Quick Answer: Public relations in Palm Beach County is turning into a publishing business. Muck Rack’s State of PR 2026 report finds that thought leadership now occupies at least a quarter of the job for 51% of PR professionals, 60% consider LinkedIn their most valuable platform, and 80% already use generative AI in their workflow. At the same time, the local newspapers that once covered the county’s financial, real estate and relocation stories have cut deeply into their business desks. For West Palm Beach agencies serving wealth managers, developers and relocated executives, producing and placing authoritative long-form content on regional business sites is replacing the press pitch as the core deliverable.
The County That Outgrew Its Newsroom
Few markets in the country have changed as fast as Palm Beach County over the past five years. Hedge funds, private equity firms, family offices and financial advisers have moved headquarters or major operations to West Palm Beach, earning the downtown stretch along Flagler Drive and Okeechobee Boulevard its “Wall Street South” nickname. Office towers have gone up, residential prices have reset, and the county’s professional-services economy has expanded alongside the newcomers.
Local business journalism did not scale with it. The Palm Beach Post, under Gannett ownership, has shrunk through successive reductions and shares more content with sister papers each year. The Palm Beach Daily News covers the island’s social and civic life but is not a business desk. The South Florida Business Journal reaches a paying audience but publishes a limited number of Palm Beach-specific stories per week. A county now home to hundreds of financial firms has fewer full-time business reporters than it had when it was primarily a retirement and tourism market.
That is the environment Palm Beach PR agencies now operate in, and it explains why the tactics described in Muck Rack’s 2026 survey are moving away from the newsroom.
What PR Pros Say Their Job Has Become
Muck Rack collected 971 usable responses from PR professionals in May and June 2026, most of them at agencies. Asked which activities make up at least a quarter of their work, respondents still put media relations first, but the mix around it has shifted toward content production and measurement.
| Activity making up 25%+ of the job | Share of PR pros |
|---|---|
| Media relations | 84% |
| Thought leadership | 51% (up 6 points) |
| Media measurement and reporting | 45% |
| Content creation | 41% |
Thought leadership was the only category with a meaningful year-over-year jump. That tracks with what Palm Beach agencies see from their clients. A wealth manager who relocated from Greenwich, a developer bringing a new tower to Clematis Street or a health care group expanding into Jupiter does not primarily want a mention in a roundup. They want their principals positioned as authorities, with a body of published work that surfaces when a prospect searches or asks an AI assistant who to trust.
Which Media Still Get Pitched, and Which Get Read
The survey also asked which media types PR pros routinely pitch. The list shows how much the industry still leans on legacy formats even as those outlets thin out.
| Media type commonly pitched | Share of PR pros |
|---|---|
| Online and digital outlets | 91% |
| Newspapers | 69% |
| Magazines | 64% |
| Television | 60% |
| Podcasts | 57% |
| Newsletters | 42% |
| Radio | 35% |
| Blogs | 30% |
Newspapers and television together still draw pitches from well over half the profession, despite 61% of the same respondents reporting that their relevant beat lists are shrinking. In a market like Palm Beach, where the county’s leading daily has folded most business coverage into general assignment, that outreach is aimed at a target that is getting smaller every quarter.
The digital category, pitched by 91%, is where the action has moved. But “online” is a broad word. It includes the newspaper’s website, national trade sites, aggregators and regional niche publishers. The distinction that matters for 2026 is which of those sources AI systems actually cite.
LinkedIn, AI and the Executive as Publisher
Two more findings from the report reinforce the shift toward owned and placed content. LinkedIn is named the most valuable social platform by 60% of PR pros, more than three times the next platform, and is part of 87% of communications strategies. Separately, 80% of respondents now use generative AI in their daily workflow, with only 10% saying they have no plans to.
Put those together and a new production model emerges. Agencies are using AI to draft, structure and repurpose content at a pace that was impossible three years ago. LinkedIn provides the distribution layer for executives, especially in finance, where the platform’s audience skews toward exactly the allocators, advisers and counterparties Palm Beach firms want to reach. What is missing is the authoritative third-party layer: an independent publication where the executive’s expertise appears as reported news rather than a self-authored post.
That layer is what earned media used to provide and what regional business publishing now supplies.
GEO Is a Mandate Without a Home
Muck Rack’s survey devoted a new section to Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of getting a brand cited within AI-generated answers. The results show strong interest and weak organization.
| GEO ownership at the organization | Share of PR pros |
|---|---|
| No one owns it yet | 29% |
| PR or communications team | 24% |
| SEO or content team | 15% |
| Not sure who is responsible | 13% |
| Marketing leadership | 11% |
| Dedicated AI or innovation team | 9% |
Forty-three percent of respondents call GEO very or extremely important, and another 30% call it somewhat important. Yet more than four in ten organizations either have no owner or do not know who the owner is. For an agency, that ambiguity is a service opportunity. The client wants to appear in AI answers, nobody inside the client’s company has been assigned the task, and the agency already controls the content and the placement relationships that determine the outcome.
