What Has AI Changed in Media Relations? The Jobs That Are Disappearing

What Has AI Changed in Media Relations? The Jobs That Are Disappearing

Generative artificial intelligence has transformed media relations practices in just a few years, affecting both journalists and communication professionals. While some tasks are gradually disappearing, new skills are emerging alongside them.

Automated Tasks Are Redefining Certain Roles

Writing short factual news pieces, transcribing interviews, translating press releases, and summarizing lengthy reports can now largely be automated.

Junior journalism positions historically focused on these repetitive tasks, as well as certain roles involving translation or newswire writing, are seeing their scope significantly reduced in many newsrooms.

New Skills Are in Demand

• AI-assisted verification and fact-checking, to distinguish reliable information from generated or manipulated content.

• Content structuring for AI tools, as press releases and press kits now need to be designed to be correctly understood and summarized by AI assistants as well as by humans.

• Data and trend analysis, as AI tools can process volumes of media coverage that would be impossible to analyze manually.

What This Means in Practice for Communication Professionals

As journalists increasingly use AI tools to sort through and summarize the information they receive, press releases must now be structured clearly and factually from the very first lines, with numerical data that can be easily extracted.

Automated translation, which is now almost instantaneous and increasingly reliable, also makes it easier to distribute the same content to English-, French-, Portuguese-, or Arabic-speaking media across the continent. This is a significant advantage in Africa's highly multilingual media landscape.

An Industry That Is Transforming Rather Than Disappearing

Rather than leading to the complete disappearance of jobs in journalism and communications, AI is reshaping the skills that are most highly valued.

Fact-checking, strategic analysis, human relationships with journalists, and the ability to tell a compelling story remain difficult to automate. These skills are therefore likely to remain at the heart of communication professions in the years to come.