This Week in PR Takes - Week 42

Take of the Week:
I can admit it, I’m a sucker for movie references - with a space in my heart if that movie is a knucklehead 80s comedy. If you send me a take with one, I’ll almost surely include it based on merit alone.

That leaves us with this week’s Take of the Week, with an absolute banger of a reference to Animal House. Katy wrote about the end of calling things DEAD - the embargo, traditional PR and of course Niedermeyer.

Her sentiment is also spot on.

We tend to declare “something” dead, but it’s really more of a shift or a trend evolving than dying. Is PR dead? Of course not, especially considering all of the takes and info we’ve read this year around earned media and press releases feeding the LLMs. Is it different than what it looked like, sure; but it’s not dead.

Neither is the embargo. To use another reference, you could argue that it is “mostly dead” (bonus points for anyone who tags me on LinkedIn with the reference), but I have successfully pitched news under embargo in the past few months. Using an embargo may look different than it did years ago, but there are times when it is useful and effective.

Resource of the Week:
I highly recommend reading MuckRack’s December 2025 AI Report, it’s chock full of fantastic material.

Before we get into this week’s takes, I wanted to thank Meredith Klein for the shout out on the Smart in Public Podcast. Give it a listen!

A message from Reportable:
Not only is Reportable a great resource to send LLM-friendly press releases with an amazing value, their Reportabot is an equally amazing tool to use the power of AI when creating a press release. You just Reportabot what the news is, who is quoted and a few details and you get back a near-ready release to issue.

It’s free to use, and of course you can then use Reportable to send out the release:) If you want to learn more or have questions, schedule a 15 minute call with Reportable’s Karen Reynolds using this link.

The Rest of the Takes:
AI and PR
- Speaking of AI and PR, Dustin had an interesting take around and loss of jobs in our industry.

Media
-Pay attention to the signature, according to Rob Pegoraro. All of the contact information we need is right there.
- Liang wrote about Business Insider quietly rolling back its paywall.
- Tonya gave a peek under the hood into why she responded to a bunch of pitches from weeks ago and what it means for PR people.

PR Misc.
- Laddering back up to the Take of the Week, Adam did not declare the embargo dead - but he did provide insight into why he won’t pitch under embargo.
- Khris and Sarah wrote in their newsletter about MuckRack’s Measurement Report, and questioned why we all still use metrics that don’t matter.
- I cannot say I’ve ever asked a freelancer this question, but it’s still a great take from Josh about what not to do with them.
- Lizzy with a must-read list of what tech founders should know about PR

That’s it for this week’s takes, thanks for reading.

-Brian
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkramer/