing subscriptions. These marketing budgets (which have shifted to social and online from the likes of the famous Economist adverts) have no doubt grown much more than the press office media function I’m discussing here.

The Post’s action is cost-driven, but perhaps also reflects the fact that media appearances, while prestigious, are harder to track in impact. It’s a bit unclear from WaPo exactly how the ‘star talent unit’ would differ from traditional promotion of reporters, but the big picture is that the publications is putting the onus on the individual reporter to promote themselves and build their own brand.  That makes it hard to complain when a reporter is too active on social media (the NYT have complained to staff about social media posts, especially highly political ones). Years ago, someone at CNN was fired for writing their own blog – that seems excessive.

Almost ineluctably the power of the collective publication brand will suffer as reporters hustle to promote themselves.  Publications I suspect will increasingly say – either overtly or in mumbo-jumbo – that an important metric for measuring reporter and columnist performance is how many people read their articles. This has long been gospel at Bloomberg. That certainly makes reporters more accountable, but one worries about foreign reporting, or long form investigative journalism – things that don’t drive clicks every day.

New stars emerge

As (some) reporters become stars, it naturally makes them more mobile, and more able to take their followers with them to a new publication. (A crucial advantage of social media presence is that the employer does not control it.)  Technology, such as Substack, makes it easier than before for an established writer with valued specialisation, to set up on their own and monetize their work.

Puck News model for star journalists is a variant of this – they get equity and compensation based on their own newsletter subscriber numbers.  The New Yorker two years ago suggested that Puck had columnists earning $300-400k.  Puck would argue the overall brand and infrastructure is still valued by its writers. But it is a bit like a day trader arcade.

The Post and others will need to be careful that the scoops remain with the publication – many outlets have had problems with reporters breaking scoops on their social media handles. Even if the article is published online, a star reporter with many social media followers can often drive traffic to the article on the outlet’s website more speedily than a busy comms/social media team.  Over time this downgrades the brand of the publication (the place where the article lives online) and emphasizes reporters.

There was never a golden age when only the outlet counted – from Woodward and Bernstein and before there were stars whose promotion and economic interest didn’t always easily align with their employer.  The Post is probably right that in a changed world, reporters need to get slicker at promoting themselves, just as in the 1990s they learned to use word processors and then do without secretaries. Generations change.

All this said – I’m not clear the FT or WSJ or NYT will easily give up on press office promotion of their reporters.  But it’s not black and white – there will be more “self serve” – the trend to longer reporter biographies on media sites is in part to support their promotion externally.

What does this mean for corporates?  Well to use the Watergate term, follow the money.  If you are Citigroup or PwC, any new beat reporter at the WSJ or FT will find you.  But for the bulk of companies – largely and smaller – who don’t get regularly covered in major media and needs to hustle to create news, or any smaller company, you need to accept that you are targeting and building relationships with individuals, and that those reporters may move on more frequently than ever.  And if they move to write on Substack or on Puck, they have not necessarily become less influential to the audience you care about.

Andrew Marshall is the managing director of Cognito in America and Cognito’s vice chairman