This edition of The Reputation Ledger hands the pen to a guest contributor, and it is a pleasure to do so.
Paula Fisher is a strategic communications consultant with more than twenty years building and leading comms practices across the UK, Europe and Asia, including senior roles at Ogilvy in Hong Kong and Singapore and MSL in London. She has counselled C-suite leaders through scrutiny, growth and crisis, and now runs her independent practice, Reynard Communications.
The question she tackles here is one I hear in different forms all the time: with owned channels, paid reach and AI-generated content everywhere, does earned media still matter? Paula’s answer is a firm yes, and her reasoning matters to anyone thinking seriously about reputation - not least because, as she points out, the credible third-party coverage that journalists produce is now feeding directly into how AI systems describe you.
That last point sits right at the heart of what we do at Pavesen, and I pick it up in the Pavesen Perspective at the end of the piece. First, over to Paula.
I don’t need earned media anymore, do I?
Fragmenting media landscapes, a lack of trust in those for those running the media titles and a propensity to dig even deeper than the story you’re telling is causing many C-suites to discount earned media as a key asset in their reputation armoury. Especially as they live in an age where companies can publish instantly, advertise precisely and build audiences without ever picking up the phone to a journalist.
So increasingly the question asked is: why chase media coverage you can’t control when you can have your channels to convey your message verbatim?
Here’s the definitive answer to that question:
Reputation is your most fragile asset
There is increasing recognition from most business leaders that reputation is one of their most important assets. But few understand the nuances behind building, nurturing and maintaining this reputation, and that while an asset, it is the most fragile of assets.
Reputation isn’t a fixed thing. It’s an intangible collective belief about who you are and what you stand for, built from the accumulated perceptions and experiences of everyone who encounters your company from customers, investors and employees to regulators, the public and everyone in between. Whilst reputation is far from a new concept, in today’s world, thanks to immediate access to news via online and social channels, it can be under constant scrutiny where the slightest irregularity can be seized on by even a small group of detractors to create substantial - and often long term - damage.
Can reputation be bought?
In a word ‘no’. But it is fair to say that in today’s paid and owned landscape, brands and corporations do have more opportunity to pay to get their message out directly to their audiences. However, while this buys reach and visibility, it’s not necessarily establishing the trust and credibility that will help you win favour with your audiences. That comes from others talking about you and sharing their opinion on you. And earned media remains one of the most respected sources for this.
What earned actually does
Earned media, the coverage achieved in credible, trusted media outlets - commentary that gets picked up, stories that journalists choose to tell about you - carries something that no paid or owned content can replicate: third-party endorsement.
When a journalist writes about your company, or an analyst cites your thinking, or an editor runs your op-ed, they’re making an editorial judgement. When a journalist, respected by your audiences, decides you are worth the space, that means significantly more than whatever is coming from the horse’s mouth.
Don’t wait until the damage is done
Earned media should be part of your reputation strategy long before anything goes wrong. Telling stories of your ambition, achievements, people, technology, impact all help to build positive brand equity. As does forging connections with the key people that write about your industry. This positive profile establishes a familiarity and affinity that ties your audience to you and creates a reluctance to so quickly discount you if any of the proverbial sh*t hits the fan.
Furthermore, it makes you findable, credible and, critically, trustworthy to people who don’t yet know you.
It also, increasingly, makes you visible to AI.
The AI dimension
Large language models don’t browse your website first. They scrape trusted credible sources. And media is seen as a credible source. The publications, platforms and voices that have historically carried credibility are now the ones informing how AI systems understand and represent your company, your category, your expertise.
If you’re not showing up in credible earned media, you’re not just invisible to readers, you’re less visible to the AI tools that are shaping how the next generation of audiences find and assess information. In a world where AI-generated content is everywhere, authentic third-party coverage has never been more valuable. Being genuinely credible has never been more important.
Facing the loss of control
Unless you’re living in countries where media is rigorously government controlled and censored, in credible media outlets, there is no editorial control over the final output - zero, zilch, nada. Yes, you can convey your messages and influence the journalist as much as you can but, ultimately, a journalist will write what they want to write. And even if your journalist includes all your lovely messages and stories in the first draft of the article, the editor has the right to come in with the scissors and chop it all down significantly. Furthermore, particularly with the UK media, you may find the journalist is not shy to bring up some significant past misdemeanours.
