Muck Rack‘s 2026 State of PR report: 87% of PR pros now include LinkedIn in their comms strategy. 60% call it their single most valuable platform, more than three times Instagram. And half of PR professionals say thought leadership now eats up at least a quarter of their job, up 5 points from last year.

That’s a good sign, LinkedIn is finally showing up in PR strategy. But there’s a difference between having LinkedIn in your strategy and building personal content into it, and that gap is exactly what separates traditional PR from modern PR.

Traditional PR: you pick the story, write the pitch, cold-email a reporter, and hope.

Modern PR: you’re constantly telling your story on LinkedIn, and it’s PR’s job to spot which ones have legs, then build them into something bigger.

I saw this firsthand, which sparked this post idea. A team leader at a tourism client of mine posted about a local restaurant this year, a quirky spot you drive through a working scrap yard to get to, one of the best breakfast places in town. His PR contact caught the post and pitched it to a few culinary outlets. It landed in a roundup on a consumer site with over 2.2 million monthly readers, an audience that would never have found this destination otherwise. And it didn’t stop there. That post is now the entry point for a bigger pitch: the restaurant as a way into the region’s industrial heritage, its family-owned businesses, its breweries.

Modern PR helps craft the personal LinkedIn content in the first place, not just the company page, then filters what surfaces into earned media.

PR is evolving. Whether you think that’s good or bad, people get their news from social media now. Personal LinkedIn content, in my view, is the future of where PR is going.