Your communications director sent a press release this morning. There is a 97% chance nobody covered it. Not because the story was weak. Because the infrastructure that would have covered it has been systematically dismantled over the last decade, and what remains is being eaten by AI.
That is the situation. Here is the math.
The funnel has collapsed at every stage. Only 2-3% of press releases result in any media pickup. Average journalist response rate to pitches: 3.43%. Forty-nine percent of journalists receive six or more pitches per day. Twelve percent receive more than twenty. The reporters still covering local politics are buried, understaffed, and working beats that used to require three people.
This is not a messaging problem. It is an infrastructure problem.
Since 2005, more than 3,200 newspapers have closed or merged. Two hundred and eight counties now have zero local news source. None. 1,563 counties have only one, covering roughly 55 million Americans. Statehouse reporters, the people your earned media strategy depends on, declined 35% between 2003 and 2014 and have continued eroding since. Less than one-third of newspapers assign even a single reporter to the statehouse. Only 14% of local TV stations do.
When you write a press release about your candidate's position on property taxes and send it to the county paper, there is a reasonable chance that paper no longer has a reporter. There is a near-certain chance that reporter is covering eight other races simultaneously. The coverage is not coming. It has not been coming for years. Your strategy is built around a newsroom that mostly does not exist anymore.
Google launched AI Overviews in May 2024. In the twelve months after, traffic to news sites dropped 26%. Zero-click searches -- searches that end without anyone clicking through to a publisher -- jumped from 56% to 69% of all Google queries. When AI Overviews appear, the top organic result's click-through rate drops by roughly 79%. One major digital media property went from 8.5 million monthly clicks in early 2024 to 264,000 by January 2026. That is a 97% collapse in under two years.
The surviving newsrooms that were not killed by the business model are being killed by the algorithm. The editorial infrastructure is gone. The distribution infrastructure is gone. The SEO-driven traffic that kept digital-only outlets alive is being redirected into Google's AI summaries. There is no earned media ecosystem left to earn media from.
Seven percent of U.S. adults often get news from print newspapers. Three percent say print is their primary source for election news. In 2016, 51% of Americans followed news all or most of the time. That number is 36% today. Trust in national news organizations has dropped 20 percentage points since 2016. Among Republicans specifically, trust has fallen 37 points.
The voters you are trying to reach have already left the building.
Forty-six percent of adults under 30 say social media is their most common political news source, double the rate of the 30-49 cohort. Twenty-nine percent used YouTube for political information in 2024. Three in five Americans listened to podcasts during the 2024 election cycle, consuming an average of 111 minutes of political content per week in that format. Podcasts have reached parity with cable news in total voter reach. The Trump campaign's Joe Rogan appearance generated 26 million YouTube views in 24 hours. That single placement reached more of the actual persuadable target demographic, young men 18-34, than any combination of press releases the campaign filed all cycle.
This is the environment. Now look at how campaigns are allocating against it.
Political campaigns currently put 36% of their budgets into digital. Commercial advertisers put 78%. That 42-point gap has widened since 2020, not closed. Campaigns are a full decade behind where their voters are consuming information. The consultants running traditional earned media operations are not operating in 2026. They are operating in 2014.
The campaigns that have adjusted are running a different operation. Connected TV political spending is up 506% since 2020. Digital's share of total political ad spending doubled in one cycle. In 2025, digital crossed 50% of all local advertising spend for the first time. The crossover has happened. Campaigns still investing primarily in traditional media are now in the minority of all advertisers, not just the minority of politically sophisticated ones.
AI has broken the production economics entirely. A campaign routing around legacy media now generates content volume that previously required eight to twelve staff -- video, scripts, ad variants, rapid response, graphics -- with a single creative director and an AI stack. Personalized video messaging for every registered voter in a statewide race costs under a million dollars. Targeted digital content reaches 8,000 to 15,000 in-district voters per placement at ten to thirty cents per thousand impressions.
The math is not close.
The press release was designed for an information ecosystem that no longer exists. It assumed a working local journalist to receive it, a viable publication to run it, an algorithmic distribution system to amplify it, and a voter who trusted and read that publication. All four assumptions are false in 2026.
Campaigns that route around legacy media gatekeepers are not taking a risk. They are operating in the actual information environment. Campaigns that still depend on those gatekeepers are the ones taking the risk. They are just not calling it that.
The reporters are gone. The papers are gone. The SEO traffic is gone. The readers are gone. The only thing still operating is the habit of sending press releases and the consultants who charge to write them.
That is the war most campaigns are still preparing to fight. It ended while they were drafting the subject line.
Sources: Northwestern Local News Initiative 2024; Pew Research News Platform Fact Sheet; Sword and the Script (400,000 pitch analysis); MediaCopilot / The Digital Bloom (Google AI Overviews traffic data); Fast Company 2024 media layoffs tracker; AAPC 2024 political ad spend; Wesleyan Media Project; BIA 2025 local ad forecast; Campaigns & Elections digital lag report; Podcastle political news consumption analysis; The Hill (Trump-Rogan).