Tales From the Beat Episode 148: PR Veterans on Media Relations, AI, and Who Counts as a Journalist

The latest installment of Tales From the Beat brings together two public relations veterans for a wide-ranging discussion about the uneasy but essential relationship between PR and journalism. Hosted by longtime reporter and PR operative Ed Garsten, episode 148 features Scott Merritt, founder and CEO of Strategic Global Media, alongside his business partner Dwain Schenck. The pair spend much of the conversation dissecting why media relations remains one of the most demanding and frequently misunderstood corners of the PR profession.

Merritt, who spent close to three decades working both in-house and at agencies before launching Strategic Global Media in 2022, has built his firm around helping companies whose work is genuinely hard to explain to a general audience. Schenck arrived as a partner after roughly 30 years in media relations, reputation management and crisis communications, following an early career as a television reporter and weekend anchor in Montana. Together they argue that effective media relations demands far more than blasting out press releases. The job, as they describe it, requires knowing a journalist’s beat, studying the outlet’s audience, and spotting the real story buried inside a client’s materials — then being able to articulate why any of it should matter to readers. It also demands a thick skin, since PR professionals have no authority over whether a journalist actually uses what they send.

A central theme of the episode is the guest’s pointed criticism of mass pitching, the practice of building enormous contact lists from media databases and firing off near-identical emails. They frame this as both wasteful and reputation-damaging, warning that repeatedly irrelevant outreach can permanently sour relationships with reporters. The discussion underscores a principle the guests return to often: relevance outweighs volume. One particularly memorable illustration involves pitches about wildly off-topic subjects landing in a transportation journalist’s inbox, a humorous stand-in for what goes wrong when senders skip basic research. Their advice boils down to understanding not just who you’re contacting, but why the story serves that specific audience — the reporter is simply the conduit.

The conversation then shifts to artificial intelligence and its growing influence on how stories surface. Garsten notes that journalists once leaned heavily on tools like Google Trends to gauge public interest, whereas today they increasingly consider what people are asking AI assistants such as ChatGPT. Merritt and Schenck see genuine value in AI for spotting trends, surfacing story angles and finding the right reporters, but they insist it doesn’t replace human judgment. Their working method — find the trend, determine where a client fits, identify the appropriate journalist, offer real expertise — still culminates in people pitching people. Because relevance drives how AI systems connect information, tightly targeted stories and credible sources are more likely to appear in AI-generated answers, a dynamic the host likens to working backward from the questions audiences are already asking.

Finally, the episode tackles the increasingly blurry question of who gets to be called a journalist. Where the traditional landscape once made the answer obvious — staffers at established outlets listed in recognized directories — today’s mix includes independent reporters, bloggers, Substack writers, influencers, niche industry publications, content creators and former mainstream journalists working solo. Merritt points out that no governing body officially settles the matter, so his firm focuses on who is worth pitching rather than enforcing a rigid definition. Schenck offers three practical filters: relevance, meaning whether someone truly reaches the audience that matters; credibility, meaning a commitment to facts and accuracy; and influence, meaning a genuine effect on that audience. Where a person works, he suggests, matters less than how they work — a writer building an independent platform can serve a campaign just as well as a major newspaper’s staffer. Schenck’s newsroom background gives him a practical edge in understanding deadline pressure and how reporters evaluate information, though both guests stress that a newsroom past is not a prerequisite for PR excellence, citing Merritt himself as proof.