The Trust Exchange

How To Navigate Media Engagement in the Age of AI

The conversation about AI in media has largely centred on disruption in the newsroom – job displacement, efficiency gains, and the risks of misinformation. But for communications professionals, the more strategic question is: How does AI change the rules of engagement with media and what do we do differently as a result?

The answer is not to abandon traditional media relations, but to evolve it deliberately. Because in an AI-shaped information ecosystem, earned media is now critical infrastructure for large language models (‘LLM’).¹ And to ensure that infrastructure adequately serves all parties, a trust exchange between journalists and media relations professionals is essential.

To build this trust, there are three shifts communications teams should prioritise right now:

Treat Media Relationships as Strategic Assets, Not Transactional Channels

In an environment where journalists are increasingly flooded with AI-generated pitches and content,² trust has become scarce and therefore more valuable.

While newsrooms are also starting to rely on AI tools to accelerate research, transcription, and production, they remain under increasing pressure with smaller teams and broader beats. Journalists are moving faster, often outside their traditional areas of expertise, and therefore have become more dependent on credible, responsive sources to get stories right.

This creates a clear opportunity for communications teams that invest in genuine, human-to-human relationships with journalists. This includes:

Being consistently responsive and reliable
Providing timely access to credible spokespeople, not just pre-packaged quotes
Helping journalists navigate complex or unfamiliar topics quickly
Taking the time to get to know the journalist – understanding how they work, what they value when being pitched to, deadlines, focus and interest areas within their beat – rather than a blanket approach to everyone.

When you strip media relations back to its fundamentals, trust underpins the foundations of credibility, relationships and reputation – of both the organisation and you as a professional. Communications teams must be the signal in a system increasingly filled with noise.

Redouble Focus on Quality, Relevance and Differentiation

AI has made content creation easy. That’s precisely why cut-through has become harder.

Journalists have told us they are already seeing a rise in “pitch bots” and generic, AI-generated outreach cluttering their inboxes. At the same time, they’re using AI themselves to summarise information, generate ideas, draft punchy headlines, and triage inputs more quickly.

The principles of good media engagement still apply, but with the threshold for attention rising, it is imperative that we prioritise:

Relevance to the journalist’s audience and beat, and type of content the outlet publishes
Clear articulation of the ‘so what’ and why the story matters now
Genuine insight or access that AI cannot replicate

AI can help both sides move faster, but it also makes mediocrity easier to produce at scale. Communications teams need to move in the opposite direction: fewer, sharper, more strategic and valuable interactions grounded in human judgement and genuine understanding.

Reframe Earned Media as an AI Influence Strategy

This is the most important shift, and the least well understood.

AI systems have become intermediaries between audiences and information. Increasingly, people trust summaries, answers, and recommendations generated by LLMs rather than clicking through to original sources.

That change has three major implications:

Journalism is becoming training data. Credible media coverage feeds AI models and shapes how they represent organisations, industries and issues.
Your reputation is being mediated twice. First by journalists, and then by AI systems that interpret and repackage that content – sometimes imperfectly.
Reputational issues will resurface. Should a reputational issue impact your organisation, such as a cyber breach, regulatory investigation or legal matter, AI’s extensive memory means outdated media articles will resurface, long after the news cycle has passed.

We are already seeing declining referral traffic to news websites from search as AI summaries answer queries directly, with an SEO study finding an AI overview correlates to a 58 per cent lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking pages.³ And while AI systems are improving all the time, there is an ongoing risk that information is misrepresented. That risk makes accuracy and authority in the source material even more critical.

AI systems will draw from whatever digital signals are visible and discoverable. Success is no longer determined solely by ranking in traditional search results, but by whether trusted information is present in the AI discovery layer that increasingly shapes how audiences access and understand information. In this context, earned media does more than reach audiences – it defines the dataset AI draws from.⁴

The organisations that understand this will treat media engagement as a way to seed accurate, high-quality information into the public domain, reinforce consistent narratives across credible sources, and reduce the risk of distortion as AI systems interpret their brand.

If you’re not shaping the narrative in trusted media, you’re leaving it to be inferred – and potentially misrepresented – by AI.

Why This Matters Now

These shifts are emerging at a moment of real tension in the media ecosystem. On one hand, journalists are embracing AI as a practical tool. On the other, there is deep concern and a level of distrust about its impact on accuracy, integrity and jobs.

Research shows that while AI is improving efficiency, human editorial oversight remains essential, and audiences still place greater trust in high-quality journalism over AI-generated content.⁵

Publishers are beginning to understand the evolution of the information environment and some news organisations are positioning their content as inputs to AI systems, not just outputs for human audiences.⁶

The paradox here is that the value of credible journalism is increasing at the exact moment its traditional business model is under strain. For communications teams, this is an opportunity.

The Comms and Media Trust Exchange

The fundamentals of media relations haven’t changed, but their strategic importance has.

Quality matters more because content is abundant
Earned media matters more because it shapes both human and machine understanding
Relationships matter more because trust is under pressure

Recognising this shift early and evolving to a strategic approach will see communications teams strengthen their influence and credibility and build deeper trust with journalists.

For communications teams, the implication is clear: media engagement strategies now need to be designed for both the journalists shaping today’s news agenda and the AI systems influencing how that reporting is subsequently discovered and interpreted.

FTI Consulting is helping organisations respond to this shift by combining deep media expertise with large language model analysis. This allows us to identify the sources shaping AI-generated answers, assess gaps in an organisation’s media presence and develop engagement strategies that strengthen authority, accuracy and visibility across both traditional and AI-mediated information environments.

Organisations that approach media relations in this way will be better positioned not only to secure attention, but to build trusted relationships, contribute credible information to the public record and increase the likelihood that their organisation is accurately understood.

If you’d like to learn more about the work we are doing reach out to our Corporate Reputation specialists: CorpRepAU@fticonsulting.com.

Footnotes:

1: Streem, “State of Australian Media Report” (2026).

2: Medianet, “2026 Australian Media Landscape Report” (2026).

3: Law, Ryan and Guan, Xibeijia, “Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%,” Ahrefs (Feb. 4, 2026).

4: For an overview of AI-driven discovery, see Jones, Carl, Mhajan, Madhur, Yeung, Emily and Pattisen, Alex, “The Great Visibility Reset: Winning the AI Discovery Layer,” FTI Consulting (April 7, 2026).

5: University of Canberra, “Digital News Report: Australia 2026” (2026).

6: Streem, supra note 1.

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Published

August 11, 2026

Key Contacts

India Bednall

Senior Director