I’m all for a bit of back-patting. Especially when it’s well deserved, and even more so when the hand doing the patting is someone else’s.
So when Press Gazette – the hallowed trade rag of media geeks and PR doyennes – recently ran a lovely write-up on the growth of Capital Business Media, I was delighted. Beaming, in fact. There’s something satisfying about seeing your company’s hard graft recognised in print (or pixels), nestled among the news of who’s made substantial redundancies, who’s pivoted, and who’s just hired a former TikTok influencer as their new head of strategy.
But then came the kicker. The buzzkill. The frustrating, fingers-on-a-blackboard twist in the tale: the piece was behind a paywall.
Now, I get it. Journalism isn’t free. Reporters need to be paid. Publishers need to keep the lights on. And websites – even the ones with clunky UX and a cookie banner the size of a duvet – need revenue. But when your shiny new bit of PR, lovingly pitched, massaged, and nudged into a slot by your PR team, is suddenly visible to… well, about 37 subscribers and a bloke named Colin who still has an RSS reader… it all feels a bit, well, pointless.
The actual growth that the Press Gazette piece on Capital Business Media was talking about came about directly because we do not use paywall’s – and never will – on any of our websites, and Press Gazette could most probably make themselves more revenue but not using one.
Because PR – real, strategic, value-generating PR – is about more than egos. Or at least, it should be. It’s about reach. Visibility. Shaping the conversation. A great media hit should do more than sit on your mum’s fridge door. It should drive traffic, get people Googling you, earn you a bit more swagger in the pitch meeting.
But when it’s locked behind the “Subscribe now for £14.99 a month (or £149.99 a year)” barricade, the value begins to erode. Not immediately, and not always fatally, but in a death-by-a-thousand-clicks sort of way. The headline teases. The intro loads. Then—bam. The wall comes down like a guillotine. And the potential impact? It vanishes into the digital void.
And this isn’t just me having a sulk because my feature couldn’t be screen-grabbed and paraded across LinkedIn like a new baby photo. This is a broader issue facing the entire PR industry. If the holy grail of coverage – the big-name title, the high-profile platform – can only be seen by those who already live and breathe media, then what’s the real ROI for the client?
Will businesses keep paying four or five figures a month to get coverage they can’t properly leverage? Will CMOs sign off on budgets to secure placements in titles their customers, partners, and stakeholders can’t even read without creating yet another login and parting with a tenner?
There’s an uncomfortable truth here. One that PR firms – especially the big, glossy ones with exposed-brick offices and scented reception desks – might not want to admit: the value of PR is increasingly in visibility, not just placement. And visibility, in a post-paywall world, is getting harder to quantify.
Yes, there’s still cachet in a Financial Times mention. A Times write-up can still lend serious clout. But if your audience is entrepreneurs, SMEs, or anyone under 35 who thinks paying for news is a crime against the internet, then your impact is limited.
We live in an age where LinkedIn posts, podcast appearances, and cheeky YouTube shorts get more engagement than some magazine articles. I’ve seen company founders go viral with a single raw, self-shot iPhone video explaining their mission – reaching more eyeballs than a full-page spread in a national broadsheet could ever hope to.
That’s not to say traditional media is dead. Far from it. But the model is creaking. It’s not built for the distribution-hungry, scroll-happy, SEO-driven landscape we now operate in. And PR firms, frankly, need to adapt. Because clients are starting to ask better questions. Not just “Can you get us in The Guardian?” but “How many people will see it? How many will click? Can we share it freely? Will it help with our Google ranking?”
If the answer to all those is “no”, or “only if they pay for the privilege”, then PR – the good kind, the strategic kind – needs to find new ways of proving its worth. That might mean a shift towards owned media. Thought leadership. Influencer outreach. Or yes, even paying to boost your own press coverage on social.
I’m not here to slate paywalls. They’re a necessary evil in a world where journalism has been gutted by ad models, clickbait, and social media giants. But let’s not pretend they don’t complicate the picture for PR.
As for that Press Gazette article? It was nice. It was flattering. It was a professional moment of pride. But when I tried to share it with a potential client and he replied, “Mate, I’d love to read it but I’m not subscribing just to see your face”, I had to laugh.
Because if a brilliant bit of coverage falls in the forest, and no one’s there to click on it – did it ever really happen?
Read more:
Yes, it’s great to get PR coverage – until it’s locked behind a bloody paywall