Do you need a PR specialist in your industry?

Usually not. You are buying reporter relationships in your beat, and a generalist who pitches across many beats often holds more current ones than a self-described specialist. The right question is not "do you know my industry" but "which reporters covering my category have you placed a client with in the past year."

The word "specialist" bundles two different assets. Price them separately.

• Beat coverage - the reporters who write about your category, by name. This is the asset worth paying for. A fintech founder needs the journalist who actually covers fintech, whatever the agency calls itself.
• Domain fluency - the agency speaks your jargon and knows your buyers. It shortens the ramp by a few weeks, but you supply most of it at kickoff anyway. Do not pay a premium for it.

Scale matters more than the sign on the door. An agency pitching at volume keeps relationships current across dozens of beats, which matters because reporters change beats and outlets constantly (the pitch-questions page covers what serious volume looks like). Newsroom churn runs high, with thousands of journalism jobs cut each year, so a contact list decays quickly and a relationship that placed a story a year ago may no longer exist. A narrow shop's depth also carries a built-in problem: a true specialist in your vertical almost certainly already represents a competitor. That trade-off has its own page, conflicts of interest and competing clients.

The exception is regulated or deeply technical niches like biotech, defense, or enterprise security, where the coverage you need lives in trade press and the trade-press rolodex is genuinely scarce. There, a specialist's relationships are hard to replicate and worth the premium.

Whatever the label, verify three things before signing:

The one thing no agency can specialize in is your story. You own the substance, the data, the customers; the agency owns the access. Whoever you talk to, ask to see beat coverage before you ask about price. Any good agency, specialist or not, should pass that test.