Stephanie Jones Public Relations: What Good PR Judgement Looks Like

Stephanie Jones Public Relations sits at the intersection of a question the industry rarely asks directly: what does good PR judgement look like in practice, and how do you recognise it before you need it? The answer is not found in coverage volumes or media lists. It is found in the quality of decisions made under pressure, the discipline to stay off the record when going on it would be a mistake, and the commercial instinct to know which stories are worth telling and which ones should stay internal.

Good PR judgement is a professional skill that takes years to develop and is almost impossible to fake at scale. It shows up in the small calls as much as the big ones.

What Does PR Judgement Actually Mean in Practice?

The phrase gets used a lot. PR judgement. Media judgement. Reputational judgement. But when you press people to define it, the answers tend to be vague. It is one of those industry terms that everyone nods at and almost nobody can operationalise.

From where I sit, having worked with PR teams across 30 industries over two decades, PR judgement is the ability to weigh the reputational, commercial and relational consequences of a communications decision before making it. Not after. It is the practitioner who reads a draft press release and says “this is technically accurate but it will invite a question we cannot answer well.” It is the account lead who advises a client to wait two weeks before announcing a product launch because the news cycle is hostile. It is the person who, in a crisis briefing at 11pm, knows which journalists to call first and which ones to avoid entirely.

None of that is process. All of it is judgement. And judgement, in PR as in most professional disciplines, is the compound result of experience, critical thinking and a genuine understanding of how businesses work.

I spent several years judging the Effie Awards, which gave me a fairly unusual view of what effective communications actually looks like when you strip away the agency theatre. The entries that stood out were never the ones with the most creative ambition. They were the ones where someone had made a sharp, specific decision about what to say, to whom, at what moment, and had been disciplined enough to stick to it. That discipline is PR judgement at its most visible.

If you want to explore the broader landscape of PR strategy and communications planning, the PR & Communications hub covers everything from media relations to crisis frameworks and thought leadership.

Why PR Practitioners Are Often Underused as Strategic Advisers

There is a structural problem in how most organisations deploy PR resource. They bring practitioners in to execute decisions that have already been made, rather than to inform the decisions themselves. The announcement has been written. The product launch date is fixed. The CEO has already agreed to the interview. The PR team’s job, in this model, is to get the coverage, not to shape the strategy.

This is a significant waste of the most valuable thing a senior PR practitioner brings: the ability to tell you when not to do something.

When I was running agencies, one of the most reliable signs that a client relationship was working well was when the PR lead was in the room before decisions were made, not after. The clients who got the most from their PR investment were the ones who treated the practitioner as a commercial adviser with communications expertise, not as a press office that happened to be external.

The inverse was also true. The clients who consistently underperformed on PR were the ones who treated it as a downstream function. They would make a business decision, brief the agency with a fait accompli, and then be frustrated when the coverage was thin or the narrative felt forced. The narrative was forced because it was being built around a decision that had not been stress-tested for communications implications. That is not a PR failure. That is a planning failure.

The commercial case for involving PR practitioners earlier is straightforward. Reputational risk is business risk. A story that lands badly in the trade press can affect recruitment, investor confidence and client retention in ways that are genuinely hard to unpick. A practitioner with good judgement, given access to the decision-making process early enough, can reduce that risk considerably.

The Difference Between a Good Story and a Story That Gets Coverage

One of the more persistent myths in PR is that a good story will find its audience. It will not. Not automatically, not reliably, and not without the kind of media relationship management that takes years to build properly.

There is a meaningful distinction between a story that is genuinely interesting and a story that a specific journalist, on a specific publication, will want to run on a specific day. Collapsing those two things into one is where a lot of PR programmes go wrong. The client believes they have a good story. The agency agrees it is a good story. The pitch goes out. The coverage does not materialise. Everyone is confused.

What is usually missing is the third element: the editorial fit. Journalists are not waiting for your story. They have their own agendas, their own forward features, their own relationships with sources they trust more than your press release. A practitioner with strong media relationships understands this. They know which journalists are working on what. They know who is receptive to a particular angle and who has just run something similar. They know when to pitch and when to hold.

