Earned media, narrative and crisis. Scored on named tier-1 placements — not syndication, not pay-to-play, not impressions.
22 evaluated.
Syndication is not coverage
A press release pushed through a wire appears on dozens of sites and means nothing; a placement in an outlet your buyers actually read is hard and valuable. The heaviest dimension in this rubric is named tier-1 earned placements, specifically excluding syndication and pay-to-play. Ask for the last ten placements by name and check where they ran.
Relationships are the asset, and they are individual
PR value sits with specific people who have current relationships with specific journalists on your beat. It does not sit with the agency's logo. Ask who exactly would be pitching, which journalists they have placed with in the last six months, and whether that person stays on your account after the pitch.
Impressions and ‘potential audience’ are not measurement
Both are calculated from an outlet's traffic rather than from anything your story did, and both always look enormous. Honest measurement here is share of voice, message pull-through, placement quality, and where possible a tie to pipeline or reputation. An agency reporting reach alone has chosen a number that cannot go down.
How this page is built: every vendor here is scored against the published pr_comms rubric — the one written for what this category actually sells, not a general agency rubric. Several of these records were first filed elsewhere and scored against a rubric they were not competing in; where that happened, the record carries a rescored_from field showing the previous verdict and score, so the change is auditable rather than silent.