75% of journalists say less than 25% of the pitches they get are relevant. 

To me, this is one of the key stats from Cision's 10th annual State of the Media Report that was just published. 

They surveyed ca. 2,000 journalists from around the world to discover trends around the industry. 

With the massive spread of fake news and the decreasing trust in the media where half of the population doesn't trust the media, journalism in 2019 seems to be facing quite a few challenges. 

For the industry, building trust is becoming its business model where for 51% of publications ensuring accuracy has become more important than revenue (34%).

This is important for PR pros as well because it means that stories and pitches will be heavily vetted. 

The research identified 5 key trends for journalism in 2019 that a PR pro must be aware of and many of them align with and speak of the need for the Inbound PR approach. 

5 Key Trends for Journalism in 2019 

Content Marketing has been around for quite some time.

We use it in inbound marketing, we use it in inbound PR, we use it in internal communication, we use it any time we need to interact with an audience. 

Content has become a business asset.

In fact, 88% of B2B content marketers say that creating content makes their audience view their organisation as a credible and trusted resource.  

I learned this from a very cool infographic from my friends over at PointVisible that I want to show you today. 

You can take a look at the full image below but I to run through some of the key statistics from my point of view.

6 Key Facts About the State of Content Marketing

"Reflecting the views of more than 1,500 professionals, #StateofPR returns for 2019 to paint a picture of a commercially robust industry that isn't always the people-focussed profession it aspires to be."

This is the first thing that I read about the latest research into the UK PR profession by the CIPR and I'll be honest, it didn't exactly make me want to read more. It sort of depressed me.

But it's important to know what's going on in the PR industry, especially on my quest to help transform it with my book Inbound PR so I wanted to dig in to understand why this statement as a summary of the research.

I cover the StateofPR every year (here's 2018, for example, which to me was all about the need for business acumen in PR). This year, I noticed 5 key issues that I want to share with you below. 

#1 PR is growing but still has a skills gap

Republished with permission from ITPR's blog. 

New is always scary, so when we sat down as a team around a year ago and decided we were moving away from ‘traditional PR’ to Inbound PR, it’s fair to say I was a little apprehensive. 

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, plus I’d only ever worked in the ‘old’ version of PR, so moving to something I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of at the time took me a little out of my comfort zone. 

As it turns out, Inbound PR isn’t scary, doesn’t mean learning completely new skills, and certainly doesn’t take long to realise the benefits – especially for our clients, of which there are quite a few new faces!

Inbound PR resonates!

It’s fair to say the Inbound PR way of life has resonated with a lot of our clients, especially those who’s bosses have been sceptical in the past about the value of PR as a business function.

There's a new way of doing media relations - the inbound way. 

It's a much more personalised and effective approach to working with the media and achieving results but to be successful at it, you need to really know your media counterparts. 

As part of that, you need to understand what's important to them and what's going on in their industry. 

That's why I want to run you through some key trends within journalism, media and tech for 2019 that I learned about in a study done by Reuters Institute.

There's a ton in the report so I'm going to share what I found particularly important or interesting. 

7 Tech Trends in Journalism and Media to Watch Out for in 2019