The PR Message Gap: From the 2010 Burson Study to Today

By EPR Editorial Team

Edited on Jun 28, 2026.

Related: Burson — PR Agency Profile · Harold Burson Report.

In 2010, Burson-Marsteller published research measuring the gap between corporate PR messages and what media and bloggers actually published — a 48% gap for mainstream media and a 69% gap for bloggers. The study landed at a moment when corporate communications teams were still adjusting to the rise of the blogger ecosystem and the broader collapse of the traditional press release as a primary communications mechanism.

Sixteen years later, the gap remains. The categories have shifted. The methodology for measuring it has improved. The structural disconnect between what corporate communications operations want said and what published media actually says has not closed.

What the 2010 Study Found

The Burson-Marsteller research measured the percentage of corporate-issued PR messaging that did not appear in the resulting media coverage. For mainstream media, 48% of intended messages were not reflected in published stories. For bloggers, the gap was 69%. The methodology was straightforward — comparison of pitched messaging with published output — and the findings were widely cited because they quantified what experienced PR practitioners had long known qualitatively.

The implication was significant. Nearly half of mainstream media coverage and more than two-thirds of blogger coverage did not carry the messages PR teams had intended to land. The standard PR measurement frameworks of the time — counting placements, total mentions, share of voice — were measuring activity rather than message penetration. Activity was up. Penetration was much lower than the activity metrics suggested.

What Closed and What Did Not

Three things have changed since 2010 that should have closed the gap, and largely have not.

PR measurement has improved. Modern tools measure sentiment, message penetration, and share of voice at granular levels that were not available in 2010. Practitioners now have better data about how their messages are landing.

Content marketing emerged. Brands now publish their own content at scale, which bypasses the message-gap problem by removing the journalist intermediary entirely. The brand says what the brand wants to say, in the brand's voice, on the brand's owned channels.

Direct-to-audience channels expanded. LinkedIn, X, Substack, podcasts, and the broader creator economy let executives and brands communicate directly with their audiences without going through the media filter. Each new direct channel reduces the practical importance of the message gap in earned coverage.

The persistent gap is in the channel that still matters most: earned coverage in traditional and digital business press. Journalists still interpret, contextualize, and re-frame the messages brands attempt to land. The gap in 2026 is similar in size to the gap in 2010, even though the absolute volume of earned coverage has shifted and the underlying channels have changed.

Why the Gap Persists

The gap persists for structural reasons that do not have solutions. Journalists are not stenographers. They write the story that serves their reader, not the story that serves the source. The interests of the source and the interests of the reader are not always aligned, and when they diverge, the journalist follows the reader's interest. The result is that brand messages that do not directly serve the reader's interest do not appear in the coverage.

Strong PR operations accept the structural reality and operate accordingly. They craft messages that genuinely serve the reader's interest as well as the brand's interest. They focus on the messages that have a chance of landing rather than running the same generic talking points across every pitch. And they measure penetration of the specific messages that matter rather than tracking overall coverage volume.

The Modern Implication

The 2010 Burson-Marsteller framework still applies. The percentages have shifted somewhat — mainstream-media penetration of intended messages is probably slightly higher than 52% in 2026 because measurement is better and journalists work more with structured source materials. Blogger and creator coverage penetration is probably lower than 31% because the channel has fragmented into thousands of individual voices each with their own framing.

The discipline for communications teams: measure message penetration, not just placement counts. Craft messages that serve the reader, not just the brand. Use direct channels for messages that cannot survive the journalist filter. And do not pretend the gap does not exist.