There's a list of PR people circulating in tech journalists' group chats, and no, you don't get to see it.
When Nycole Walsh and her research team at Kickstand surveyed 350 tech journalists about what's working in their inboxes, 69% said they have warned a colleague about a specific PR person to avoid. Meanwhile, 85% said they have at least one PR contact they trust enough to call first when a story is breaking.
Long story short: PR is splitting in two. The industry is sorting itself into a small group of people who get called first and a much larger group who are being filtered out—by name, in chat threads and before the email is even opened.
It's tempting to read this as an AI story, but that's not quite right. The dynamic of journalists sorting their inboxes by name and relationship has been in motion for years; what generative tools changed is the volume. The flood of polished-sounding pitches forced reporters to triage harder, and the conversation about whose pitch gets read is now happening openly between them. The relationships that already existed are now worth more.
Here's what the journalists in Kickstand's research revealed about the small group of PR people who land on those call-first lists. The patterns are transferable beyond tech PR.
They Lead with a Claim, not a Credential.
77% of the journalists surveyed said they're more likely to respond to a research-backed pitch than to a product announcement with equivalent news value. The PR people who get called first lead with something a reporter could write today—a number the client is willing to be on the record about, a customer pattern they're seeing or a contrarian read on a market shift. Position your spokesperson as the source of a story, not the subject of one.
They Sound Like a Person who Read the Room.
91% of the journalists surveyed said they can tell within the first sentence whether a pitch was written specifically for them or repurposed from a broader send. Generative tools have made that test sharper. A batch send pitch takes 90 seconds to produce now, and reporters are seeing dozens of them a week. The pitches that pass the first-sentence test reference a piece the reporter just published, a question their last story raised, or a pattern in their coverage that someone has been quietly tracking.
What used to be a nicety is now a necessary signal that a human was on the other end.
They Understand the Journalist's News Cycle, not Just the News.
44% of the cyber journalists surveyed said their jobs would be easier if PR people had a better understanding of how fast the news cycle moves on their beat. The pattern is universal across categories, and every beat has its own rhythm. The PR people who get called first know when a story is fresh and when it's stale, which weeks of the quarter are loaded and which are dead. They time the send for when the reporter is most likely to need the angle, even when the client wants it out yesterday.
They Respect the Time-Cost of a Journalist's Inbox.
67% of the journalists surveyed said they have "almost certainly" missed a story they would have wanted to cover because their inbox was too full. Trade and vertical journalists are 33% more likely than average to cite "more lead time" as a top ask, and the PR people earning attention work with both numbers in mind: shorter emails, news angle in the subject line and longer runways when possible. Honesty about what you're sending—"this is not breaking news, but it's a quiet pattern worth a longer piece"—is becoming a real differentiator.
All three patterns share something. The PR contacts on the call-first list got there because of months of small actions. The pitch reporters accept today is the byproduct of behavior they noticed six months ago.
If you're not sure which list your name is on, here's the test: when news breaks in your client's category tomorrow, who picks up your call?
Kristina Kennedy is co-founder of Kickstand. She is an MIT Sloan MBA and has spent 20+ years building PR programs in mobility, MarTech, cybersecurity and other complex tech categories.