During my 15 years in TV news and five years in public relations, I’ve heard different versions of the same question about relevance.  

Sometimes the questions come from well-meaning but poorly filtered friends. Other times, prospective clients simply want to better understand their potential return on investment.  

Early on, the question sounded like: Does news coverage really matter anymore when everyone’s just on their phones? 

Lately, it’s taken a more specific turn: Should we really care about getting in the newspaper or TV newscast when everyone just looks things up on ChatGPT? 

My response? Yes and yes. Media coverage still matters. But don’t take my word for it alone.  

Pew Research Center publishes annual data on where U.S. adults get their news. The most recent data show that a majority (56%) most often get their news through digital devices, with TV second at 32% and newspapers at 7%. Right off the bat, those TV and newspaper numbers aren’t what they were, but landing coverage there could still represent reaching a meaningful portion of your target audience.  

Within that digital device number, we find that 27% are still turning to news websites or apps (read: newspaper and TV stations’ online arms), 21% to social media (which still includes mainstream media’s social pages), 19% to search, and 9% to podcasts. AI chatbots made the list at 2% for the first time in the survey’s history, a number expected to climb exponentially in the coming years.  

As we look at what’s here and to the fast-approaching future, what fuels those generative AI chatbots?  

Earned media — aka news coverage!  

That’s according to Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse report released in May, which studied more than 25 million source links for gen AI responses across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. The study found that about “99% of links cited by AI come from non-paid sources [while] journalism accounts for about 27% of all citations.”  

Is the path from news coverage to target audience as direct as it once was when the majority of Americans picked up the newspaper from the end of the driveway each morning, or tuned in to watch the network news each night after supper? Of course not.  

But that news coverage is fueling what people read about you in their AI chats. The value remains, even if the impact now comes in waves.  

Journalism still matters when it comes to brand awareness, and effective public relations strategies light the way to securing that coverage.  

Ready for a public relations partner to help you earn and maximize media coverage that can increase your visibility in both the news and generative AI results? Reach out to Henrich Communications today!