By: Danyail Lawton
28 September 2026
(2 min read)
Ask a hospitality organization who handles their press, and the answer is often “nobody, really.” Ask a few more questions and it turns out the marketing team writes and sends a release alongside every promotion. That is not nobody. That is public relations being run by people whose job is marketing, not press.
Marketing and PR solve different problems
A marketing team sending its own releases can announce a new menu, a renovated lobby or a holiday promotion, and put it in front of an email list or a social following. That is real, useful work. It is not the same job as convincing an editor, producer or reporter, on their own terms, that a story is worth their readers’ time. A release sent to an outlet with no relationship behind it usually lands in a queue with a hundred others and stays there.
Where earned media adds to that work
Earned media does not replace the releases a marketing team already sends. It works alongside them: pitching the angle a release cannot carry on its own, building the relationships with specific reporters and outlets that make a pitch worth opening, and turning a single announcement into coverage that did not come from the brand’s own account. A promotion the marketing team already planned can become the reason a local reporter has to write about the property, if someone is doing the separate job of making that case directly to a person instead of broadcasting it to a list.
There is also a difference in what each job protects. A release under the brand’s own name is controlled, but it reads that way to a reader, as an ad in different clothes. A story told through an outlet’s own reporter carries that outlet’s credibility instead, which is exactly what a promotion on its own cannot borrow.
What a marketing lead should look for
The question worth asking is not whether a communications function exists. It usually does. The question is whether anyone is working reporters and outlets directly, with pitches built around what that specific audience cares about, apart from the calendar of releases already going out. If the answer is no, that is not a gap in the team. It is room to add a layer the current team was never built to cover, without changing what they already handle well.
If your team is already sending the releases and you want to know what earned media adds on top of that, book a consultation.