Epstein, embargos and suing the media: the edited rules of public relations in 2026
“Wait, isn’t PR just covering bad stuff for rich people?” someone asked me last week.
They’d mostly heard of PR as news cover-ups and spin. Fair enough: PR has a bad rep and it’s about to get worse.
When the role of US PR-turned-VC Masha Bucher in the Epstein files surfaced last week, or when Airwallex tried to sue Nine into removing unfavourable coverage just last month, that perception rots a little more.
I dare you to name one universally admired PR figure. Even the fabulous Samantha Jones is hardly the moral compass of Sex and the City.
Public relations is, at its core, the business of influence: influencing how the public perceive your brand.
And influence, in the public imagination, sounds like manipulation.
But that shortcut, “PR is influence. Influence, bad.” hides that sometimes influence is good.
PR is attention and attention to more and more diverse voices is good. The resilient PR effort of Epstein victims has played a major role in pressuring the government in releasing the file.
For up and coming startups, media attention can accelerate growth by reaching out to the right customers and investors.
French Lawyer Jacques Vergès, known as “The Devil’s Advocate” for defending Klaus Barbie once said justice cannot exist if both sides aren’t fairly represented.
The same is true for public relations. Influence isn’t inherently corrupt; it’s how expert voices, founders and dissenting perspectives enter public debate. The problem starts when influence becomes control and key players bend the rules and most people don’t even get to play.
It doesn’t help that PR is played on an ever-shrinking chessboard. But before you can play, you need to understand the board, what winning looks like, and the first rule of PRs.
Setting up the game: a shrinking media landscape
The first thing to know about PR is that journalists and PRs have been in a hate-love dynamic for years. [Not all of us though — this PR loves every journalist she works with)
Think less brotherly rivalry of Australia and New Zealand, more England and France during the Hundred Years’ War.
Journalists need us as much as we need them but the game has changed underneath both of us.
When I moved to Australia, I also moved from public affairs into public relations. Back then we told clients the journalist-to-PR ratio was an atrocious 5:1. Today it sits at 8:1.
Probably worse today, given The Washington Post has just laid off one-third of its staff. Closer to home, Business News Australia announced they were entering administration.
Newsrooms are shrinking. Less room, more competition to get in the media agenda.
Every quarter I hear my fellow PRs lament: the hardest part of the job used to be dealing with clients you can never satisfy. [Not all PR though — this PR would love her clients/users to know she adores them. Yes, especially you!]
Now the hardest part of the job is securing coverage and dealing with clients who are even less satisfied.
Because what “good” looks like in PR has also completely changed.
Winning the game: good PR in 2026
Cut Through Venture achieved a PR masterclass that would very much please all the Samantha Jones of this world, professionally of course who have been advising their client that to make the news, sometimes you have to do newsworthy things, top of which: a serious, shareable, proprietary research.
Cut Through Venture released last week their fifth year running 165-page proprietary report State of Australian Funding, quoting dozens of key opinion leaders across the industry ensuring maximum reshare and visibility on LinkedIn, (and this despite omitting our supreme Merch and attention leader Rayn Ong).
Their report earned them five pieces of coverage in launch week. Five. And a mention in Startup Daily’s second Startup 360 of the year.
And that is great attention in 2026.
PR 2026: less tricks, more trust
Embargos used to be to PR what +4 are in UNO. Gold. Embargoes are a PR tactic if you want to share your news on a particular date, you can send a press release ‘under embargo’.
This means the journalist can write up the piece, ask any follow up questions or conduct their interviews so they’re ready to publish on the specified date. Everyone benefited.
Except PRs used this tool to send different embargo times to different mastheads. And so embargos became less binding with some journalists today breaking embargos for sport.
On the other hand, used to be exceptional. Today, there should be your go-to.
An exclusive is a story you are providing to one media publication first, allowing them to publish before you send the release to anyone else.
With an ultra-competitive media landscape, favour exclusives as much as you can.
Build trust by direct signal: try to pitch stories that are newsworthy, timely AND relevant to the journalist you are pitching.
And build trust indirectly by amping your thought leadership efforts.
Gone are the days where companies would control what their staff posted on LinkedIn. Today, your employees should be your best influencers. Social media is earned media now; and you can be sure journalist will check your LinkedIn profile before picking up your story.
The easiest way to break trust is to spam journalists with irrelevant, you’ve visibility never read my work pitch.
Journalists are drowning in what the industry used to call “spray and pray” pitches. Except now it’s worse: record volumes of AI-generated spam are flooding inboxes. [I know, I know — ambiguous coming from an AI PR founder. But Newsary doesn’t let our AI put words in your spokesperson’s mouth. There’s a difference between using technology to find and structure stories and using it to mass-produce generic slop.]
Newswires are also useless for 99% of pitches. While a rare few remain useful and trusted sources of information, most simply feed listicles — media whose only readers are the people checking whether their own coverage ran.
But there are trickier ways to break trust, like Airwallex’s attempt to sue Nine into silence. It didn’t work. It never does. Threatening litigation almost always magnifies the story. It invites deeper probes, less sympathetic framing, and secondary coverage about the legal fight itself. It’s called the Barabara Streissand effect and you can read more about it here.
Two rules, however, never changed: don’t put anything in an email — or anywhere, in writing — that you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing across a billboard in Times Square.
And don’t be a jerk.
PR really is that simple.
- Marie Dowling is a startup and tech PR practitioner and CEO of Newsary, an AI-powered media intelligence platform that helps founders and comms teams build journalist-ready stories and media relationships.
