PR glossary: every term a buyer will hear, defined

The 27 terms below cover nearly everything an agency will say to you in a proposal, a kickoff call, or a monthly report. Each is defined for the person paying the invoice: what it means, and the buying decision it should change. You hire an agency for craft, but you should never lose an argument about scope, timing, or money because a word was left fuzzy.

• AOR (agency of record) - the single firm formally responsible for your PR. One accountable owner. Worth it once volume justifies it; for many seed-stage companies a scoped retainer beats a full AOR commitment.
• AVE (advertising value equivalent) - coverage priced as if you had bought the same space in ads. Discredited; the industry's own measurement bodies rejected it years ago. If a report leads with AVE, read the report as a sales document.
• Boilerplate - the standard "About [Company]" paragraph at the bottom of every release. Dull but important. You are the only party who can supply it accurately, so do.
• Byline (contributed article) - an article published under your name, usually drafted by the agency. Thought leadership you placed, not coverage a journalist chose to write. Price it that way.
• Earned media - coverage a journalist chooses to write. You do not pay for it or control it. The third-party endorsement is the thing a retainer is actually buying toward.
• Embargo - a reporter gets the news early and agrees not to publish before a set time. A launch coordination tool that only works with reporters who trust the agency, so it doubles as a test of the agency's relationships.
• Exclusive - one outlet gets the story first in exchange for committing to cover it. You trade breadth for a near-certain, deeper piece. Make that call consciously, before launch day.
• Feature - a full article about your company. Weigh one feature above several passing mentions when you judge a month's results.
• Hit / placement - one published piece of coverage, the actual deliverable. Count hits in outlets your buyers read, not a tally padded with syndication.
• Impressions - the total potential audience of the outlets that ran your coverage, not the people who read the piece. Directionally useful, easily inflated. An eight-figure impression count is an upper bound on potential audience, not a count of readers.
• Media kit / press kit - the page of logos, founder photos, bios, and company facts a reporter needs to publish. Cheap to assemble once. Its absence stalls coverage at the worst possible moment.
• Media list - the named reporters an agency plans to pitch for you. Ask to see it before you sign. The list's relevance predicts results better than its length.
• Media training - coached interview practice, usually billed separately. Worth buying before your first major interview, not as a standing line item.
• Mention - your company named inside a story about something else. Real, but lighter than a feature. A report that counts mentions and features equally is overstating the month's results.
• Newsjacking - attaching your founder's comment to breaking news. One of the few ways to earn coverage between announcements. Judge an agency here on reaction speed, measured in hours.
• On background / off the record - the rules for what a reporter may quote. On background informs the story but cannot be quoted by name; off the record cannot be used at all. Agree the rule before you speak, never after.
• Owned media - channels you control: blog, newsletter, docs. Zero outside trust, but reporters check them before they write. Do not pay retainer rates to have it written.
• Paid media - placement you buy: ads, sponsored posts, paid partnerships. Predictable, and labeled "sponsored." A vendor who blurs paid and earned is spending your credibility.
• Pickup - other outlets re-reporting a story after the first one runs. The compounding you want from PR; one strong hit with pickup outproduces ten weak ones.
• Pitch - the email offering a reporter your story, and the unit of the work. Judge any vendor on relevance and reply rate, not raw volume.
• Press release - the formal written announcement. A reference document for reporters, not a coverage strategy on its own.
• Retainer - the flat monthly fee for ongoing work. Startup-focused retainers commonly run $5,000 to $15,000 a month; big national firms start around $20,000.
• Share of voice - your slice of category coverage versus competitors. A relative scoreboard, meaningful only with a named competitor set attached.
• Syndication - the same article republished across a partner network (Yahoo, AP affiliates). It inflates hit counts without adding new readers. Discount it in reports.
• Thought leadership - bylines, podcasts, and panels under your name. Builds authority between news moments. It should supplement earned coverage in a report, not substitute for it.
• Tier (top-tier, trade) - shorthand for outlet importance. Top-tier means WSJ and TechCrunch class; trade means the outlets your industry actually reads. For most B2B companies the right trade beats top-tier. Define the tiers with your agency in writing at kickoff.
• Wire / newswire - paid distribution services (PR Newswire, Business Wire) that post releases verbatim. Distribution, not coverage. A report counting wire postings as hits is padding.

Two of these deserve a deeper look elsewhere in this handbook: how hits, impressions, and syndication should appear in a report is covered in the monthly PR reporting template, and the questions to settle before any of these terms hit a contract are in the agency vetting scorecard.