The NY Times had a great article, written by Virgina Heffernan, about the changing world of media. It explains how growing media choices and ways of consuming media are having a profound impact on the ways content gets done. So journalists and writers need to reconsider their story lines, as do the owners of publishing vehicles.
In PR we tend to sometimes get myopic and focus on the issues most obviously affecting us without looking at the big picture. It was interesting for me to consider the impact of these changes on the intermediaries we seek to communicate with and through (true, social media allows anyone to be a publisher, but until or unless we all become A list bloggers, we will seek to get our messages heard through others).
The following excerpt from the article is aimed at journalists, but the message could just as easily apply to PR:
The journalist Jeff Jarvis has lately blamed his peers for not apprehending better the changes to our profession wrought by digital technology. The writer Ron Rosenbaum has responded
that the best journalists were too busy working to philosophize: they
were reporting, writing and editing. Both are right. For 10 years,
journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can
blame anyone in any profession, midcareer and set in her ways, for
avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly
leads or opening her sources to readers?
Virginia Heffernan goes on to pose a provocative question and explain what this means:
Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television,
magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly
changing modes of distribution?
Sounds an awful lot like the "medium is the message" idea pioneered by Marshall McLuhan way back when.
She uses an example to make the point:
The fact that articles live in digital form and no longer, primarily,
on paper, frees them from certain constraints that seem absolutely
normal to old-media people and archaic if not just stupid to everyone
else...
When advertisers become content providers, magazines lose ads and
finally drop off newsstands. With no newsstands and no covers, there is
no need for cover lines; with no cover lines, the story no longer has
to be written in the cover-line-justifying way.
She concludes with some advice (again, without many changes the words could apply directly to PR):
People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to
concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the
exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for
craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending
a day on Twitter ….
Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of
distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types,
mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been
missing.
PR as a profession need to be cognizant of these trends and adapt accordingly.
More media choices and the rising importance of digital distribution does not just mean more places to pitch and get coverage – it means a fundamental re-evaluation of how we communicate, the stories we tell and what we expect to get out of it.
