News and Insights

Navigating the New Normal – How Media Literacy Has Evolved in 2025

June 5, 2025

This year’s Global Health Earned Media Summit gathered FINN colleagues from across the globe who shared a wealth of knowledge and perspectives to grow our media expertise. The two days of programming offered unparalleled insights and provided a glimpse on how we can improve relationships and increase engagement, tactics that have become exponentially more important while navigating the current media landscape.

Health – now more than ever – has become an integral topic to stay updated on from a global standpoint; this vital issue has made many PR professionals re-analyze the way we approach media literacy, media accuracy, and understanding narratives across the industry as it stands.

Understanding Thought Leaders: Brand Awareness and Positioning

We know that staying aligned as a team on a perspective while drafting and preparing messaging is a priority, but what we must consider is regularly revisiting our overall goals and objectives. It’s easy to initially hone in on one goal that we have established to work towards, but with ever-evolving team projects, revisiting our clients’ objectives can sometimes get overlooked, especially given the rapidly changing healthcare landscape that we have experienced so far in 2025.

This re-evaluation can look like a few things–it could mean approaching a new group of outlets outside of your regular trade targets or even driving new ideas directly pertaining to the current media landscape.

Think of Consistency and Connection

Communicating on a consistent basis with our media contacts and friendlies is absolutely essential. For PR practitioners, there are several strategies that we can implement to increase our interactions with media, allowing a mutually balanced collaboration of strategic storytelling. This level of trust often results in stories that can be told with honesty, integrity, and depth.

Stories Told By Truth, Through Messaging

This year, an element of PR that has become more crucial is messaging. During several sessions, our FINN colleagues shared tips on how to optimize insights during interviews, especially those that are live. To begin refining messaging, the first step includes asking the necessary questions to consider how these insights will best reflect truth and relevance. Having a clear understanding of your voice in advance allows for comprehensible and precise storytelling of the issue or topic at hand.

Prioritize Your Resources – Engage!

On Day 1 of the summit, I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel alongside FINN colleagues Laura O’Neill, Alyssa Paldo, and Aurélia Adloff to discuss one of my personal favorite topics, landing top-tier placements for client success. During our session, I gained valuable insights from my fellow media experts, however, one of the biggest takeaways was the idea of utilizing your time and location to meet and engage with resourceful contacts. There are so many practices that we can implement into our weekly routines as PR practitioners to ensure we are optimizing our relationships, and we have every resource available to do so, like through LinkedIn, coffee chats and mutual connections.

As we enter the second half of 2025, implementing these best practices will result in impactful success not only for those we collaborate with, but for the success of media literacy in the healthcare sector. Thank you to our health media experts from London, France, Israel, Singapore, New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Nashville for combining your expertise and contributing to the success of the 2025 Health Media Summit, one that we won’t forget.