In 2022, there were 6.2 Public Relations professionals to every one journalist, and that was before media companies laid off 20,000 people in 2023. Can PR function as a self-sustaining industry if journalism falls?
We’ve seen the layoff trend continue with another 537 journalism jobs cut in January 2024 from publications ranging from the Los Angeles Time to Sports Illustrated. But it’s part of an ongoing change to the media landscape and whether we like it or not, that will have an impact on PR.
In the day-to-day functioning of PR, there’s the obvious – there will be less journalists for PR professionals to work with. This means less eyes on the receiving end of pitches, and among your media contacts will be people who were laid off, and people who are now doing twice the work. But it could also mean longer periods for editing and other editorial decisions on content. It’s best to approach contacts with kindness (which you should always be doing), and to always be considerate of their workload and changing priorities and deadlines.
With fewer opportunities for earned media content, PR professionals may need to rely more on owned content.This means your company blog, your social media channels, your email newsletters and any other ways you communicate in a digital capacity. It puts a greater emphasis on content creation in order to share your messages directly to your target audience.
Part of content creation would include a larger reliance on social media influencers and partnering with them to develop compelling and shareable content that aligns with a client’s messaging. But, this shift to content creation is also going to require PR professionals to hone their own storytelling skills in a way that resonates with the target audience to create more emotional connections, a role that journalism has often played in connecting brands to their audience.
Journalism has long used storytelling to humanize brands and large corporations and communicate key messages. Let’s think about a new medical device that can save lives. In a traditional PR to journalism model, a PR professional might write a press release detailing the capabilities of the new device, offering up a medical professional (the client) as a source for interviews or podcasts. A good journalism story would add the human connection of someone who was saved by the device, where the device, the client and their message all become secondary, but the message resonates with the audience on a deeper, more emotional level. Without journalism, that responsibility shifts to the PR professional. And while that shift might be difficult for some agencies and some professionals to navigate, it also might not be the way client’s are used to getting their message out.
Another shift for the PR industry will include the shift to digital PR and online reputation management. This comes in second to the content creation shift, because I think this shift has been forming since the rise of social media, particularly TikTok. I don’t want to say that it’s easy for someone to go viral on TikTok, but it happens so often, and when it includes a brand, it can have devastating consequences (Kyte baby, anyone?). It’s important for any brand, with or without journalism, to be monitoring their online reputation, especially on apps like TikTok, whether or not they actively use that form of social media. But, the shift to digital PR isn’t just about TikTok or your online reputation, it includes your online community engagement (across channels), plus your visibility and credibility online.
Because of this shift, your audience would be getting your message “straight from the horse’s mouth’ so to speak, which puts your credibility on the line with every message. It would put PR professionals under greater scrutiny from client’s in order to maintain that credibility and the public’s trust. For PR professionals, it means a stronger focus on crisis communication in order to control the narrative. In the absence of traditional journalism, which can provide more balanced coverage, companies will need to be more proactive in managing crises and utilizing strategic communication. For that, PR professionals will play a crucial role to ensure transparency and accountability.
In the ever changing media landscape, the collapse of the journalism industry wouldn’t collapse the PR industry, but it would fundamentally change the traditional ways PR has operated. Professionals would need to embrace content creation as the new focus of their day-to-day responsibilities, but also refine their storytelling skills in order to share emotional and compelling content directly with the audience. And because this change would cut out journalism as the middleman in sharing those stories, PR professionals would need to adapt to new technologies, as well as uphold changing ethical standards.