The Propel Wrapped:
Journalist Engagement 2022

With 2022 coming to an end, it's time for PR professionals everywhere to assess what happened during the past 12 months in the media relations landscape! The Propel team conducted a study of approximately 1.7 million PR pitches sent from January to December of 2022 and found some fascinating trends along the way that shed light on how major news topics were being pitched and how media professionals were receiving them.

From wars to natural disasters, many different types of stories were landing in journalists' inboxes at record volume, and it was interesting to see some do much better than others. To identify key trends and patterns, we looked at a handful of words and phrases used by PR pros to hook journalists on major news topics and from here, we identified which ones were most attractive to the media. Download this report to learn more about PR pitching trends around many topics that dominated headlines across the globe, including war, the economic downturn, key elections, climate change and health.

Key findings include:

This new way of working was popular in pitching in 2022, so much so that 16,927 pitches were sent on the subject of “work.” However, only 3.04% of these pitches received responses.
PR pros sent 23,996 pitches with the word “war” this year, garnering a 4% response rate.
AI was one of the most pitched topics of 2022, with 113,463 pitches on artificial intelligence being sent out.
But perhaps the biggest shock of all is that pitches surrounding the flu – of which there were 6,177 – received a 23.14% response rate.
This is the highest response rate of any pitching subject, across all pitching subjects, that Propel has seen thus far.