Communications is the whole function of what an organisation says and to whom. Public relations is the part of it aimed at earning attention from people who do not work for you — journalists, analysts, podcasts, the public. Every PR programme is communications; most communications work is not PR. The distinction sounds academic until you are writing a job description or deciding what to outsource, at which point getting it wrong costs you either a year or a hire.
The functions, sorted
Public relations. Earning coverage from journalists. Media relationships, pitching, interviews, analyst relations, podcast placement. Outward-facing and dependent on people who owe you nothing.
Internal communications. Employees. All-hands, intranet, change management, announcements. A genuinely separate discipline with different skills, and the one most often under-resourced.
Executive communications. What a leadership team says publicly. Speeches, bylines, social presence, board and investor narrative. Overlaps heavily with PR.
Crisis communications. Coordinating what is said when something goes wrong, across press, employees, customers and regulators simultaneously.
Corporate communications. The umbrella function, usually including all of the above plus brand narrative and message architecture.
Investor relations. Shareholders and analysts, with disclosure obligations that make it legally distinct from everything else.
Marketing communications. Advertising, content, demand generation. Different objective entirely — persuasion you control, rather than attention you have to earn.
The distinction that actually matters
Controlled versus earned.
Everything you publish yourself is controlled. You decide the words, the timing and the placement. Marketing, internal comms and your own blog all live here.
Everything a journalist writes is earned. You cannot control the words, the timing or whether it happens at all. That absence of control is exactly what makes it credible to a buyer, and it is why earned coverage works differently from everything else in the communications mix.
Practical consequence: a person who is excellent at controlled communication is often mediocre at earned, because the skills invert. Controlled work rewards message discipline and consistency. Earned work rewards knowing what a specific journalist finds interesting and being willing to say something they might disagree with.
Which one do you need?
Hire PR when you need third-party credibility — buyers checking whether you are real, recruits checking whether you are going somewhere, analysts deciding whether to include you.
Hire communications more broadly when you have employees who do not know what is happening, a leadership team with no public voice, or an approaching moment (a layoff, an acquisition, a regulatory issue) where several audiences need consistent handling at once.
Hire marketing when you need volume, control and attribution.
Most companies under twenty people need one PR person and no communications function. Most companies over two hundred need both and usually discover it during a crisis.
What an in-house comms team should own that an agency cannot
Internal communications. An agency does not know your culture and should not be speaking to your staff.
Institutional memory. What was promised, to whom, and what was said last time.
Executive access. The relationship that lets somebody tell a CEO their answer was poor.
Speed of approval. The single biggest determinant of whether a programme works.
"The programmes that work are the ones with a standing slot to approve things. When approval is ad hoc, everything ships late and the news peg is gone."
Kristin Kaplan, Operations, Salient PR
What an agency brings that in-house usually cannot
Existing relationships on your beat. The main thing you are buying. An employee builds a list over months; an agency arrives with one.
Breadth across categories. Patterns learned on other accounts.
Surge capacity. Launches and crises need more people for short periods.
Honest external judgement. An agency will tell you the news is not interesting. Employees frequently cannot.
For context on what that relationship work produces: between December 2025 and August 2026, 63% of graded replies to our outreach were a yes.
"Most of what people call a PR failure is a targeting failure. The pitch went to someone who stopped covering that beat 18 months ago. That's not bad luck, that's nobody checking."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
Titles and what they usually mean
| Title | Usually means |
|---|---|
| PR Manager | Media relations, pitching, coverage |
| Communications Manager | Broader; often internal plus external |
| Head of Comms | Owns the function; may or may not do media relations |
| VP Communications | Strategy, crisis, executive counsel, board reporting |
| PR Coordinator | Lists, scheduling, tracking, monitoring |
| Corporate Affairs | Comms plus policy and government relations |
Titles vary enormously between companies. Read the responsibilities, not the label — "Communications Manager" can mean anything from writing the newsletter to owning media relationships for the entire company.
The word to be sceptical of
Integrated communications. It means using more than one channel. It is genuinely sensible practice and it is not a methodology, despite being sold as one. If an agency leads with it, ask what they will actually do on Tuesday.
Does AI search change the balance?
It raises the relative value of earned over controlled.
AI systems assembling an answer about your company weight credible third-party sources heavily, and weight your own marketing content very lightly. So the part of communications you control least is the part that increasingly determines what a buyer is told before they ever reach your website.
That is an argument for keeping earned media resourced, at a moment when its measurable referral traffic is falling and the temptation is to move budget to channels that report cleaner numbers.
The short version
- Communications is everything you say. PR is the part aimed at people who do not work for you.
- The real division is controlled versus earned, and the skills genuinely invert.
- Under twenty people: one PR person, no comms function. Over two hundred: both.
- In-house owns internal comms, memory, executive access and approval speed.
- An agency brings relationships, breadth, surge capacity and the willingness to say the news is not interesting.
- "Integrated communications" means using more than one channel. Ask what happens Tuesday.
Salient PR runs earned media programmes for technology companies, usually alongside an in-house communications lead. All figures come from our own outreach database covering December 2025 to August 2026.
Sources
- Salient PR outreach database, Dec 2025 – Aug 2026
If you want this run by people who do it every day — Salient PR is a technology PR agency working with technology companies. See how we work or start a conversation.
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How public relations and corporate communications differ, which functions belong where, and why the distinction matters when you're deciding who to hire.
