Nearly two-thirds of PRs monitor the news for work in evenings and at weekends, with 56% of PR professionals reporting feeling overwhelmed by news monitoring, and 32% saying it makes them feel stressed
Junior PRs feel the pressure most, with 72% saying that it makes them feel overwhelmed, vs 51% for mid-level PRs and 50% for seniors
Analysis of 20 major publishers shows that articles are published every 19 seconds, highlighting just how hard it is to stay on top of the news
Despite monitoring the news heavily, 64% of PRs say they find a story they can act on for their client or brand only once a week or less
PR depends on knowing what’s happening. But keeping up with the news increasingly means checking it before work, in the evenings and at weekends, while trying to find the relatively small number of stories that are actually useful.
We surveyed 119 PR professionals between 24th July and 21st August, 2026 about their news-monitoring habits and analysed the publishing output of 20 major UK and US news organisations. The findings show just how difficult keeping up has become.
More than half of the PR professionals we surveyed said monitoring the news for work makes them feel overwhelmed. At the same time, 63% said it makes them feel informed.
That creates an awkward trade-off. Following the news is an important part of doing the job well, but the amount of information PR professionals need to keep on top of can easily become too much.
“I can definitely relate to the feeling of news monitoring being overwhelming and stressful. A lot of it likely comes from the news cycle being so rapid and the stress on PRs to find relevant stories that they can potentially react to.
I think it’s good to remember that it’s fine to have days, or even weeks, where we say, “there’s nothing relevant for my client/brand here”. That’s evidenced by just over a third of PRs saying that they find stories worth acting on at least once a day.”
Matt Seabridge, Digital PR Tips
News monitoring doesn’t stop at the end of the working day. 64% of PR professionals said they monitor the news either in the evenings or at weekends, and 89% said they check the news before 9am.
For many PR professionals, keeping up with the news cycle has become something that happens around the working day as well as during it.
“As someone who's worked in PR and is now a psychotherapist, I think the real issue is that feeling of never being fully off. PR has always moved fast, but when the news lives in your pocket, checking it doesn't stay at your desk. It creeps into evenings, weekends, the time where your brain is supposed to switch off.”
Jasmine Granton, Revu
To understand the scale of what PR professionals are trying to keep up with, we separately analysed the XML news sitemaps of 20 major UK and US publishers, including BBC News, Reuters, The Guardian, CNN, and The New York Times.
Across five weeks, from 20 July to 23 August 2026, we recorded almost 139,000 articles appearing across their sites.
On an average weekday, those publishers produced around 4,500 articles. That works out at one new article every 19 seconds from just those 20 publishers alone.
PR professionals aren’t simply reading the news for the sake of being informed. They’re looking for something they can use. A breaking story their client could comment on, a change in consumer behaviour that could make for an interesting reactive angle, and lots more.
But genuinely useful opportunities are rare.
64% of PR professionals said they find an actionable story only around once a week or less. Nearly one in ten said very rarely.
In other words, a PR professional might consume hundreds or thousands of headlines over the course of a week before finding something genuinely useful.
“Reactive expert commentary has become a much bigger part of digital PR over the last five years, and that naturally puts more pressure on teams to monitor the news very closely. There are more PRs competing for the attention of fewer journalists, and often the difference between winning coverage and missing out is simply how quickly you can get a strong, relevant comment in front of the right journalist.
But the reality is that teams can't monitor absolutely everything. The answer to this is to be much more focused about the topics you track in the first place. Brands should be clear on the areas where they have genuine authority, where their experts can add something useful, and what they actually want to build an association with. Hyper-relevance matters far more than trying to react to every story.”
James Brockbank, Digitaloft
The feeling of overwhelm is particularly pronounced among people earlier in their careers. 72% of junior PR professionals said news monitoring makes them feel overwhelmed.
That compares with 51% of mid-level and senior PR professionals combined.
There are several possible explanations. Junior PRs may be doing more of the day-to-day monitoring themselves, may have less experience quickly judging which stories matter, or may feel greater pressure to make sure nothing is missed.
“I'm not surprised juniors feel this hardest because earlier in your career there's more pressure to prove you're switched on and on top of things. And if senior people are visibly checking the news at 9pm on a Sunday, it's so much harder for anyone junior to feel like they're allowed to switch off too.”
Jasmine Granton, Revu
“With 72% of junior PR professionals saying they feel overwhelmed when consuming and monitoring the news, it suggests we’re creating a culture where being a good outreacher or PR professional is increasingly associated with being constantly online. I’ve actually told teams during particularly heavy news cycles to step away from being online for a while - because constantly consuming the news doesn’t necessarily make you better at your job. It can have a negative impact on your wellbeing and mindset at work.”
Shannon McGuirk, Peach
While junior PR professionals were the most likely to feel overwhelmed, senior PRs were the most likely to keep monitoring the news at weekends.
59% of senior PR professionals said they monitor news at weekends, compared with 42% of mid-level PRs and 39% of junior PRs.
That suggests the pressure to stay informed doesn’t disappear as people become more senior.
“PR is not a nine-to-five job and never has been. If you work in communications, staying across the news is part of the deal. You cannot advise clients properly if you have no idea what is happening outside office hours.
The sheer volume of information and the expectation that everything should be spotted instantly is the problem. The skill isn’t consuming more news, it’s becoming better at filtering it.
Agencies also have a responsibility not to turn being ‘always on’ into a badge of honour. Technology and AI should increasingly be doing the heavy lifting on monitoring, so practitioners can spend their time applying judgement, creativity and experience rather than endlessly refreshing news feeds.”
Andy Barr, Season One
PR professionals need to know what's going on - that's part of the job. But keeping on top of the news shouldn’t mean feeling like you need to be online 24/7, unable to switch off.
Twenty major publishers alone are producing thousands of articles every day. Keeping up with everything is impossible.
The problem isn’t that PR professionals are reading too much news - it’s that finding the small number of genuinely useful opportunities can mean sifting through an enormous amount of information.
When that spills into early mornings, evenings and weekends, staying on top of things can very quickly turn into never really switching off.
“I think the industry needs to get better at recognising that you can be an excellent digital PR professional without being ‘on’ 24/7. We should be teaching junior PRs how to monitor the news effectively and understand what matters with experience and tools, rather than making them feel like they need to know everything, all of the time. PRs will always have to monitor and consume the news - it's part of the job - but we can have a healthier approach to it.”
Shannon McGuirk, Peach
“None of this means PRs should stop reading the news. Staying informed really is part of the job. What needs to shift is the idea that being good at PR means being switched on to the news cycle every waking hour.”
Jasmine Granton, Revu
The survey was conducted by Finchling and included 119 agency, in-house and freelance PR professionals across a range of seniority levels.
Respondents were asked about when they monitor the news, how much time they spend doing it, how it makes them feel and how frequently they discover something they can act on.
Finchling also analysed the XML news sitemaps of 20 major UK and US news publishers over a five-week period between 20 July and 23 August 2026, recording almost 139,000 article URLs.
Finchling is a tool that finds reactive opportunities for PR teams.
It monitors news, research, government legislation and other sources to find interesting stories and events that your clients or brand can react to.
Instead of sending PR teams hundreds of alerts, Finchling is designed to help them find just the things worth acting on.