So why subject yourself to all this risk? This lack of control makes you and your story all the more credible. The story is not polished and varnished to perfection by your in-house or agency comms teams, it is told from the point of view of the journalist exactly as he or she sees it. This is what makes it distinguishable from paid advertising or content.
The trick is to build a strategy robust enough that you don’t need every article to go perfectly.
Building an earned media strategy that works
Start by understanding the conversation that’s already happening. What stories is your industry generating? What questions are journalists asking, and who are they asking? The key is to shape stories that resonate within that conversation. Trying to interrupt it with messages nobody asked for won’t get you very far.
Get to know who’s writing about your industry. Read them. Understand what they care about. Put yourself or your clients forward for commentary that’s timely and relevant - not for every story, but the right ones.
Build your expert bench. Earned media needs voices - real people with genuine points of view, willing to share insights, challenge assumptions and explain complexity. Spokespeople who speak like humans, not message trained to the point of near automation.
And when you speak: avoid jargon. Jargon is often used to hide inexperience, a lack of knowledge or straightforward incompetence. Speak plainly, with the personal point of view. Let that personality come through. With AI-generated content already flooding every channel, a genuine voice, genuine expertise and genuine storytelling will win through. Stories are what move us. Stories are what get remembered.
But none of it works if it’s just performative. You have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. There needs to be robust and genuine proof points for the story you’re telling - borne out by how your company operates day to day. Earned media amplifies what’s true about you but it cannot manufacture what isn’t.
The shrinking landscape and new earned opportunity
It’s no secret that traditional media is under pressure. Newsrooms are smaller. Titles have folded. Journalists are overstretched - and are now content capturers, photographers and videographers as well as writers. The audience for any single outlet is more fragmented than it was a decade ago, with 54% of people now accessing news primarily through social channels rather than going directly to media outlets (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026). Meanwhile, a new generation of independent voices, Substack writers, podcast hosts, niche newsletter editors, creators has stepped into the gap, luring loyal, highly engaged audiences away from traditional titles.
This shift toward creator content and social-first news consumption adds a new dimension to the definition of earned media. Now, not every influential voice is a journalist and not every meaningful piece of coverage appears in a publication.
Endorsement from these new voices has expanded the definition of earned, opening up new routes to building credibility with new audiences. Earned strategies need to keep pace, making sure stories reach the right audiences in the right places.
Paula Fisher is an experienced communicator who has advised C-suites of global corporations on their executive visibility, storytelling and reputation management strategies. Having gained extensive experience at global networked agencies, she currently runs her own practice, Reynard Communications where she works with leadership teams and communications functions to build and protect reputations that connect with the audiences that matter most.
Two layers of the same architecture
Paula’s piece lands on something we see every day: earned media and digital reputation are not competing disciplines. They are two layers of the same architecture.
Pavesen is not a PR firm and does not want to be one. We are the digital layer that sits beneath PR and strategic communications - search presence, AI narrative management, the online footprint that determines what a counterparty finds when they look you up. Earned media is what strategic comms professionals like Paula do brilliantly, and it is the raw material that much of our work depends on.
Because Paula is right about the AI dimension. Large language models weight credible, third-party sources heavily. A strong piece of earned coverage does not just influence the reader on the day it publishes - it shapes how AI platforms describe an individual or a company for years afterwards. The reverse is also true. A single adverse article, even an old or unresolved one, can sit inside an AI-generated summary long after it has aged off page one of Google, because AI models do not apply the recency bias that search engines do.
This is why we collaborate rather than compete. On most engagements we work alongside a strategic comms agency or an in-house team - they own the earned narrative and the media relationships, we own the digital surfaces where that narrative lands: search results, AI outputs, Wikipedia, the broader online footprint. When the two layers are coordinated, the earned work compounds. Coverage gets found, gets indexed, gets absorbed by AI models, and reinforces the right story on every channel a counterparty checks.
When they are not coordinated, good comms work leaks value. We have seen excellent earned campaigns undermined by a stale search page, or an AI summary still anchored to a five-year-old story nobody thought to address.
So if you have a comms agency or an in-house team, keep them. Our job is to make their work travel further. If you would like to talk about how the two layers fit together, you know where to find me.