Earned Media Still Drives Your Reputation
Whether you’re a government or business, effective communications demand an always-on campaign strategy. Organizations using an always-on communications strategy produce a constant flow of content across channels because audiences are siloed, skeptical, and only reached through repetition.
Within the mix of public relations tactics available to every organization, earned media remains a cornerstone of modern campaign communications. This may seem counter intuitive. There are fewer traditional news organizations today and consolidation has left the news industry in an unhealthy state.
Worse yet, people are increasingly looking elsewhere for their news. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report marks a milestone: for the first time, social media and video networks lead all sources of news, used by 54% of audiences globally, ahead of television and news organizations’ own websites. Trust in news sits at 37%, with news avoidance at 42%.
In Canada, 44% of people get news from social media accounts unaffiliated with journalism, science, or government. Audiences have scattered. No single interview reaches the country anymore. Reaching people requires showing up repeatedly, across channels, over time.
The lookalikes
Meanwhile, as consolidation has reduced news gathering in many areas, new types of media have emerged with specialized focuses: the lookalikes. Publications serving one industry, one profession, or one community. They may look like traditional news organizations, but they do not operate the same way.
This category of publisher now occupies much of the ground traditional outlets vacated: businesses that serve one industry, one profession, or one community and carry the appearance of news organizations but operate as advertising platforms.
Community-based versions employ writers, publish daily, and cover cities, food, real estate, and local happenings. The difference sits in what drives the assignment. A story earns its place by generating traffic, because traffic is what these businesses sell. Headlines are engineered for clicks, sponsored content blends into coverage, and verification receives whatever time the publishing pace allows. Every Canadian city has these sites, and many readers do not distinguish them from journalism.
Don’t forget AI
There is also a new reader to consider: AI. When people ask AI models about your organization, the answer is assembled from what has been published about you. Muck Rack’s analysis of more than one million AI citations found earned media accounts for 82% of the sources these systems cite. Your website barely registers.
Every credible story about your organization is now also training material for how AI describes you to the next person who asks. Earned media has become reputation infrastructure twice over: once for humans, once for the systems humans increasingly consult first.
An earned media gameplan
An effective always-on communications strategy should be anchored around earned media. Implementing a successful strategy starts with infrastructure of your own: your people.
Identify spokespeople for each major area of your organization and develop them deliberately. Reserve your CEO for strategic moments and crises. An organization that sends its chief executive to every interview signals that no one else can speak, and burns its most valuable voice on routine coverage. A bench of credible experts gives journalists more reasons to call and gives your organization more surface area in the public conversation.
Message matters
Once you have your people, lock down the message. Build core narratives and messages for each area before anyone steps in front of a reporter.
Many organizations request media training while their leadership has never agreed on the narratives or messages. That is asking for a tune-up when the car has no wheels.
Training polishes delivery. It cannot supply substance that was never developed. Message alignment is the unglamorous work that determines whether ten interviews build one reputation or ten.
Your editorial calendar
The third piece is an editorial calendar: your playbook for what you will discuss with the media that covers your world, and when.
These moments need not be pitches. Briefings and background conversations keep the journalists relevant to you informed between stories, and that knowledge pays dividends when news breaks and you need coverage that gets the context right. Reporters write with more accuracy and more confidence about organizations they already understand.
Pitch selectively. You hold a limited amount of reputational capital with every newsroom, and each pitch spends some of it. Apply the test editors apply: is this newsworthy, does it matter to this outlet’s audience, would it be a story if it were about someone else? If the answer is no, share it another way. Do not get into the place where journalists ignore your organization because the white noise of pitches that aren’t news have trained them to ignore it.
None of this works as an occasional effort. Spokespeople develop through repetition. Narratives take hold through repetition. Relationships with journalists compound through repetition. This is a campaign that does not end, and it is how organizations earn the coverage that shapes what audiences believe about them.
The alternative is silence. And silence, in this environment, means someone else will be writing your story.