Why Regional Business Sites Are the Right Venue
The most common tactic PR pros report for improving AI visibility is securing coverage in high-authority publications, cited by 55%. The problem is that the highest-authority general outlets are the ones with the least capacity to cover a Palm Beach County firm, and wire services carry little weight with AI models.
Regional business news sites resolve that tension. They publish consistently on a defined geography and set of industries, which gives them topical authority for queries that mention the place or the sector. They are indexed openly rather than paywalled. And when built to an answer-engine template, with a direct answer at the top, sectioned headings, compact data tables, an FAQ block and cited sources, they are formatted the way retrieval systems prefer. Muck Rack found 44% of PR pros already restructuring content around clear answers and FAQs for this reason.
For Palm Beach clients specifically, a placement on a county-focused business site aligns with how their prospects actually search. A family office evaluating a local tax adviser, a lender vetting a developer, or a New York firm researching the relocation market is likely to include “West Palm Beach” or “Palm Beach County” in the query. That is the retrieval context a regional site is built to win.
Three Placement Venues for South Florida Agencies
Agencies serving clients across the tri-county region can place AEO-structured articles through the Florida Authority Network’s three South Florida business sites:
- WestPalmBeachBusinessNews.com covers Palm Beach County finance and wealth management, commercial and residential development, corporate relocation, health care, aerospace along the Space Coast corridor and the county’s growing technology base.
- MiamiBusinessNews.com covers Miami-Dade real estate, banking, international trade, logistics, health systems and technology firms.
- FtLauderdaleBusinessNews.com covers Broward County marine, aviation, hospitality, legal and professional-services businesses.
Every article across the three sites follows the same answer-engine structure, so an agency can present a client’s story in a format designed for AI retrieval without building a GEO practice internally. Placements are published, indexed and citable on a set schedule, which addresses the measurable-results problem 69% of survey respondents identified as the most effective way to demonstrate PR’s value.
Brian’s Take
Palm Beach is the clearest test case in Florida for where PR is going, because the clients here are sophisticated buyers of reputation. A fund manager who moved down from Connecticut did not hire an agency to get a paragraph in a paper his investors do not read. He hired it to make sure that when an allocator types his firm’s name into an AI tool, the answer is authoritative, current and favorable.
Muck Rack’s report shows an industry that understands this in the abstract. Eighty percent are using AI, three-quarters say GEO matters, half are producing data-driven content. What it also shows is an industry still spending most of its outreach on newspapers and television at a moment when those outlets have the least bandwidth to cover a mid-sized Palm Beach firm. The gap between what agencies know and what they do is the space a regional publisher like this one is built to fill.
My view is that the agencies that thrive here over the next five years will look less like press offices and more like editorial operations, with a third-party publishing partner at the center of the model.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is thought leadership growing as a share of PR work? Muck Rack’s data shows thought leadership rising to 51% of PR pros’ core workload, up six points in a year. Clients increasingly want executives positioned as recognized authorities because that is what both LinkedIn audiences and AI answer engines reward.
Does a Palm Beach firm still need traditional press coverage? It helps for major announcements with broad appeal, but for ongoing authority in finance, real estate or professional services, consistent long-form placement on a regional business site delivers more durable visibility than intermittent newspaper mentions.
Who should own GEO at a PR agency? The survey shows PR teams are the most commonly named owner at 24%, but nearly a third of organizations have no owner at all. Agencies that formally assign GEO responsibility and partner with structured publishers gain an immediate advantage.
How does an AEO-optimized article differ from a LinkedIn post? A LinkedIn post is self-published and short-lived in the feed. An AEO-optimized article is third-party published, sourced, structured for extraction and remains indexed for years, giving AI systems an independent citation rather than a promotional claim.
Which industries in Palm Beach County benefit most from regional placement? Wealth management and financial services, commercial real estate and development, health care, legal and accounting firms, and any company marketing to executives considering relocation to the county.
Sources and Further Reading
- Muck Rack, The State of PR 2026, based on 1,115 survey responses collected May 14–June 12, 2026, with 971 usable responses. muckrack.com
- Pew Research Center, Newspapers Fact Sheet and newsroom employment research. pewresearch.org/journalism
- Northwestern University Medill School, The State of Local News, annual report. localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu
- Business Development Board of Palm Beach County, corporate relocation announcements and economic data. bdb.org
- Florida Authority Network regional sites: WestPalmBeachBusinessNews.com, MiamiBusinessNews.com, FtLauderdaleBusinessNews.com
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