This is not something you can replicate with a media database and a distribution tool. I have seen agencies spend significant budget on PR software that gives them access to thousands of journalist contacts, and then wonder why their open rates are low and their coverage is thin. The problem is not the list. The problem is that mass distribution is the opposite of relationship-based media management. You are not pitching a story. You are broadcasting noise.

Good PR practitioners build genuine relationships with journalists over time. They are useful sources, not just pitchers. They understand the editorial environment well enough to know that the mechanics of what drives attention are not static, and that what worked two years ago may not work today. That ongoing calibration is part of the job.

How Measurement Distorts PR Behaviour

If you measure PR by coverage volume, you will get a lot of coverage. You will also get a lot of coverage that does not matter. This is one of the more reliable patterns I have observed across client relationships over the years: the measurement framework shapes the behaviour, and if the measurement framework is wrong, the behaviour it incentivises is wrong too.

Coverage volume is easy to measure and easy to report. It fills a slide. It gives the impression of activity. But it tells you almost nothing about whether the PR programme is doing anything useful for the business. A hundred pieces of coverage in publications your target audience does not read is worth less than three pieces in the publications they do. A profile in a trade title that your prospective clients trust is worth more than a dozen syndicated pieces that no one sought out.

The honest version of this conversation is one that most agencies and clients avoid because it is uncomfortable. If you could measure the actual commercial impact of your PR programme, how much of it would survive scrutiny? Not the coverage. The impact. The shift in perception among people who matter. The conversations it started. The deals it influenced. The talent it attracted. The crises it prevented.

I spent a significant part of my career working on measurement frameworks for marketing programmes, managing hundreds of millions in ad spend across industries where the pressure to demonstrate return was constant. The discipline that environment forces is valuable. It makes you ask harder questions about whether the activity is actually doing anything. Most PR programmes have never been subjected to that level of scrutiny, and the ones that have tend to look very different as a result.

Fix the measurement, and most of the PR fixes itself. When practitioners are held accountable for outcomes rather than outputs, they make different decisions about which stories to pursue, which media to target, and which activities to deprioritise. The quality of the work tends to go up because the noise has nowhere to hide.

For a broader view of how PR connects to commercial strategy, the PR & Communications hub at The Marketing Juice covers the full range of topics, from media relations and measurement to thought leadership and crisis communications.

The Relationship Between PR and Organisational Credibility

There is a version of PR that is about generating noise, and there is a version that is about building credibility. They are not the same thing, and organisations that conflate them tend to end up with a lot of the former and very little of the latter.

Organisational credibility is a slow-build asset. It is the accumulated result of consistent positioning, reliable delivery on stated commitments, and the kind of third-party validation that comes from journalists, analysts and peers saying things about you that you could not credibly say about yourself. It is not something you can manufacture with a press release campaign. It is something you earn over time by being genuinely useful, genuinely interesting, or genuinely different in ways that the market cares about.

The PR practitioner’s role in building that credibility is to identify the stories and positions that are true, specific and defensible, and to place them in front of the right audiences at the right moments. Not to spin, not to exaggerate, and not to manufacture a narrative that the organisation cannot sustain under scrutiny.

I have seen organisations damage their credibility significantly by overclaiming in press materials. The claim goes out, a journalist tests it, the organisation cannot support it, and the resulting coverage is worse than no coverage at all. A good practitioner prevents that. They are the person in the room who asks “can we actually back this up?” before the release goes out, not after.

This is where the advisory function of PR is most valuable, and most often absent. The practitioner who only executes what they are told will never push back on an overclaim. The practitioner who is genuinely invested in the client’s long-term reputational health will. That distinction is worth paying attention to when you are evaluating PR talent or agency relationships.

What Separates Competent PR Execution From Strategic PR Counsel

Competent PR execution is not rare. There are a lot of practitioners who can write a press release, manage a media list, coordinate a launch, and report on coverage. These are learnable skills, and the industry trains people to do them reasonably well.

Strategic PR counsel is much rarer. It requires a different set of capabilities, and they are not the ones that most PR training programmes prioritise.

