If the media is truly dying, what happens to PR?
Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and co-author of Get Content, Get Customers, spoke at a PRSA Cincinnatti luncheon recently. His presentation was titled The Present and Future of PR.
Pulizzi says that in a conversation with Forrester Research he heard a prediction that within two years half of all US newspapers will stop production. If that happens the PR and media relations model will be broken beyond repair.
Who gets to tell the story then? ” If PR’s role is to help manage the information from an organization to its “public”, doesn’t that include the creation of targeted story-telling initiatives like custom magazines, enewsletters, blogs, white papers, etc.?” asks Pulizzi. And I’d add video.
Perhaps this explains why the session I do on Storyteller Markteing has become so popular at Search Engine Strategies.
Is telling the story and creating the content PR’s realm? Or is it the realm of the marketer/corporation communications, the advertising agency, the custom publisher, or even the traditional publisher, asks Pulizzi.
He feels that PR may have the advantage because we understand the value of the story. And I agree.
However, PR has seen some of their tasks get outsourced to other agencies in new media simply because we have not jumped on this track fast enough. We don’t understand the technology and the tools. But this can lead a company into troubled waters – when SEO agencies are writing the press releases I believe we’re way off course.
There is a learning curve here, but it’s one we absolutely have to embrace.
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