There are six PR professionals for every working journalist, creating an increasingly crowded pitching environment where multiple brands, agencies, and communications teams may be competing for the attention of the same reporters.
Traditional media relations have always involved competition for limited attention. But the media landscape is changing, and PR professionals now have access to a much larger pool of potential media partners.
The PR Pitching Problem
Traditional media relations are built around scarcity. There are only so many journalists covering technology, healthcare, finance, beauty, travel, business, and other industries.
On average, a journalist receives 42 pitches for every HARO query, making it easy for even a strong story to get lost in the volume.
Creators introduce a different model. There is a much larger pool of potential media partners to tap into, with creators who have already built audiences around specific industries, interests, and customer segments.
Rather than asking only, “Which journalist should I pitch?” PR professionals can also ask, “Which creators already have the audience I want to reach?”
There Are 30x More Creators Than Journalists
The creator economy has dramatically expanded the number of people producing and distributing content. IAB’s 2025 Measuring the Digital Economy study estimates 1.5 million full-time-equivalent digital creator jobs in 2024, compared with roughly 49,300 news analysts, reporters, and journalists. That’s roughly 30 full-time-equivalent creator jobs for every journalist.
Creators on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms are effectively building their own media channels. They have audiences, niches, editorial perspectives, and established relationships with people who actively choose to consume their content.
And many creators aren’t operating as large media businesses. According to NeoReach’s 2025 Creator Earnings Report, nearly 57% of surveyed full-time creators earn below the U.S. living-wage benchmark of $44,000 from content alone. The report surveyed more than 3,000 creators representing 1.1 billion combined followers.
That creates an opportunity for brands. Creators need content, ideas, expertise, products, and partnerships that help them consistently produce content their audiences want to see.
For PR professionals, creators can become another way to put a brand, product, expert, or story in front of the right audience.
Expand Your Media Outreach
Imagine a PR professional representing a new financial product.
The traditional approach might be to identify journalists covering personal finance, fintech, or investing and send them a pitch. That remains an important part of media relations, but it doesn’t have to be the only approach.
There may also be dozens or hundreds of creators making content for exactly the audience the company wants to reach.
A personal finance creator could explain the product. A fintech creator could demonstrate how it works. A career creator could discuss how it helps people manage their finances. A small-business creator could show how it applies to entrepreneurs.
The goal isn’t to replace traditional PR. It’s to expand the definition of media outreach.
Instead of only asking who might write about a story, PR professionals can also consider who can authentically incorporate that story into content their audience already wants.
Finding the Right Creator Is the New Challenge
Having more potential media partners creates a different problem: how do you find the right ones?
Searching manually across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn can quickly become as time-consuming as traditional media research. The goal isn’t to find the creator with the biggest following. It’s to find creators whose content, audience, and niche align with the brand.
That challenge is becoming increasingly important as creator marketing scales. IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report found that 32% of respondents cited identifying the right creators to partner with as their biggest challenge.
New creator discovery tools are making that process more similar to media-list building, but with a more conversational approach.
For example, Featured’s Find Creators is a chat-based search experience that lets users describe the creator they’re looking for in natural language.
A PR professional might search: “Find me finance creators on TikTok with more than 25,000 followers who are based in California and average at least 10,000 views per video.”
The tool can use criteria such as platform, follower count, average views, location, language, posting activity, and industry or niche to surface relevant creators from Featured’s database of 380 million creators. Users can combine these criteria in a single natural-language search or search for specific creators by handle.
Once a creator is identified, information such as engagement rate, audience insights, average likes and comments, previous collaborations, and contact information can help determine whether that creator is worth approaching.
The advantage isn’t simply having more creators. It’s being able to search that larger pool and quickly find the people who are actually relevant to a brand and its audience.
PR Professionals Should Start Optimizing for Social
The traditional PR playbook isn’t going away. Journalists still play an important role in shaping public conversations, establishing credibility, and producing news.
But PR professionals now have another distribution channel to consider: social media.
Creators are building audiences around specific industries, interests, communities, and customer segments. That gives PR strategies two parallel paths:
Pitch journalists for earned media.
Pitch creators for social distribution.
The goal isn’t to choose one over the other. It’s to build a media strategy that reaches audiences through both.
Find the Creators Already Reaching Your Customers
The next evolution of PR may not be about sending more pitches. It may be about finding more of the right people to pitch.
Creators have become an enormous, decentralized network of niche media channels, reaching audiences interested in everything from finance and healthcare to beauty, technology, travel, business, and beyond.
For PR professionals and brands, the opportunity is straightforward:
Find the creators who already have your customers’ attention, and give them a reason to create something worth sharing.
The traditional media landscape has a scarcity problem. The creator economy offers abundance.
The PR professionals who learn how to work with both may have a significant advantage in getting their brands and clients in front of the audiences that matter most.