Strategic counsel means being able to read the commercial context of a business decision and understand its communications implications before anyone else in the room has thought about them. It means knowing when a client is about to make a reputational mistake and having the confidence, and the relationship, to say so clearly. It means understanding that the media environment is not a constant, that audience attention shifts in ways that affect which channels and which formats carry credibility at any given moment.

It also means being commercially literate enough to connect PR activity to business outcomes in language that a CFO or a board would find credible. This is a skill that many PR practitioners have never been asked to develop, because their clients have never asked for it. The moment a client starts asking for it, the gap between competent execution and strategic counsel becomes very visible very quickly.

When I grew an agency from 20 to 100 people, one of the things that drove that growth was the ability to position the agency as a strategic partner rather than a supplier. The clients who stayed longest and spent most were the ones who valued counsel, not just delivery. The same dynamic applies in PR. The practitioners and agencies that earn the most trust, and the longest relationships, are the ones who bring a point of view, not just a service.

There is a useful analogy in how content platforms think about the relationship between creator expertise and audience trust. The practitioners who build genuine followings, whether in media, content or PR, are the ones who have something specific and credible to say, not just the ones who say it loudest.

How to Evaluate a PR Practitioner’s Judgement Before You Hire Them

This is a question I get asked more often than most, and the answer is not found in the portfolio. Coverage samples tell you what a practitioner has achieved. They tell you almost nothing about how they think.

The most reliable way to assess PR judgement in an interview or a pitch process is to give the practitioner a scenario that has no clean answer and see what they do with it. Not a hypothetical crisis with an obvious resolution. A genuinely ambiguous situation where the right call depends on context, relationships, timing and commercial priorities that are in tension with each other.

Watch for a few things. Does the practitioner ask clarifying questions before offering a position? That is a good sign. It suggests they understand that context shapes the answer. Do they acknowledge the trade-offs in their recommendation, or do they present a single confident solution as if the situation were simple? Overconfidence in ambiguous scenarios is a warning sign in any advisory role, and PR is no different.

Do they talk about the business implications of the communications decision, or only the communications implications? A practitioner who cannot connect their advice to commercial outcomes is a practitioner who will struggle to earn the confidence of senior stakeholders. And do they push back on the premise of the scenario if it contains assumptions they disagree with? The willingness to challenge a brief, respectfully and specifically, is one of the clearest indicators of genuine strategic thinking.

The same critical lens applies to evaluating any professional service. The discipline of asking harder questions, rather than accepting the surface answer, is something I have come back to consistently across two decades of agency and client-side work. It is the same instinct that makes a good PR practitioner valuable: the refusal to take the easy route when the honest route is more useful.

Understanding how digital tools shape the information environment is also part of the picture. Practitioners who understand how search and content optimisation interact with earned media are better placed to advise on how coverage lands and compounds over time, not just whether it appears.

The Long-Term Value of Getting PR Right

Organisations that invest in genuine PR capability, not just PR activity, tend to accumulate a reputational asset that is genuinely difficult for competitors to replicate. It takes time to build. It requires consistency. It demands a level of discipline that is harder than it sounds when the pressure is on to generate visible output quickly.

But the compound effect is real. A business that has been consistently well-positioned in its market, that has a track record of credible, substantive communications, and that has built genuine relationships with the journalists and analysts who shape opinion in its sector, is a business that has a structural advantage when things go wrong, when it needs to attract talent, when it is seeking investment, or when it is trying to win a client who has never heard of it before.

That advantage is not created by a single campaign. It is not created by a single practitioner, however talented. It is the result of sustained, disciplined, commercially grounded PR practice over time. It is the kind of asset that organisations that think long-term about competitive positioning understand and invest in accordingly.

The businesses that treat PR as a line item to be cut when budgets tighten are the ones that find themselves without reputational infrastructure when they need it most. By the time a crisis arrives, or a major growth opportunity presents itself, is not the moment to start building. The building has to happen in the quiet periods, when there is no immediate pressure and no obvious return to point to.

This is where critical thinking matters most in PR strategy. The ability to invest in something whose return is real but not immediately measurable, to resist the pressure to optimise for short-term visibility at the expense of long-term credibility, is a form of commercial discipline that separates organisations that take communications seriously from those that treat it as a support function.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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