This is a guest post by Mike Sergeant from Sergeant Leaders.

When I crossed over to PR after 18 years in broadcasting, I assumed that I would have to spend a lot of time ‘selling in’ stories to journalists. I absolutely dreaded it, and I was pretty rubbish at it.

The truth is that, when you’ve spent almost two decades slamming the phone down on PR people, the last thing you want to do is become one of those annoying flacks.

Having been on the receiving end of PR spam and cold calling, making a career out of persuading reluctant journalists to grant you a couple of column inches seems demeaning and depressing.

Plus, as a seasoned media professional, you only have a certain amount of capital (credibility), which can easily be wasted if you try to flog your best newsroom contacts underwhelming stories.

So, like many ex-journalists, I did everything I could to avoid writing press releases and calling flustered correspondents and editors. And a good thing too.

In truth, most career PRs have better contact books anyway. I knew a few people at the BBC; not that many newspaper journos.

But then I discovered I had something far more valuable than a media approach list (which anyone can pay for these days).

AI or Artificial Intelligence has definitely become one of the most popular buzzwords in marketing and PR over the last few years. 

Most marketing and PR pros haven't yet figured out the implications of AI in their jobs and there seems to be this misunderstanding that AI will replace the human. 

In fact, according to a recent report automation threatens a quarter of marketing and PR jobs.  

I don't believe this to be true. AI to me is an enabler, just as technology is. You still need a human's brain to discover and analyse problems, identify solutions and connect the dots between the human and the AI work through the best choice of tools. 

AI might diminish the need for certain tasks to be performed by a human but then this frees the human to work on the more important and strategic stuff and should be seen as an opportunity, as a challenge to develop new and better skills. 

These are exciting times for marketing and PR pros and agencies.

I've been reading a lot about AI recently and I want to share with you a compilation of blog posts and videos that apply to marketing and PR agencies. 

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 

"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.