AI is everywhere in communications. It is changing the approach to drafting releases, monitoring and summarizing coverage, messaging and strategic planning, and our workflows. These are not emerging practices, it is here. They are table stakes.
The real shift is happening in how media and journalism are being mediated by AI itself. Generative systems are already shaping how audiences encounter news and how brands are described. That means the future of earned media is about securing coverage and ensuring accuracy, discoverability, and trust in environments where AI is both curator and narrator.
I’ve been working on Muck Rack’s AI Dashboard and Generative Pulse and seeing firsthand the magnitude of this shift.
The New Mediation Layer: Generative AI and Media Intelligence
Traditionally, media monitoring told us what was published; analytics told us how it performed. We took these insights to tell the story of the content and engagement and inform strategies. These new AI monitoring tools (like Muck Rack’s AI Dashboard) integrate earned, owned, paid, and social to reveal if and how messages are seen, cited, and trusted.
We are monitoring the way Gen-AI summaries and AI engines are impacting search, awareness, trust, and engagement. This data informs our shifting approach to integrated PR strategies. In practice, this means communications leaders can see how coverage is being digested and reassembled by generative systems.
This matters because Gen-AI has become the new front door to information. When a policymaker, donor, parent—any consumer asks ChatGPT a question about your sector, the response is not neutral. It is built on patterns of earned coverage, citations, and signals. In other words: journalism is feeding the machines that are shaping public perception.
Hallucinations and Trust:Why Journalism Matters More Than Ever
AI is powerful, but it is not reliable without human touch. Large language models can “hallucinate,” inventing facts, misattributing quotes, or fabricating citations. For PR professionals, this is not a technicality but a reputational risk.
If your brand is misrepresented by an AI output, the root cause often lies in what’s missing: a lack of consistent, trusted coverage in authoritative sources. That is why journalism and fact-checking are more critical than ever. They are the grounding data that reduce hallucinations and ensure accuracy in generative responses.
The potential risk in trust and harm is an important implication that communicators are leading with AI governance and ethical adoption. Securing accurate coverage lives longer than today’s headline—it could inform tomorrow’s AI summary and build or break trust.
The Role of the Communicator in an AI-Era News Ecosystem
As AI accelerates information flow, communicators take on new responsibilities:
- Fact-Checking at Scale: Not just correcting coverage, but checking how AI systems are summarizing your brand.
- Cultural Relevancy: Ensuring AI summaries do not flatten nuance, erase community voice, or misrepresent experiences.
- Discoverability: Optimizing for SEO, AEO, GEO, and AIO so your organization is represented across human and machine-driven channels.
- Trust Stewardship: Advocating for transparency and ethical use of AI in newsrooms while modeling the same in communications strategy.
The Collaborative Communications team is supporting our clients and partners in understanding these shifts and applying necessary adaptations and strategies to their current messaging, websites, and PR plans.
Contact us to learn how our team can help you future-proof your PR plans with Gen-AI digital landscape in mind.
Madi Carzon
Public Relations Strategist, Collaborative Communications
Madi Carzon helps organizations elevate their work and advocate on key issues in education, public health, and community development. With expertise in public and media relations, message development, and integrated campaigns, she transforms complex ideas and research into compelling narratives that resonate with journalists and decision-makers.
As Collaborative’s public relations strategist, Madi supports clients across the K–20 continuum with strategies rooted in insight, storytelling, and collaboration to change the dialogue on some of the timeliest issues in education. Her experience with message testing and audience research ensures that clients can reach the right people with the right messages, whether through earned media, stakeholder engagement, or public awareness efforts.