Nearly half of PR pros still aren’t doing this

I just finished analyzing the results of the private survey I run each year asking PR pros about their most valuable tech tools.

The full report is available only to my Inner Circle, but one result jumped out at me that I’d like to share with you.

I asked “How do you find newsletters to target?”

Most telling: 44 percent said they don’t routinely do that.

Another 36% said they use Google or a general-purpose AI tool, 20% search Substack, and 19% use their media database. (They could choose more than one, so the total exceeds 100%.)

That tells me newsletter targeting is still an “add on” for a lot of PR pros.

Which is a problem, because newsletters are no longer some quirky side channel you can dabble in when you have extra time. I wrote about the most important PR article of 2024 that advocated for new ways of segmenting audiences into niches. In many niches, newsletters are THE channel.

To be clear, I’m not saying, “Go pitch every Substack you can find.” You need a deliberate process for identifying the niche outlets your actual stakeholders trust.

That might be a Substack. It might be a trade pub’s email newsletter. It might be your trade association or an independent creator. Same lesson either way: Pitch your niche.

Here’s what I worry happens inside a lot of organizations:

The PR team says they’re adapting to the changing media landscape because they added “podcasts and newsletters” to a slide somewhere.

But in day-to-day practice, they still spend most of their time chasing the same familiar outlets, using the same database workflows, and not challenging their same assumptions about what “counts” as media.

Meanwhile, the people actually shaping opinion in their space are building direct relationships with readers three or five mornings a week in the inbox.

The good news is this is fixable fast – Use this process to build yourself a repeatable newsletter-discovery habit:

1. When you research a topic, don’t stop at reported articles. Look for who is curating, commenting on, and consistently emailing about that topic.
2. Search Substack directly.
3. Search Google and AI tools for niche publications and recurring authors.
4. Most valuable: Ask smart people in your industry what newsletters they actually open.

And once you find a good one, don’t treat it like a side note. Study it the same way you’d study a key reporter’s beat. What does it cover? What tone does it use?

What links or sources keep showing up? What’s the real audience it serves?

We’re past merely saying “podcasts and newsletters” to sound current. Now’s the time to systematically find the right ones before your competitors do.

The rest of the survey zeroes in on the best tech tools for PR. My favorite part is where respondents recommend free or low-cost tools that fly under the radar for most PR pros. That’s how I discovered half a dozen tools I now use every day. You can access the full results if you join the Inner Circle during our upcoming spring enrollment window. Register for our Wait List to get more details.