AI is disrupting many industries these days and PR professionals are looking to integrate AI tools into their workflows to make their jobs easier. But which tools are the best for Public Relations?
The best PR pros leverage AI not just for content creation but also for journalist research and media list building. Why is this so important?
Check out the current stats and ratios. For every journalist out there, there are six PR pros. With the vast amount of emails that journalists get these days, rising above the noise is tough. Did you know that only 3% of media pitches get replied to?
To boost our chances, we need to find journalists aligned with our story and tailor each pitch to their specific interests. Journalist research might be incredibly time-consuming, but it’s essential for personalization and achieving success in your outreach.
Imagine having an AI assistant that could do all the time consuming research for you and find the perfect journalists for your story, getting their up-to-date contact details, and revealing a treasure trove of their latest works – all in a matter of seconds.
So, let’s examine how AI tools can handle all the research behind the scenes.
Static models: The illusion of accuracy
In the past few years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved significantly, giving life to powerful tools like ChatGPT, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini. They’re pretty good at generating human-quality text, resulting in many PR pros using them for pitch generation and press releases.
However, the main limitation of current LLMs is that they’re trained on past data. This can lead to issues such as out-of-date information, lack of transparency, or hallucinations. You know the ones — for example, quotes from papers that don’t exist or questionable math skills.
Let’s examine how tools such as ChatGPT handle PR research tasks. Say we’re working on a story about a new AI technology, and we’d like to find journalists to pitch it to:
Doesn’t look too bad, right? Well, a quick search reveals that Karen Hao left The Wall Street Journal in August 2023, and Tom Simonite joined The Washington Post in June 2024. Static models like ChatGPT rarely provide sources of information, so your only way of fact-checking their answers is to google them. So in that case, isn’t just using Google directly more efficient?
Question-answering models: Somewhat accurate but limited
Recent advancements in AI have enabled quick web scans for relevant information, offering significant improvement over the limitations of static models. Perplexity, for instance, can provide up-to-date answers to complex queries in seconds, thanks to its ability to process web data in real time. It also provides source links, making the answers more trustworthy.
While this might improve the ability to retrieve accurate information quickly, these are still general-purpose models not trained for PR workflows. And it shows. They can only find a handful of journalists and if you take a closer look at the sources of information, you’ll find that most come from one or two links.
Let’s try the same example as above – Find journalists writing about AI technology:
Not a bad list, you might say. However, a closer look reveals that almost all of these recommendations come from a single article—Top AI Journalists and Outlets to Pitch. This is not helpful, because you could easily google articles like this yourself, and for niche topics that aren’t made up of these kinds of listicles, you won’t get many relevant results. Plus, these tools are limited in their research capabilities, and they won’t get you journalists' contact details, either.
PR-focused AI platform: Spot-on for media research
While general-purpose AI may help with some of your day-to-day work, a PR-specific platform is essential for effective and efficient PR.
Dazzle is the first and only chat-based AI platform for PR professionals, and it’s free to use. It was created by PR professionals themselves and tested on hundreds of PR campaigns with great success.
Simply ask for whatever you need – whether it’s to find LA’s best journalists to cover an upcoming mental health app or discover top-tier outlets offering guest-post opportunities. Dazzle searches the web for the latest info and sifts through a network of verified data partners to answer questions like an expert PR researcher would:
- Who are the best journalists who write about a new fitness AI app?
- What are the contact details and social media handles of these journalists?
- How should I pitch Parker Hall from Wired to cover new language translation earbuds?
- Which outlets allow guest posts on AI-driven software?
With this intel, you can build your media list and create personalized story angles and email pitches faster than ever. This level of detail and personalization would usually require hours of research, but Dazz does it in seconds.
Dazzle uses a variety of models and search capabilities to scan the web in real time, giving you the most timely and accurate results. It also provides sources for every piece of info, making it super easy to verify.
You’ll even get AI-generated article summaries to get an idea of a journalist's existing coverage without reading lengthy articles (even those behind a paywall). And you’ll get all this for literally every relevant outlet, blog, and podcast out there. It doesn’t get much easier than that!
Building media lists gets easier
Another downside of general AI tools is that you need to copy-paste all the information you get into a spreadsheet. With Dazzle, you can save all the journalist’s information straight into your media list with one click. AND these lists auto-update when anything changes, so your data is always kept fresh and up-to-date.
You can collaborate on these lists with your team, exchange comments, assign tasks, or share them with clients and managers. Dazzle’s AI even automatically recommends dozens more relevant journalists by looking at those that you’ve already added to your media list, expanding your existing lists in minutes.
Try Dazzle now
Different artificial intelligence tools can help with different tasks, but Dazzle helps you do double the PR work in half the time. The accurate and current data in your media lists means that you’re pitching the right journalists with a pitch that’s relevant, timely, and written well. All because you let Dazzle take care of the grunt work so that you can focus on what truly matters – getting top-tier media coverage.
And the best bit? Dazzle is free to use! Try it now.
